According to symplr’s 2023 Compass Survey of health system leaders, workforce challenges are the top threat to healthcare organizations in the coming year. Demand for healthcare services has ramped up in recent years due to population growth and aging, while increasing numbers of healthcare professionals are leaving the industry due to burnout or reaching retirement age. As a result, today’s healthcare workforce is plagued with shortages and turnover, and many healthcare providers struggle to find and hire qualified candidates. In this blog, we’ll explore the reasons behind hard-to-fill healthcare roles and key strategies for finding and retaining healthcare talent.
One of the most significant challenges in healthcare recruiting is the shortage of skilled professionals. Today’s healthcare recruitment space is hypercompetitive, making it difficult for recruiters and sources to keep up. On average, healthcare recruiters have 61 open roles they are trying to fill at once. The average time to fill a position in healthcare is 49 days. By comparison, the average across industries in the United States is only 36 days.
The takeaway? The strategies healthcare organizations are using aren’t helping them find the elusive talent they need. Healthcare organizations will only be able to decrease time-to-fill without sacrificing quality care by moving from reactively filling roles to proactively sourcing quality talent. To do this effectively, you need to be sure your team has the right skills and is set up for efficiency.
At symplr, we realize that even the best healthcare recruiters can struggle if the right processes aren’t in place to support them. You can improve your time-to-fill even on the hardest-to-fill positions by optimizing your process and workflows and integrating modern techniques for sourcing the right candidates.
Typically, hard-to-fill positions in the healthcare sector include registered nurses, nurse practitioners, general practitioners, physical therapists, and psychiatrists. Other specialty areas facing staffing challenges include geriatrics, rheumatology, and various surgical specializations.
Even the best hospitals with the best recruiters encounter time-to-fill challenges. Failing to take a strategic approach to talent management, including a focus on retention during the hiring process, puts health systems into a vicious cycle of employee turnover.
Understaffing leads to longer wait times for patients to schedule necessary appointments, allowing conditions to potentially progress to the point where patients need emergency care. Providers also have less time to spend with each patient and deal with a heavier administrative burden as a result of understaffing, increasing the likelihood of missed/incorrect diagnoses and other medical errors. Data shows that many nurses and other healthcare providers already spend over half their day on administrative tasks like scheduling, data input, and payroll, leaving them with little time to spend with patients. With clinicians already strapped for time for direct patient care, understaffing and inability to fill open healthcare roles further exacerbates this issue.
To attract and retain healthcare talent, we recommend a four-pronged approach:
By integrating these approaches, healthcare organizations can create a comprehensive strategy to attract and retain the best talent.
While many hospitals look at success as filling empty seats when it comes to their recruitment efforts, at symplr, we know that quality-of-hire, retention, and tenure tell the full story of how talent acquisition helps improve an organization. We also know that recruiting is both an art and a science. We give you the tools you need to understand what tactics are working with talent analytics and even to predict a candidate’s performance, so you can improve your time-to-fill.
symplr’s solutions for talent management, sourcing, and recruiting help health systems attract, hire, and retain healthcare talent:
symplr knows that technology should be making your work easier and reduce your time-to-fill, rather than add to it. That is why we offer an integrated platform solution tailored specifically to hiring, keeping, and growing a quality healthcare workforce. With symplr, healthcare organizations can optimize the recruitment and hiring processes and reduce the time it takes to fill hard-to-fill healthcare roles.