There’s no doubt that hiring today is more difficult than ever before. As we discussed in a recent post, more than two-thirds of today’s hiring companies cannot find the candidates they’re looking for, according to data from SHRM. As context, that number is up nearly 20 percent year-over-year.
But what has caused hiring to become more difficult? We might be able to answer that question by looking at one of the bellwethers of the recruitment space: the healthcare industry.
According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) the healthcare industry is growing, and is growing along a steady trend line. In fact, their most recent data shows that some 43,000 new jobs were added to the economy in July alone, marking 67 months of near consistent job growth. This puts the healthcare industry in line with the overall job growth the economy has been experiencing since the Great Recession.
If we look to the cause of this extended period of job growth, we can look to the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). According to data compiled by Monster, the ACA helped provide coverage to 17 million Americans who were previously without coverage. This influx in patients has increased demand for healthcare professionals, and as policies look toward universal coverage, we can expect this demand to grow.
The problem here isn’t that HR and talent acquisition professionals have been inundated with applications for a withering number of opportunities. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.
Consider this: As the healthcare industry continues to grow, the demand for specialized healthcare professionals will increase, as more and more patients with specific medical needs increases through expanded coverage.
As Monster alludes to in their post, specialization in healthcare may be responsible for a better level of care administered to patients, but it’s made finding candidates with specialty experience difficult. As competition amongst healthcare providers increases, competition for talent will increase, and we can already see that it has.
According to research conducted by Merritt Hawkins, more than 45 percent of physicians report receiving more than 100 job solicitations per year. Clearly, what we’re seeing develop in the healthcare industry is a skills gap--jobs are rapidly being created, and the available candidates don’t have the skills or experience to meet this demand.
Considering recruiters are operating within a skills gap, it’s more important than ever that they invest in recruitment marketing technology that can help them get the most out of their job advertising spend. In using an analytics and automation platform like Recruitics, HR and talent acquisition professionals can better understand where the budget for their performance-based job advertisements are going, and set rules to optimize their bids and cut wasted spend from their strategy.
Doing so will allow recruiters to generate a greater return on investment--more conversions, at a lower cost--and then reinvest that saved capital into other recruitment marketing efforts, allowing them to engage with a larger pool of candidates and make more highers, quickly and efficiently.
Sign up for a demo to learn more about how Recruitics can help your healthcare organization find the right candidates at the right price.
