The Temperatures are plummeting and the competition for recruiters is more demanding than ever, with 72.8 % of HR professionals in the Healthcare sector “struggling to find relevant candidates.” With their current methods, depending on your company size, the recruitment process can become even more difficult in the winter, when holiday travel and festivities slow everything down. Key decision makers are often traveling, and it’s the end of a fiscal year, budgets are dwindling, before the new budget allocation in the New Year.
So how do you set your company and job openings apart as unemployment rates are falling?
The number of recruitment tools promising success to Healthcare HR professionals is, quite frankly, dizzying. But recruitment is, and always should remain, a human-centered activity. An effective recruitment plan doesn’t rely solely on all automated tools or manual outreach. Instead, the plan blends the two to create efficiency with a personal touch.
Below, we’ve identified both the challenges and trends you’ll need to take into account this winter. In turn, we discuss how you can design your recruitment strategy to tackle the holiday season.
Here’s how:
Rethink Your Strategy From the Ground Up
Millennials aren’t afraid to leave a job that isn’t making them happy. In fact, this prevailing demographic job-hopped at nearly double the rate of their predecessors within the past 20 years in the Healthcare sector. And that’s why a change in perspective is crucial for any HR professional. It’s no longer about potential employees seeking your business out. Instead, you need to do the grunt work in order to source the top talent necessary for growing your business.
In fact, research shows that the current job market is 90% candidate driven. This means potential employees are now being catered to as much as the customers a business strives to reach.
Just as you use marketing strategies to sell your business to potential residents or service users, you should be candidate-focused in your recruiting strategy. Their needs and values should be a top priority when you’re crafting your content, outreach, and offers. Recruitment marketing is a tactical way to find, attract, and nurture top talent for your business using methods similar to those you employ with potential residents. An example of this is inbound recruiting. This means you go beyond simply posting ads or offering an available position, and instead, forge relationships by sourcing and engaging potential candidates proactively. This strategy of appealing to the unique stages of a job seeker’s journey is a way to find more relevant experience for long-term success.
Uplevel your employer branding
When job seekers are deciding where they want to apply, 84% cite a company’s reputation as a top priority in their decision—which means it’s essential to focus on your popularity and what you can offer as an employer. It’s known as ‘employer branding’, and it’s a key tenet of recruitment marketing. Your brand is not just your company logo or your corporate Reputation, but your value proposition for potential employees, and your key to both attracting and retaining top talent for the long-term.
Before creating your employer branding strategy, ask yourself why someone would want to work for your company, What makes you different to where they are working to make them consider your. It is also important to poll the entire company, for honest and constructive guidance. What are your strengths, what sets you apart from other companies? This will most likely highlight the weaknesses of your company culture as well, which can be just as helpful, this can then be rectified and help retain your existing staff
How to show off your company
Content is king when it comes to employer branding. Get creative with it, and be sure to show the personal side of your company. Here are some starting points:
- Create a ‘Company Culture’ page to explain what it’s like behind the scenes. What are your core values? What is it like to work for your company and/or for specific teams?
- Shoot a series of brief interview videos of current employees in an informal setting. This will really capture the essence of daily life at your company. You might want to post these on your Company Culture or Careers page, or at the very least, have executives and recruiters share on social media.
- Did Sally recently move up from Care Assistant to Senior Care assistant? Did Daniel from the Dementia Wing just raise loads of money to donate to Alzheimer’s Society? On social media, make sure to share not just your company successes, but your employees’ successes, too. Highlight recent hires, promotions, and even personal (outside-of-work) accomplishments. Encourage employees to like and comment on posts featuring their peers. Try to get leaders (managers, team leads, department heads, executives) to engage as well. This will help show job seekers that people matter at all levels of your company.
Of course, employer branding can be every bit fun and hip as it is serious and issues-oriented. Microsoft is a perfect example of this. To compete with trendier tech giants, Microsoft targeted their employer branding to millennial culture. Who knew that the company had treehouse conference rooms or a cat-lovers’ club? We didn’t, until they made a push to publicize their employer brand!
Tools for recruitment automation
Let’s face it, a strategic recruitment process takes time. It’s one thing to try to fill a couple of open roles, but when you find yourself in need to fill ten or twenty positions—or when you’re rushed and short on time during the holiday season because of the annual leave calendar—the process can feel overwhelming. That’s when automation comes in to save the day. Here are some of the leading ways HealthJobs4U.com can help you save time in your process, while still being strategic:
Intelli-match software for sourcing potential employees:
Our Intelli-match software allows you to get accurate matches based on your searches and candidate skills, plus with our CV alerts and CV Matches this inventories the experience and skills of your required candidates and uses that data to screen, grade, and suggest new candidates for your available roles. For busy HR professionals, this articulate and data-backed screening saves valuable time during the most inefficient stage of the recruitment process. It also gives you more time to dedicate to the later stages in the funnel, when face-to-face interaction is most necessary.
Hands on Approach with job-seekers:
Because the average job board software isn’t capable of providing that human touch as we first mentioned in this article, we have a dedicated resourcing team who have over 50 Years combined experience in the recruitment and healthcare sector to contact candidates at the right moment, and they will talk to them over the telephone and promote your job and branding, so you’re not missing out on a huge pool of potential talent that may not otherwise apply for your role. This allows you to reach out to folks who have already demonstrated interest in similar roles but may not have come across your role, and whose contact information is at your fingertips.
Chatbot:
Narrowing down your pool of candidates from the torrent of initial applications and managing menial communications with them is likely the biggest time-waster of the entire process. Luckily, our chatbots can take care of this busywork for you. They will control conversations with potential candidates and direct them to your vacancies so they can proceed to the next step in the process.
Niche targeting:
Remember our points about employer branding and going the extra mile to draw candidates to you? We are dedicated to the Healthcare and Nursing Sector and all we focus on is targeting these candidates so not wasting time spreading the net far and wide on irrelevant candidates you get from typical run of the mill job boards. We can also help assist you with refining your Ads to make sure they are top of the internet footprints.
Network online—but also in real life
You already know that posting your jobs on both your website and across all social platforms—FaceBook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn—is a must-do. You might not know how important it is to keep up a general presence on those platforms as well. Your company social profiles should share not just job openings and business news (like funding, or product releases), but also your day-to-day culture. Many companies have even created social media accounts dedicated to company culture. This is where you should maximize your employer branding, linking to your ‘Company Culture’ page and values. This is the best place for candidates to get a realistic account of life at your company, beyond the specific job role. Lay this foundation so that candidates you source socially will get a good impression of your company when they do social research of their own, they will feel like they know the business before they even step in the door and the key to this is keeping up the content and being familiar.
Application process mobile friendly
A whopping 89% of job seekers use their smartphone or other mobile devices to conduct their job search. That means you’ll be losing valuable potential candidates if they can’t easily apply via mobile. If this isn’t in the cards for your company yet, post your jobs on career sites like HealthJobs4U.com. Our platform has been streamlined and mobile-friendly sites, not only this but we have an app across all mobile platforms for job seekers to use and search all jobs on our site.
Summary
To sum it all up, the recruitment process this winter doesn’t have to be overwhelming or complex, as long as you’re doing it the smart way. Add artificial intelligence and automated tools to your wishlist to handle the most tedious recruitment tasks. This will allow you the time and energy to focus on your employer branding and networking. Most importantly, it’ll allow you to build relationships that are vital for new employees and long-term growth for your company. Hopefully the Festive Seasons this year bring you closer together with old friends, family, and some talented candidates!