Looking at challenges that each industry face helps to discover what is working and what isn’t to attract and recruit top talent. Let’s look in more detail at the Healthcare Sector.
The UK Healthcare sector continues to be under pressure, not least the NHS. With Brexit on the horizon and uncertainty about how this will impact migrant workers, recruitment will likely become an even bigger challenge.
Healthcare challenges – High Churn, High Volume
The Health and Social Care Sector is the largest sector in the UK, employing nearly four million people. It covers a wide range of roles and requirements across hospital, personal care and residential care settings.
It’s renowned for high volumes of recruitment, problems with staff retention and a shortage of healthcare professionals – that’s not all of it, there will be a growing demand and dwindling supply of resources as employment in the Health and Social Care sector is predicted to continue to grow.
As part of this demand and supply, candidates have options and competition will be high. This sector has, in recent times, seen labour sourced from overseas so the impact of Brexit could be significant with changes to migrant workers and freedom of movement laws. The problem will be exacerbated by a growing and ageing population so the need for health care sector recruits are in demand.
What can be done to ease the burden?
The government reported that it anticipates a further two million new workers will need to be trained and recruited into the health and social care sector between 2012 and 2022 as the sector grows and staff retire*.
How the Healthcare industry approach recruitment could have a fundamental effect on the healthcare recruitment challenges of today and the future.
We know that many of the recruitment channels used by the Health/Social Care industry are not delivering the desired quality and quantity of candidates (see the Candidate Attraction Survey 2017 for the breakdown by channel). For example, simply pushing print advertising out to industry publications and using CV Databases just aren’t delivering the right results. Understanding the sources that work and getting the most out of your ATS & Recruitment CRM to attract the talent you need and then nurturing long term talent relationships could help get you ahead of the game.
The quadrant below from the survey shows this sector is struggling to generate the desired quantity and quality of candidates. Candidate scarcity is a huge issue affecting the sector so recruiting proactively and having a talent pipeline strategy is a must.
Talent Pooling
Ideally, you want to be able to act quickly to your vacancies through a well-stocked talent pool. Having a target list of pre-screened, engaged candidates ready for vacancies should be central to your recruitment strategy. It will help to mitigate the issue of volume recruiting and demand and supply. The better you are able to group by your desired criteria within your ATS or Recruitment CRM, whether it be location, grade or experience, will mean easier and more rapid targeting of talent - delivering the right messages at the right time. So, it’s vital that you can pinpoint the ideal candidates through filtering and search tools within your ATS & Recruitment CRM to get to the best candidates, quicker.
Screening & Vetting
One of the main challenges for recruiters and hiring managers in the healthcare sector is dealing with the sheer volume of roles to fill, whether that be for the NHS, private healthcare provider or for medical practitioners, nursing assistants or care workers and home carers. Add to that the number of applicants who apply for roles and response handling becomes critical – especially considering the importance of providing an excellent candidate experience.
Using screening questions is one way to perform an initial sift of candidates and identify applicants with the necessary attributes for the role. Validating professional and educational qualifications, residence permits, ID and UK right to work documentation automatically will optimise and streamline your initial screening process and ensure compliance.
Better still, if you can automatically rule-out unsuitable candidates and applications, attach assessment forms to specific vacancies and view and compare responses within the vacancy within your ATS/CRM.
Process Optimisation
Look at your hiring workflow and review what you really need for all of those involved in the process to ease the burden. Do you need blind applications? Q multilingual solution? or a role based portal (for hiring managers, recruitment teams, agency partners)? In optimising your recruitment workflows you are in a much better position to source, evaluate and set up interviews and manage the candidate experience – snapping up the best resources before the competition get to them.
Self-Service Recruitment Analytics
Recruitment campaigns on a large scale require powerful reporting and analytics. Standard reports often don’t provide what you need so be sure you have access to an ‘at a glance’ dashboard of everything you need to measure. We recommend your recruitment analytics chart your progress, can alert you to the tasks and activities you need to complete, report in real-time and compare performance against targets i.e. Talent Pool Size vs Target, No. of vacancies versus applications etc. as a minimum.
Flexibility of your analytics will enable you to work faster and smarter. Using your analytics to fine tune the recruitment process will also provide continual efficiencies.
Want to know more?
Take a look at our webinar for an introduction to complete e-recruitment.
Or take a self-guided tour across the e-recruitment journey and don’t forget you can access the free Candidate Attraction Report 2017 to look at the channels that are working to attract quality and quantity of candidates.
*https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/430137/Skills_and_Performance_Challenges_in_Health_and_Social_Care.pdf