Will technology replace the human healthcare recruiter?
It’s a question that’s on the forefront of people’s minds, especially after the turmoil of the last two years. Healthcare staffing has become increasingly transactional, leading some to wonder whether a robot could do the job just as well.
But for most people, career is one of the most impactful areas of their lives, aside from family and faith. Few people are comfortable dedicating something so important to a machine—they prefer a human to be their advocate.
So where does that leave technology in healthcare staffing?
It’s simple: technology empowers your recruiters to be more human.
Because tech automates monotonous tasks and collects real-time insights, recruiters can spend their hours on what matters most: building relationships with their candidates.
Let’s walk through some examples of how technology in healthcare staffing makes this happen.
Why technology is critical for the modern healthcare recruiter
COVID changed the healthcare industry completely. Recruiters need to adjust their recruiting strategies accordingly.
The average hospital turnover rate in 2021 was 25.9%, a 6.4% increase from previous years. This has placed a significant amount of pressure on healthcare recruiters, who struggle to find qualified candidates to fill highly technical and specific positions.
Not only that, but to increase their chances at redeployment, healthcare recruiters have to provide more than just jobs. They have to provide exceptional experiences.
Technology is key to making this happen:
- Making better connections to potential candidates
- Faster and more accurate hiring decisions
- Embedding analytics in recruiting process
- Automating monotonous tasks
- Collecting feedback in real time
- Building trust & transparency through brand elevation
However, there are concerns that automation and AI will replace the human recruiter. But as with any tool, it all depends on how you use it.
Sure, there will be some recruiters who abuse the technology. But just as many, if not more, will use it to spend less time on “busy work” and more time on building human-to-human connections—something a machine will never be able to do.
The result? Recruiters will become more human, rather than less. Instead of replacing the human recruiter, technology will make them better at their job.
How to maximize success with recruiting technology in healthcare staffing
Let’s walk through a few examples of how technology specifically can help enhance the healthcare candidate’s experience during the hiring and placement process.
Faster, more efficient onboarding
You only have one chance to make a first impression. If your onboarding process sucks, then candidates will remember that throughout their entire journey.
So the smoother and more personal you can make the onboarding process, the better:
- Automated follow ups with personalized content
- Real-time feedback capture to help recruiters adjust the process
- Efficient screening to ensure you’re spending time with good-fit candidates
By making onboarding more efficient, your recruiters can quickly determine what each candidate needs, and offer personalized support from the onset of the relationship.
Build trust with your candidates
Trust matters. In an industry that can quickly become transactional—as we’ve seen in the past couple of years—becoming a trusted advisor for your candidates is key to not only making placements, but improving retention, callbacks, and redeployments.
One of the biggest stressors in healthcare is instability. That stress has only become worse since COVID-19. Just being a steady presence for the candidate—and not ghosting them when they’re not “useful” to you—can go a long way. Technology enables recruiters to do this at scale.
For example, when a candidate has a bad experience, capturing real-time reviews can enable the recruiter and their supervisor to see the issue. When they proactively respond and work to address it, this shows the candidate that your firm is trustworthy.
Create higher quality matches
The healthcare sector is currently a tight labor market. With a large number of highly technical and specific open roles, healthcare recruiters face the challenge of finding the right candidates without working 80-hour weeks to do so.
Fortunately, there are plenty of recruiting technologies that enable faster, more efficient candidate matches:
- Faster screening. AI-powered tools sort through candidate information references, certifications, and specific qualifications to enable quick evaluation and match recommendations.
- Quality sourcing. Keeping a competent pipeline of healthcare candidates can be tough. Automated sourcing can help collect potential matches for your human recruiters to evaluate.
- Optimized job descriptions. By analyzing thousands of top-performing job descriptions, some technology can provide recommendations to optimize your job descriptions so you attract the right-fit candidates.
Build mutual respect through reviews
Reviews give you instant feedback to know how to better serve the candidate. They also help the candidate know you’re listening to them every step of the way.
Whether good or bad, insightful feedback allows recruiters to see what is or is not working. If the feedback is positive, they can boost morale. If negative, they uncover ways to grow and improve their team.
But this is only possible with the right technology that will capture those reviews in real time. That way, the recruiters can fix issues before they become problems, and celebrate their wins as they happen.
Final thoughts on technology in healthcare staffing
Technology is quickly becoming a mainstay of the healthcare staffing sector. But that doesn’t mean the human recruiter is going anywhere. In fact, it means the human recruiter has the tools to do their jobs more efficiently, and provide better experiences to the candidates they serve.
As a result, firms that leverage this technology to provide better sourcing, screening, communication, and feedback will provide a more humanized experience to healthcare professionals—something this industry sorely needs.
To get started with an automated review platform that empowers you to monitor recruiter performance, elevate your brand reputation, and build an organic referral engine, get started with Great Recruiters here.
