Healthcare Recruiter Productivity [7 Tips and Tricks]

The sun has set, the office is closed, and your team is no closer to filling your open healthcare positions. In fact, a few more have opened up. There never seems to be enough time to do what recruiters need to do. When your recruiting team is overwhelmed, team morale, and ultimately patient care, can take a hit. It doesn’t have to be this way.

But recruiter productivity doesn’t mean asking your team to work harder and faster—that’s how burnout happens. Instead, there are strategies you can implement to make your team more productive without asking them to work late.

Here are seven tips and tricks to boost healthcare recruiter productivity.

1. Audit for Time Loss 

When we talk about time loss, we mean the moments that are lost throughout the day—time spent doing repetitive tasks, switching platforms, or erasing mistakes. “Time loss” can be a scary phrase. Recruiters, like all workers, deserve rest, breaks, and work-life balance. Adjusting for time loss doesn’t mean that every moment of your team’s day should be jam-packed. However, your recruiters could be losing time on small manual tasks that quickly add up. In healthcare, time-to-hire and time-to-fill are crucial statistics, so mitigating time loss is crucial.

Maximizing recruiter productivity means ensuring that your team has time to spend on the big-picture. When daily tasks are automated, recruiters can devote energy towards developing recruitment strategies and connecting with employees for retention purposes.

Perform an audit to better understand where your time, resources, and energy are going. Ask for volunteers willing to log how long they’re spending on each of their daily tasks. Are you spending too much time on candidate communications? Are hours eaten up by posting to job boards? When you get a clearer picture of how you spend your time, you’ll be able to adjust—and make your team more productive.

Learn how to perform a hiring audit

2. Invest in the Right Tech

From time management apps to applicant tracking systems to shift management software, there’s a lot of tech out there to help improve your HR team’s recruiter productivity. Technology can help smooth your team’s path towards better, faster recruitment.

Remember that technology is an investment—if you pick the right tech, backed by the right customer success representatives, you should save much more money than the tech costs. When you understand your recruitment team’s pain points, you can better decide where your tech spend should go.

Learn how to best spend your tech budget

3. Make Use of Communication Templates

Manually micromanaging your candidate communications can be a time suck, and it isn’t always necessary. Painstakingly responding to candidates that you’ve received their applications, that they won’t be moving forward, or that you’d like to offer them an interview, can quickly eat up your day.

But not responding at all—or responding too slowly—can negatively impact your reputation, and lead to candidate drop-off. According to Glassdoor, most companies experience an 80% drop-off rate among candidates who’ve started the application process.

Use templates (pre-set messages for specific situations) for common candidate communications. Some technology can create and send out templates automatically. A good ATS (applicant tracking system) can provide you with easy automations and customizable templates.

Once communications are streamlined, recruiters are free for other tasks that need their attention.

Learn more about candidate communication templates

4. Automate Your Tasks

Candidate communication isn’t the only thing that can be automated. Look for an ATS or HRIS that employs automation in other useful ways. Today’s top software can automatically send confirmation emails whenever a new candidate submits an application, or send out calendar invites when a candidate schedules an interview.

If creating automations in your applicant tracking system seems daunting, ask your customer success team for a tutorial. Once you’ve mastered them, automations can shave minutes, hours, and even days off of your process.

5. Merge Your Hiring, Onboarding, and Management Platforms 

Moving between platforms can take a lot of time and effort. It can be overwhelming to juggle multiple types of software, each with different interfaces and functionality. When your hiring, onboarding, and management platforms are all on separate platforms, things can get confusing quickly. Not to mention, there can be an inordinate amount of manual labor involved in transferring candidate and employee data from one platform to another.

Recruiters often have to log their hiring needs on one platform, manually upload jobs to another platform, then reupload candidate information to hiring and management platforms. Look for software that can merge hiring, onboarding, and management platforms. The best technology should allow you to easily move candidate information from one part of the platform to another. When your team’s whole job is done on one platform, you save time and reduce human error.

6. Use Technology to Filter Out Unqualified Candidates 

If you get a lot of unqualified candidates, your recruiters will spend too much time sifting through applications with very little to show for it. This is a widespread issue—according to Robert Half, HR managers claim that about 42% of their resumes don’t match the basic qualifications.

Use Knockout Questions

Knockout questions are simple (often multiple choice) questions that can help you immediately qualify or disqualify candidates. These can be a great tool when it comes to ensuring your team doesn’t lose time sorting through unqualified candidates.

A few knockout questions, paired with candidate-friendly applications, can make the application process fast and efficient, without losing focus on necessary qualifications.

Learn more about knockout questions

7. Keep On Track With Apploi’s Checklists 

Want more resources to help your team make most of the hiring and onboarding process? Explore Apploi’s collection of free staffing checklists.

1. Your Comprehensive Recruitment Audit Checklist
2. Your New Hire Onboarding Checklist
3. A Checklist for Staffing During Peak Hiring Season

Improving Recruiter Productivity With Apploi

Boost your recruiter productivity levels to new heights with the best software, tailored just for healthcare. Apploi’s intuitive hiring, onboarding, and management platform is there to help you every step of the way.

Interested in learning more about how you can attract, hire, and manage healthcare staff efficiently? Contact us today for a free demo of our end-to-end talent management solution.