At this point, we all know that many healthcare employers are competing for the same candidates. The healthcare industry is looking at a 3.2 million worker shortage for roles like nursing assistants and home health aides. Competition between employers is inevitable. 

So how do successful employers respond to such a difficult situation? By focusing on recruiting faster. 

Employers who build hiring strategies around speed rely on one idea: that they can find and hire those coveted candidates before anyone else does. 

The trick to this tactic is ensuring you pick up speed without losing quality. Employers can do this by automating certain tasks, asking prescreening questions to weed out unqualified candidates, and using digital hiring software to manage different recruitment efforts from one place.

Most employers have gone through the experience of posting to job boards, crossing their fingers, reposting, and manually posting to another board. The cycle can feel endless.

But for some employers, job boards aren’t the only (or even the primary) source for online applicants. 

Instead, these employers invest in social recruiting. From broadly popular and well-established sites like Facebook and LinkedIn to younger-skewing platforms like Snapchat and TikTok, social media can be a valuable source of candidates.

While competitive salaries are an important factor for job seekers, healthcare employers often have strict limitations on wage increases. That’s one reason some managers use hiring strategies that focus on something they actually can control: unique and desirable benefits.

Applicants seeking full-time employment will likely take it for granted that their employer will provide health insurance. But there are other ways to make your benefits stand out.

Employers who use this hiring strategy want their benefits to be at least one of two things: uncommon and flexible.

Why uncommon? Well, it’s not a competitive strategy if the business down the street offers the exact same perks.

And why flexible? So employees can choose the benefits that work for them, without HR needing to rely on guesswork.

An employee’s benefits package can have a significant impact on their job satisfaction. Flexible and generous benefits make it easier for all employees to maintain a healthy working life, which also has benefits for diversity, equity, and inclusion. 

Burnout and stress are two of the most common reasons healthcare workers leave their jobs. Naturally, those are also things new job seekers hope to avoid.

Poor company culture can be a huge issue for healthcare businesses. Some successful employers make culture a core piece of their recruiting and hiring strategy.

Building a healthy workplace culture helps both recruiting and retention efforts. When employers have a culture worth bragging about, word of mouth naturally attracts candidates. But employers can also leverage their strong culture in recruiting materials. 

Not all employers start recruiting from scratch every time they have an open role. In fact, for businesses with sizable talent pools, it might not be necessary to find new applicants at all. Instead, these employers can sort through their records and rehire past workers or reengage former applicants.

This strategy requires meticulous records of all the workers and candidates who have ever passed through your business. In general, talent pool-focused hiring strategies are most successful for employers who use digital recordkeeping tools to store employee and applicant data.

Multi-channel recruiting is a hiring strategy that focuses on sourcing candidates from multiple places at once. 

This hiring strategy goes beyond cross-posting jobs to multiple job boards. It can also include recruiting on social media, in person, through networking, with employee referrals, and with analog ad campaigns.

Recruiting from multiple channels can help employers find more candidates, but it can also make job applications more accessible for applicants themselves. Digital job ads are valuable, but they’re not a good way of finding candidates who don’t have wifi access or mobile data. 

Consider this: 97% of Americans own a cellphone, but only around 85% use a smartphone specifically. Multi-channel recruiting, which can include texts and local ads, is generally a much more inclusive hiring strategy than relying solely on job boards.

Finally, some businesses appeal to candidates by leaning into employer branding. 

But what is employer branding? Essentially, it’s your reputation as an employer. If potential candidates decide not to apply to your roles based on negative Glassdoor reviews or unprofessional messaging, that’s a branding problem. 

But the opposite is also true. Attractive career pages, glowing company reviews, and positive news items can all help establish you as an employer of choice. 

No one can entirely control their reputation, but you can strengthen yours by improving your job ads, your communication with candidates, and by putting the spotlight on employee testimonials.