Keeping a healthcare center staffed and operational is tough, and getting progressively tougher. There is a high demand for top talent, who are in short supply. In fact, the World Health Organization predicted a shortage of 12.9 million healthcare professionals across the world.

Closer to home, the Association of American Medical Colleges’ Center for Workforce Studies predicts a shortage. We will need 45,000 primary care specialists and 46,000 surgeons and medical professionals that we don’t have, in just the next decade.

Creating a talented workforce now requires that you get creative.

Let’s break down some of the most effective methods, other than traditional job interviews, to bring the top talent in through the doors of your healthcare center. These three alternative approaches to recruiting healthcare and wellness professionals can help you surge ahead of competitors and zero in on top talent.

Work on your Brand and Take Hiring Digital

Your TA (Talent Acquisition) team would do well to choose digital hiring methods to bridge the gap and hire the best, even during this talent crisis. Digitization has a great scope within the healthcare industry, and hiring is no exception.

You’ll find everyone from experienced chiefs of medicine to paramedics fresh out of an EMT-B course on professional platforms like LinkedIn. But that isn’t the end of your search online: you can also look into sources like Medzilla, Hospital Careers, and PracticeLink. Use sponsored posts prudently and use your listings when required. You can get financing help for a sponsored campaign when you’re hiring an entire team or a new division, like ambulatory healthcare.

On the digital front, hiring efforts aren’t limited to hunting for top talent. You also need to pay close attention to delivering a consistent, relevant, and concise brand message to potential hires. Make sure you have a website with the latest openings listed in a way that candidates can’t miss them.

Other online media—like social networking sites and blogs—can help you establish a clear voice online. You can make sure the best talent hears you. Work4, a platform that finds recruits through Facebook, claims that social media ads helped them convert candidate leads 50% better than usual on healthcare career sites.

Be Flexible when Hiring

Hiring to fill positions in nursing is a little different from recruitment in other areas of medicare, primarily because nursing schedules are notoriously frenzied and hectic. Registered nurses often work five 8-hour days a week, or four 10-hour days, or three 12-hour days. And this isn’t counting the voluntary or forced overtime, which is quite commonplace.

Here, the key to adapting is to make your hiring flexible. Most nurse interviews, because of the nature of their job schedules, need to be conducted out of the traditional 9-5 time slot.

You can also leverage technology and incorporate solutions like video interviews. This solution eliminates the need for direct facetime, using a series of questions to which candidates record answers in a video format. The asynchronous nature means your TA team doesn’t have to work outside of office hours.

Turn to Staffing Agencies for Specialty Hiring

A US Bureau of Labor Statistics report predicts that the demand for medical doctors and surgeons will increase by as much as 13% by 2026. This comfortably beats the average growth rate in other professions.

Hiring surgeons is more about quality, qualifications, and experience than it is about quantity. Hiring a top surgeon or discipline expert (like a neuroscience expert to head that department, or a psychology professional who specializes in PTSD) needs expertise.

You need someone who is in constant touch with top talent pools across the country, sometimes from outside the US. This way, you can proactively reach out to experts whose credentials match your staffing needs. Advertising online, through local listings, and international job boards, often prove futile.

For this, you can choose to partner with a staffing agency. Pick a competent agency—they can market your open positions across the country, or internationally if required. Hiring such an organization gives you access to a bigger pool of expert talent. It can cost you—agency fees vary depending on whether you’re looking to hire a resident or making it a locum tenens position. However, the pay-off of finding the right expert justifies the cost of looking for one, in just a few months.

Options like alternative financing can help you cover costs when you need to fill an expert position quickly.

Conclusion

There is a huge gap between talent demand and supply in US healthcare recruitment.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics showed employment spikes in healthcare for August this year, but the bigger picture remains mostly unchanged. To bridge the gap, embrace these alternative twists on the traditional hiring approach.

Each method is designed to give you an edge in hiring efficiency, and bring the best talent in through your doors. If you need funding, we can help you out in as little as 48 hours—click here to learn how, or apply right away.