32 Million Patients Are Coming: How Healthcare Staffing Can Keep Up

78620126Patients are coming. With the passing of the Affordable Care Act, an estimated 32 million additional patients could be seeking medical treatment. This means healthcare hiring needs to ramp up in 2014 to meet this dramatic increase in demand.

Staffing professionals and recruiters should look at this rat race to find the best talent as an opportunity, not an insurmountable challenge. With new technology and some outside-the-box thinking, staffing pros can still find the best people for open healthcare positions.

A horde of patients might be coming, but staffing pros and recruiters will be ready. Here are just a few ways to keep up with the crushing demand for healthcare talent in 2014 and beyond:

Evaluating a High Volume of Candidates
With 32 million new patients flooding into the American healthcare system, medical positions are going to be multiplying. You’ll need to be able to evaluate candidates quickly and efficiently so you don’t waste time connecting with the wrong people while the right candidate is scooped up by the competition.

After all, according to the Society for Human Resource Management, the typical time to hire ranges between 29 to 43 days. There’s no way your open positions can wait that long, especially not with 32 million patients nearing the hospital doors.

You need a solution that will help you evaluate candidates quickly. Thankfully, new technology is leading the way on this charge, making it easier to weed through those wrong for the position and pick out those with the right stuff.

PREMIUM CONTENT: 2014 Healthcare Staffing Growth Assessment

Get social. Social media can help you connect with talented candidates before ever picking up the phone. You can evaluate their professionalism through social media postings and judge their industry-related thinking through discussions and thought leadership.

Best of all, social media can help you build up a talent pipeline by allowing you to form connections with talent who might not be right for a job today, but could be perfect for an open position tomorrow.

Put down the phone. After a half hour on a phone interview with a candidate, you might hang up having realized you knew within the first 90 seconds they were all wrong for the job. With a high volume of candidates to evaluate, that’s time you can’t afford to waste.

Using one-way video interviews, you can get a personal feel for candidates without wasting precious time in the hiring process. In one-way video interviews, candidates answer your written questions on video. These video answers can then be viewed at any time and for any duration. If someone is all wrong for the job, you can merely move on to the next candidate without a time-consuming interview. It’s little wonder research from the Aberdeen Group found employers can watch 10 one-way video interviews in the time it takes to do just one phone screen.

Stop Worrying About The Skills Gap
The skills gap is a big problem facing the healthcare industry, especially if you’re looking for physicians. Currently, 23 percent of employers have healthcare positions they just cannot fill because they can’t find candidates with the right skills. Unsurprisingly, we’re heading down a path to suffer a shortfall of nearly 90,000 doctors by the year 2020.

The solution to the skills gap is to dream bigger when it comes to your candidate pool. Think of it this way: all of your competition is fishing out of the same local pool of talent. So competition for these candidates is fierce. However, if you open up your hiring to far-flung candidates, you can get ahead of your competitors and still find the best people.

After all, just because candidates with the right skills aren’t in your company’s backyard doesn’t mean they don’t exist altogether. Thanks to new technology from cloud computing to live video interviews, it’s now easy to connect with candidates personally even when separated by large distances.

In a live video interview you can connect personally just as if the candidate was sitting on the other side of the desk, while the cloud can help you share important documents before the candidate signs on the dotted line. Now you can get out of your overfished talent pool and find the perfect person for the job.

While 32 million new patients are on their way and healthcare staffing is going to be fiercely competitive, it’s not time to throw in the towel. A little outside-the-box thinking, aided by new technology, can ensure you still make the right hire.

What are some methods you have to meet healthcare hiring challenges? Share in the comments!

MORE: Improve patient and healthcare worker safety with pre-employment testing

Josh Tolan

Josh Tolan
Josh Tolan is the CEO of Spark Hire, a video interviewing platform. Learn more about using video interviews for staffing and connect with Spark Hire on Facebook and Twitter.

Josh Tolan

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