Hiring top clinical talent: Why healthcare professionals are choosing LinkedIn.

Camille Baxter: Hello and welcome to Healthcare Insider, a sponsored content podcast series from Modern Healthcare Custom Media. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn. I'm your host, Camille Baxter. On today's podcast, we're thrilled to have David Ellis, Head of Healthcare Sales, North America, at LinkedIn, joining us to discuss the platform's hiring solutions and investments in the face of clinical talent shortages. David, thank you so much for being here today. So I have to ask this, being that you're with LinkedIn: Do you like to network?

David Ellis: Yes, I do because I think that I've recognized and sort of internalized one of LinkedIn's core beliefs that relationships matter, and so you just realize, especially as you go throughout your career, that it's somewhat who is as important as what, and I think that that's a key part of it.

Camille Baxter: That really is the core of how we move forward in business and especially in healthcare and in hiring. So, let's talk about some of the things that we came here to discuss today. Can you tell me what are some of the top challenges and priorities of healthcare leaders when it comes to hiring talent?

David Ellis: Yeah, thanks for the question, Camille, and I think it's a great place to start our conversation today. Let me start with the priorities and then move to the challenges. Through the thousands of interactions we are having with healthcare leaders, three main priorities come to mind. 

First, attracting top talent in an extremely competitive market. Second, leaders are focused on engaging, retaining, and developing that talent once they're hired. Third, they're continually adapting and evolving recruitment strategies to make the most of their talent investments, especially in a market where they need to get the most out of every single dollar. And healthcare leaders face no shortage of challenges as they work to accomplish these priorities. Arguably, the most pressing challenge is a significant shortage of talent in particular among nurses, doctors, and other clinical staff. Byproducts of this shortage include many of the things your listeners know well: increased workload, burnout, and ultimately, negative impacts on the quality of patient care. 

The next challenge is increased competition both from traditional healthcare providers as well as newer entrants like telehealth, retail clinics, etc. This makes it increasingly difficult to retain quality talent over time. Third, as the healthcare landscape is constantly changing, so are the skills and expertise needed to be successful. There's a strong need for employees who are adaptable and willing to learn, and an expectation for organizations to provide those new learning opportunities.

Camille Baxter: It is like the ground is moving so quickly under everyone's feet in the healthcare industry. So I want to talk a little bit about the data and insights from LinkedIn. So when you look at the data and the insights that you get from LinkedIn, how do you see member activity evolving within the clinical talent community, and how engaged are these candidates on the LinkedIn platform?

David Ellis: Yeah, job search and engagement activity is always interesting to see, especially in a rapidly evolving industry like healthcare. A recent report from LinkedIn shows that healthcare roles make up six of the top 10 jobs with the fastest-growing demand globally. Employers can't seem to hire this talent fast enough for first-line roles like nurses. We've seen nearly double the number of jobs posted compared to just two years ago. In fact, today in the US on LinkedIn, two nurses apply for a job every single minute, and as healthcare roles continue growing on LinkedIn, more and more healthcare professionals are turning to LinkedIn to find their next opportunity. In the past five years, the U.S. clinical talent pool has grown by 30% to over 5.3 million people, and overall, there are now over 8 million healthcare professionals in the U.S. on LinkedIn. In parallel with that growth, a LinkedIn feature in which people can privately signal to recruiters that they're open to new opportunities has increased over 230% among our nursing population.

But people in the healthcare space, they're not just looking for jobs on LinkedIn. We see them engaging on the platform in a variety of ways. First, they're engaging with content. Healthcare talent is actively consuming educational content, industry news, and thought leadership, which suggests a strong desire for continuous learning and professional development. In line with that, we've seen a 56% increase in healthcare-related posts on LinkedIn. Second, they're building their networks and their community on LinkedIn. People are using the platform to connect with colleagues, join groups related to their specialties and engage with the broader healthcare community. In line with that, we've seen a 30% year-over-year uptick in conversations about healthcare on LinkedIn. Finally, they're developing their skills. The healthcare community is active on LinkedIn Learning, demonstrating a desire to upskill and acquire new qualifications, likely driven by that rapidly evolving healthcare landscape.

Camille Baxter: That's something, what you said about two nurses applying every minute on LinkedIn – what an impact. I'm impressed by the engagement, too. Can you walk us through LinkedIn's efforts to support healthcare professionals?

