Mahe Bayireddi, Exploring the Challenges of the Current Healthcare Recruiting Landscape, on LinkedIn.com
The healthcare industry is in a crisis. There is a huge increase in hiring volume, and healthcare facilities are realistic in anticipating multiple recruiting challenges moving forward, including a 49 percent increase in time to hire and higher turnover.
Although this is the current landscape for healthcare recruiting, those numbers are only projected to trend upwards. Healthcare organizations looking to compete for top healthcare talent will have to think of creative and unique ways to attract, engage, convert and retain talented physicians, nurses and allied health workers.
Here’s a look at the current healthcare recruiting landscape at the nurse, allied health worker and physician levels.
Nurse Recruiting Landscape
Good nurses are in high demand, and with U.S. hospitals employing more than half of the nation’s 2.8 million nurses, recruiting is becoming a matter of who can provide a higher sign-on bonus according to the Wall Street Journal. In fact, sign-on bonuses of $10-thousand plus are becoming more common in states like Texas, California and Florida. Although it’s projected that recent nursing graduates will continue to offset retiring nurses, that may not be enough to meet supply and demand in over the next ten years.
Here are some of the current challenges with nurse recruiting:
Lengthy Time to Hire – Unfortunately, the average time it takes to recruit an experienced specialty nurse ranged from 55 to 119 days, pending their nursing specialty according to the RN Recruitment Difficulty Index (RDI-RN). The specialties facing the lengthiest time to hire? These include OR Nurses at 104 days and Labor and Delivery Nurses at 89 days on average. In addition, more than one third of hospital have more than a 10 percent nurse vacancy rate. With more than a million nurses needed by the year 2022, healthcare organizations are faced with finding ways to reduce their time to hire.
Inconsistent Hiring Requirements – Some states only require a nursing license to apply for nursing opportunities while many other states have raised the bar to only hire those with a bachelor’s degree or other advanced degree.
Consistency of Nurse Staff – With a tight labor market for nurses, many healthcare facilities and hospitals are turning to increasing overtime, utilizing temporary agency nurses or using services via travel nurses. Although these are potential solutions to a lack of nurses, it can lead to multiple issues with patient quality and safety, and physician, employee, and patient satisfaction and experience.
Allied Health Recruiting Landscape
Outside of nurses and physicians, there are multiple career fields within the healthcare industry playing a huge part in patient care. This includes physical, occupational and respiratory therapists as well as speech and language pathologists. Additionally, other allied health professionals could be diagnostic medical sonographers, dietitians, medical technologists, and radiographers to name a few.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the top allied health professions that will be in highest demand until at least 2024 include certified occupational therapy assistants, physical therapy assistants, audiologists, hearing aid specialists and speech language pathologists.
Here are some of the current challenges with allied health recruiting:
High Demand for Healthcare Support Workers – With baby boomers continuing to retire, and senior citizens comprising 34 percent of total healthcare spending in the U.S., there’s a large pressure for support occupations. Various therapy specialty positions have felt this pressure more so than others. As with other healthcare professions, the supply of specialized allied health workers isn’t meeting the demand of the patient population.
Recruitment Isn’t Starting Early Enough – With a reactive recruitment environment, it’s hard for healthcare facilities to keep up with the ongoing demand of allied health workers needed to fill open positions. Instead of focusing on graduating healthcare professionals, more healthcare facilities need to start focusing on grooming younger talent in middle and high school.
Physician Recruiting Landscape
Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, more people have access to healthcare coverage than ever before. People who haven’t visited a doctor in years are going to start turning up in healthcare facilities. This means a higher physician demand than in previous years, but we will have a projected physician shortage of approximately 40,000 to 105,000 by the year 2030 according to research from the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC).
With these extreme statistics, it’s no surprise that recruiting for physicians across the nation will continue to be a challenge for the healthcare industry.
Some of the current challenges of recruiting physicians include:
Providing a Competitive Package – With such a high demand, physicians in high-need have more leverage in negotiating the terms of their employment with healthcare facilities. This has forced organizations to look at more competitive ways to increase offer acceptance with physicians, everything from loan forgiveness programs to sign-on bonuses.
The Impact of Geography – Unfortunately, the physician shortage is felt more by healthcare facilities in certain parts of America. In fact, many places across the nation are essentially devoid of physicians more so than others, especially in extremely rural areas or areas where there isn’t a hospital in sight for 20-plus miles. Recruiting for these areas can be extremely difficult, and the offer packages are hardly as lucrative as more desirable geographic locations.
Retiring Physicians Outnumber Incoming Physicians – The baby boomer generation is beginning to retire, and will continue do so through the next decade. As a result, healthcare facilities have to not only compete to recruit during a higher than ever physician shortage, but they have to work extra hard to try and retain the physicians they have for as long as they can. Both issues alone can present a difficult road ahead. Coupled, they make it very difficult to maintain continuity of care in many facilities across the U.S.
These are just some of the current challenges with physician recruitment, and I don’t foresee solving each and every one of them overnight.
What’s Next?
The widespread healthcare recruiting shortages make it more difficult than ever for multiple organizations to fill necessary positions across physicians, nurses and allied health professions. At the same time, candidates have a hard time finding positions and actually hitting the apply button.
Most of this disconnect is caused by gaps in employer branding and candidate experience. From search functionality on the career site to lack of job description rating for optimization, nursing candidates have a hard time finding the information they need to apply. On the other side, employers lack the ability to detect people before they apply, and have zero nurturing campaigns in place to create a talent pool to tap into for hard-to-fill positions.