Best Practices for Recruiting Passive Healthcare Talent
If you’re looking for healthcare workers, you are not alone. Almost everyone in the healthcare field is highly aware of a growing shortage of clinical and non-clinical resources in a field where business is certainly booming. It’s placing increasing pressure on recruiting teams who know they can no longer rely upon a simple advertisement to attract top talent.
This leads us to the idea of the passive job candidate in the healthcare field. These are the candidates that are the diamond in the rough, and the approach to finding them is wildly different than waiting for someone to apply. Here’s how to find and attract passive healthcare candidates to your organization.
What is a Passive Candidate and How Do You Attract Them?
Active healthcare candidates are actively seeking new jobs. They’ve put their resume on a job board, applied for a posted position, or they’ve reached out to a recruiter to help find them their next position. Passive candidates do none of these things. While they may be thinking about finding a new job—someday—they have not actively engaged in any behaviors that would actually lead them to a new position.
Passive candidates make up about 70% of the current global workforce. That’s a lot of talent that you are simply not reaching if you aren’t actively searching for these professionals. How do you reach them?
The first step is always posting an ad. It’s a passive fishing approach that may yield a few candidates while also giving you a job description to share with passive candidates. The second step is to go to a job board.
Most major job boards have a resume database that you can search through. Most of these are also pay-to-play. The prices usually depend on the number of resume views and the frequency of your searches. On most of these, you can set a keyword search and alert that will ping you when a candidate meeting your criteria loads their resume into a job board database. You should act quickly to start a relationship with these candidates, because, believe me, so will 1,000 other healthcare recruiters.
As you do your research start to create a sourcing pool of qualified candidates. Follow this same procedure on LinkedIn, which is part database and job board and part social medial tool.
Your process for hunting passive candidates includes sourcing or resourcing them, sorting them by job description, and then using your applicant tracking system (ATS) database to tag them. When you have your list of candidates, it’s time to build your relationship. Here’s how to do it.
What to Say to Passive Candidates?
Most resume databases have some kind of chat or email feature. Use this tool for good—and by this we mean avoid standardized templates that make you seem like a machine. Sure, your applicant tracking system probably has a feature where you can bulk email candidates but is that really how you want to come across? This is healthcare after all, where the average knowledge worker probably has more training (and possibly even intelligence) than you do! Coming across as anything but honest or transparent won’t reflect well on you or the company you represent. Instead, work smarter, by carefully choosing your passive targets and tailoring the message to fit their experience the job you’re trying to fill.
The Custom Group of Companies has a higher success rate than many formulaic recruiting firms. We’ve been building our passive candidate relationships for years. Find out how we’re different and how we can help your healthcare organization meet its hiring goals. Call on us.
