The tech industry might be downsizing, but we can’t say the same about healthcare. Concerns have been raised about staff shortages, with human resource managers struggling to fill the depleted workforce. Fortunately, HeyMilo presents a fast and cost-effective way to assess hundreds of applicants without sweat.
It’s unsurprising for hundreds and thousands to apply for a handful of job roles in the talent marketplace. Reports show that the U.S. needs to hire at least 200,000 nurses annually to meet healthcare workforce demand. There is no better way to get that done than to adopt a faster, personalized, and more efficient hiring process, against the traditional approach.
Gone are the days of skimming through hundreds of CVs to pick those eligible for one-on-one interviews. Hence, we’ll explore ways to get the healthcare workforce hiring process back on track to meet the demand.
Why the Healthcare Industry is Struggling to Fill Roles Quickly
The COVID-19 pandemic might be gone, but not without disturbing the balance in the healthcare industry. Pre-pandemic burnout rates fluctuated between 30% and 40%. That figure has nearly doubled, with many nurses retiring and younger professionals quitting.
With doctors and nurses facing significant stress levels on and off work, the majority are reporting higher levels of depression and anxiety. Hence, onboarding new professionals and retaining the current ones has become challenging.
Despite adding over 650,000 jobs in 2023, the healthcare industry is yet to meet the population demand. That leaves us with the question, “What is stopping the industry from having sufficient staff strength?”
Our research has revealed a few reasons, including the following:
Growing Population
With an annual increase of 73 million individuals, it's not challenging to see how quickly the healthcare industry is understaffed. How many nurses, doctors, physicians, surgeons, etc. do we need to add annually to match the population’s needs?
Home health aides are needed even more by the older generation. Yet, burnout is forcing many frontline staff to hand in their badges.
We can’t pause global population growth. The only viable solution is to increase the staff strength in our health institutions. That way, we will reduce fatigue in the current workforce while injecting new energy into the system.
How do we get the staff strength up to par? The answer lies in our recruitment process, which presents another challenge.
Extensive Recruitment Cycles
Speedy recruitment is yet another challenge among HRs in healthcare institutions. While other industries take one month to fill a role, healthcare recruitment takes 49 days on average. Specialized hospital roles can take up to 250 days, which is no way to go if we want to close the hiring gap.
We understand how careful the screening, reference checking, and in-depth interview process should be for healthcare workers. However, this extended process might be the very thing holding back the rejuvenation of the workforce. It is one approach for which HeyMilo is made to simplify and quicken.
The delay in onboarding new staff leaves the current workers with more workload. Satisfaction rates become lower, with many quitting and many more considering the choice.
It is one thing to advertise a vacancy and another to fill the role. HRs are well aware of this process. Nevertheless, the times call for innovative hiring solutions, one that HeyMilo is willing to offer.
Finding Quality in a Short Time
The goal of a well-thought-out hiring process is to identify and hire top talent. Thousands may apply for a job, but some will be underqualified. Picking the talent faster is challenging, even for the savviest HR managers and companies.
Current Ways to Address Staff Shortages
HRs are currently hunting for the most effective ways to address staff shortages in our hospitals and health institutions. However, these approaches present unique challenges that still leave the gap wide open.
Here are the current hiring processes and their challenges:
The Traditional Hiring Process
We are well acquainted with this approach. You submit your CV, and HR reviews it and calls you for an in-person interview.
This approach is fine with a few applicants. It becomes ineffective when HRs have thousands of applications on their desk. Fatigue, errors, and even bias will occur if they want to review such voluminous CV or resume submissions.
Delays will also occur as the HRs review applications and figure out their ATS systems. That might lead to missed opportunities, with professionals accepting offers in other professions.
In the traditional approach, technology is used minimally. The primary reliance is on HR manager’s expertise to identify the top talent.
Contract Labor
You can regard this approach as a quick fix. It reduces costs and the time it would take to find staff using the traditional hiring process. However, it is often to fill an immediate need and not a long-term solution.
With hospitals and health institutions running out of options for getting full-time staff, they turn to contract labor. These hired hands are like independent contractors. Nonetheless, using contract labor presents a few challenges.
The most obvious is that these workers are not full-time employees. Hence, they will not be as engaged as you want. Their presence often doesn’t fit the company culture, with reported effects on retention and future recruitment.
Contract labor may be best for filling specialized roles that are challenging to find. However, it is not the best for long-term recruitment and retention to close the gap in the healthcare staff shortage.
How HeyMilo Helps Organizations Hire Quickly and More Efficiently
Technology has come a long way, with artificial intelligence and machine learning becoming the talk of the century. HeyMilo’s Gen AI-powered voice agents are here to scale your recruitment team and hire faster. With HeyMilo, you can reduce weeks of workload into one day.
How HeyMilo Works
Instead of flipping CVs for the right fit, HeyMilo can reduce hundreds of applications to the best candidates. It delivers precise, two-way conversational interviews with your candidates for insights. Most importantly, it can adapt the questions based on responses to cover crucial assessment points.
We will read your job description and generate the best way to evaluate your candidates through the interview. Nonetheless, it’s all customizable, so you can edit the questions and add more to your preference.
Try HeyMilo today for an ai tool that can efficiently conduct large-scale interviews and real-time unbiased insights. Coltech reported a tenfold increase in productivity since using HeyMilo to interview candidates at scale. Your business can be on its way to filling up the staff shortage in the healthcare industry at record speed today.
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