Tech to the Future for Medical Hiring: 4 New Tools
Hiring for the healthcare and medical fields this year is going to be difficult. This should shock no one, since the Affordable Care Act is dumping somewhere close to 32 million new patients into the American healthcare system. These new patients will need doctors, nurses, pharmacists, more robust IT departments, and even added administrative assistants.
Every aspect of the American healthcare system will need to expand this year, which can be daunting news for employers, recruiters, and staffing pros. After all, the medical field was already facing a shortage of doctors and skilled workers thanks to an aging population and a retiring doctor workforce. According to some estimates, we might be suffering a shortfall of approximately 90,000 doctors by the year 2020.
Obviously this means it’s even more important than ever before to get in front of the competition and hire the best people faster. With the skills gap ever widening, only those who act quickly will end up with the talent needed.
Thankfully new technology is making it just a bit easier for beleaguered recruiters and employers to find the talent they need in 2014 and beyond. Here are four new technology tools you can use to nab the right candidates:
Big Data Recruiting
What if you could use the Moneyball principle for medical hiring? In the Oscar-nominated Brad Pitt film, the Oakland A’s baseball team used statistical modeling in order to find great outside-the-box players. The team threw out conventional baseball wisdom to focus on different skills and made a winning team in the process.
Big data recruiting is like Moneyball for hiring, helping you find outside-the-box talent you might not have otherwise considered. By crunching numbers and evaluating a large set of criteria, big data recruiting can help you find the right person for your open position.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
For instance, perhaps you’ve only been looking at IT talent from the top schools or with experience at top employers. However, by quickly weeding through information, big data recruiting finds a candidate writing great code who might have a community college education or no college degree at all.
Big data recruiting lets you swim into a wider talent pool and look beyond your own prejudices in order to find the best people. For some medical positions a certain set of criteria is essential, but for other positions you might be shortchanging yourself by sticking to a set list. Best of all, you can find talent not already being aggressively sought out by your competition, allowing you to hire great people with less struggle.
Video Interviews
Since many medical positions are patient-facing, you need candidates with top-notch people skills. It’s very easy to list “superior communication skills” on a resume, but much harder to back it up in person. While the traditional hiring process can sometimes provide superstars, other times you meet a candidate in person and immediately realize you’ve wasted your time on a candidate with horrible bedside manner.
Instead the video interview can help you focus in on the best people by helping you weed through a high volume of candidates, yet still get a personal feel. In a one-way video interview, candidates answer the written questions provided by employers on video. These video answers can be viewed at any time and for any duration.
So instead of getting stuck on the phone for a half hour with the wrong person, you can merely move on if it’s not a great fit. This allows you to judge a candidate’s personality, potential fit, and communication skills without wasting much-needed time in the recruiting process.
Applicant Tracking Integrates With Social Media
Today everyone is tweeting, liking Facebook statuses, and updating their LinkedIn profiles. Social media has taken the world by storm, and it’s also impacting the world of medical recruiting. Currently 94 percent of recruiters are incorporating social media into their search for the perfect candidate. It’s not hard to see why, considering Facebook has 1.23 billion active users while professional network LinkedIn has about 277 million.
Social media is where the candidates are, which means you need to get your open positions out in front of the talent you need. Thankfully most applicant tracking systems (ATS) are no longer merely places for candidates to populate a resume. Many ATS systems also integrate with social media platforms, meaning you can use one system to post jobs, evaluate resumes, and promote your openings to social channels.
Build an App
Consider this: about 70 percent of job seekers are using their mobile devices to look for jobs. You need to use the tools at your disposal to get in front of these app-happy candidates. Think about building a mobile application in order to make it easier for candidates to apply for your open positions.
After all, CareerBuilder found that nearly 40 percent of all job seekers will abandon an application on their mobile device if the process is too complicated and difficult. You need to ease the path for great talent to connect with your organization, which means building a more mobility-minded application.
With the race for talent just heating up, it’s time to use the new tech tools to your hiring advantage when it comes to finding the best healthcare talent.
What tech tools do you use to hire the best? Share in the comments!
