Recruiting talent
Understanding the state of the most in-demand healthcare candidates will help you make better talent decisions.
- Where are candidates located?
- Where should you open your next office?
- Which of your competitors are vying for the same talent?
- What’s the size of the candidate pool you’re recruiting from?
Read on for insights into how to gain a competitive advantage in the hiring market.
Searching for talent
How can you find the best healthcare talent out there and get them excited to learn more about job opportunities at your company? From writing a compelling job description to using LinkedIn to find qualified candidates, knowing a few tips and tricks can go a long way toward helping you make your next great hire.
One way to supercharge your talent hunt and expand your reach with candidates is to post your open roles online, where they’re spending time searching for new opportunities. But when you’re focused on growing your team, writing job posts from scratch takes away time better spent attracting great candidates. Here are five useful templates to help you get started hiring healthcare talent.
Be sure to check out the full selection of job templates.
Nurses assess, monitor, and treat patients in need of medical care. They typically work in hospitals, physician offices, skilled nursing facilities, and a number of other healthcare settings. They care for ill and injured people, and provide preventative care. Many nurses specialize in one area of healthcare and work only with particular types of patients, such as newborns or cancer patients, while others practice general care.
Responsibilities
- Identify, assess, and monitor patients’ health conditions
- Administer medications and provide treatment according to physician’s orders
- Provide health education, medication review, healthcare coordination, and specialist referrals
- Monitor blood pressure and chronic conditions
- Ensure that all treatments and medications are fully documented in patients’ health records
Skills and Qualifications
- Bachelor of science degree in nursing (BSN), associate’s degree in nursing (ADN), or diploma from accredited nursing program
- Licensed by local State Board of Nursing
- Passed NCLEX-RN or NCLEX-PN exam
- Ability to work well as part of a team in a fast-paced healthcare environment
- Strong listening and communication skills, even under pressure
- Warm bedside manner and high emotional intelligence
- 1-3 years of experience in a clinical setting
- Bilingual Spanish/English speaker
You’ll find many qualified healthcare candidates on LinkedIn. But unless you know exactly what to look for, it will be hard to narrow down your search. To kick off your search for candidates, you can simply go into a search engine or a recruiting tool like LinkedIn and type in the name of the role you’re hiring for. What you’ll notice, however, is that while the search results are high in quantity, there are often many candidates who aren’t qualified for the role, either because they don’t have the right experiences or skill sets, or because they’re in an entirely irrelevant function or position.
That’s where Boolean strings come in. Boolean strings let you filter your search results based on the things that matter most to you, like specific job titles, skills, or other keywords.
LinkedIn’s Boolean operators are slightly different than those found on other sites, so it’s important to construct your searches properly to get the results you want. Use straight quotation marks (") around a word or phrase that must be included – curly quotation marks (“) won’t work. Or try adding the word "NOT" immediately before a search term that you don’t want to see in your results. You can also use the word "OR" between search terms to find people who match at least some of your requirements, or "AND" to find someone who matches them all. If you need to narrow your search even further, you can put parentheses around multiple terms (more on that in a minute).
- Always type "NOT", "OR", and "AND" in capital letters, or they won’t work
- The "+" and "-" operators or wild-card "*" searches are not officially supported by LinkedIn
Boolean searches work kind of like math, meaning LinkedIn Recruiter will read certain parts of the search string first. That means that ambiguously worded strings will lead to bad results. To avoid this, it’s important to know how LinkedIn prioritizes search operators, and to lay your searches out accordingly. The order of precedence is:
- Quotes
- Parentheses
- NOT
- AND
- OR
That’s where parentheses come in. Using them around certain search terms clearly communicates your intentions to LinkedIn’s search engine, so you should use them as much as possible. Let’s look at some examples of how search strings can help you find talent for the most in-demand roles.
By phrasing your search as clearly as possible and adding the important details, you can make your searches more targeted and accurate – helping you find the talent you need more quickly. Keep in mind you can home in on relevant candidates even further with additional candidate criteria. Just click "All Filters" near the top after running your search to narrow down candidates by location, industry, schools, and more.
Engaging with talent
Develop a meaningful connection with candidates to engage them with your company and its open roles. To do that, you must know how to initiate a conversation that captures their attention and communicates opportunities, goals, and actions that will resonate with them. Here are some tactics that will help you successfully engage with healthcare talent.
Hearing from a stranger out of the blue can be a good thing, especially if they’re offering an exciting job opportunity. But great healthcare candidates get a lot of messages from recruiters, both on LinkedIn and via email, so it’s important to make yours stand out.
General best practices when writing candidate emails:
- Keep your subject lines short and impactful
- The best-performing subject lines often use keywords like “thanks,” “exclusive invitation,” “connect,” “job opportunity,” and “join us.”
- Design your message as a conversation starter
- Candidates don’t respond well to “look at the job and tell me if you’re interested” messages. Instead, start a dialogue about their career path and goals to encourage candidates to engage with the opportunity.
- Use a conversational, enthusiastic tone
- Choose words that reflect your personal voice and express a genuine interest in helping candidates with their professional goals.
Emailing or messaging a candidate on LinkedIn is all about establishing a personal connection and piquing their interest in a role. You can still use a template, but that template should be customized to match the candidate’s interests and desires, as well as your own personality and style. Here are a few examples to get you started!
Hi [NAME],
I saw that you’re a member of the [ORGANIZATION] and I thought you might be interested in a role we’re currently looking to fill. Your experience working in emergency room environments and caring for trauma patients would be perfect for this role, and I’m really impressed by your latest journal article on [SUBJECT]. It shows exactly the kind of passion and insight we’re looking for.
You’d be joining a dedicated staff with a deep passion for patient care, and I think you’d make an incredible addition to the team. I’d love to speak with you more about the role and hear about your career goals. In the meantime, I’d be happy to answer any questions you might have.
Best,
[YOUR NAME]
Hi [NAME],
You want a role that gives you purpose. That’s what we offer at [COMPANY]. We’re dedicated to advancing patient care and helping our talented team of healthcare professionals find meaning in their work every day. We’re also big believers in promoting a strong work-life balance, because we know it helps employees bring their best selves to work.
Would you be interested in setting up a time to talk about your career goals? I’d love to tell you more about the role and the incredible culture we’ve created at [COMPANY].
[YOUR NAME]
Hi [NAME],
We’re looking for nurses with the knowledge, communication skills, and teamwork that it takes to thrive in our busy emergency room setting. You’ll need to work well under pressure and have the ability to multitask while still maintaining a warm bedside manner. You want to make a difference in the world. That’s what we offer.
Think you’ve got what it takes? We’d love to have you on the team. Let’s set up a time to talk – I hope to hear from you soon!
[YOUR NAME]
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