David Ellis: Absolutely. With all of that engagement on the platform, we're making investments to also support that healthcare community as much as we can. So, we're doing several things. First, we're improving the experience of these members with several product enhancements. For example, users looking for nursing jobs on LinkedIn will be able to customize their search with filters for different specialties, shifts, schedules and licenses. The more than 3 million nurses in the US who use LinkedIn will also be able to update their profile to highlight nursing-specific skills and experiences with more than 40 nursing skills such as pediatrics, neonatal hospice, home health and so on. Through the Open To Work feature, nurses can select job preferences for recruiters to see when viewing their profiles. We've also developed key product enhancements for employers who are hiring healthcare talent. For example, through LinkedIn's recruiter tool, talent acquisition professionals now have specific search filters such as specialty shift schedule and license that will allow them to effectively source candidates based on their current needs.

We're also investing in growing the healthcare community on LinkedIn. We've compiled a number of networking groups that interested nurses can join to connect with peers and leaders in the industry. We have a dedicated healthcare editorial team that supports key healthcare voices and have created a newsletter called Path to Recovery that has over 75,000 subscribers. Additionally, there are now over 340,000 healthcare related groups on LinkedIn for people to share, learn and build community. Something else that we're doing that I'm particularly excited about is investing heavily in AI across LinkedIn to enhance the entire ecosystem. These investments will support the healthcare community in a number of ways. For example, we can help people develop their skills by providing learners with specialized skills and course suggestions on LinkedIn Learning. Our AI will help learners unlock a new level of depth and get exactly what they need, when they need it. Through our AI-powered coaching experience, we can engage with every learner in a way that is aware of who they are and where they want to go to help drive their career forward.

Camille Baxter: So, we've talked about the nursing professionals and how they're using LinkedIn. Let's talk a little bit about the organizations. How are healthcare organizations leveraging LinkedIn to overcome the clinical talent shortage?

David Ellis: Great question. In my nearly 13 years at LinkedIn, I've worked with organizations across many different industries and hiring segments, but nothing compares to what I'm seeing right now in terms of the demand for clinical talent, especially nurses.

In the face of this hyper-competitive landscape, healthcare organizations are leveraging LinkedIn's hiring solutions to engage talent in several ways. First, we help organizations position themselves as employers of choice. Through a media-rich LinkedIn presence, employers can showcase what makes them unique, and healthcare talent can easily learn about the organizations in a way that's targeted to each individual. In this competitive market, it's critical to have a resource like this that shares your employer brand and drives great talent your way. We also provide a means for employers to have all their jobs on LinkedIn targeted to the individual so that talent can identify the most relevant open roles.

We offer a hiring platform that helps recruiters proactively source talent by quickly identifying and engaging the exact people they need with new AI-backed features to help those recruiters save time and pinpoint the best people for their unique roles. Hiring great talent at scale is critical, but Camille, retaining and developing those people is also key to long-term success. We believe that talent of all types, clinical and otherwise, wants an opportunity to build their skills and grow both in their current role and to prepare for new opportunities in the future. 

So, through LinkedIn Learning, we help organizations develop their employees and ensure they're gaining the skills they need in an ever-evolving healthcare landscape. And all of these services are interwoven with AI to ensure that the right job shows up to the best person, that your outreach is tailored to a candidate's needs – and to enrich the learning experience to help learners see how the skills they're gaining today will support them in reaching their future career goals.

Camille Baxter: Taking that a little further, can you share a success story of a healthcare organization that used LinkedIn to overcome a specific challenge?

David Ellis: Absolutely, Camille. Today, my team partners with well over 1,600 healthcare organizations across our hiring and talent development solutions. So, we've got lots of great stories. One that comes to mind is the work we've done in partnership with CHRISTUS Health. Ron Croy, the chief talent officer there, wanted to establish CHRISTUS as an employer of choice among healthcare professionals. He also wanted to find a way to more effectively source and engage this audience. Now, Ron was especially eager to better connect with nurses in particular to meet their growing talent needs. Once Ron discovered that LinkedIn was home to millions of healthcare professionals, he set out to build the CHRISTUS employer brand on LinkedIn. His team cultivated content geared toward nursing professionals on the CHRISTUS LinkedIn career page, and that showcased what made working at CHRISTUS so special. They also began sourcing talent using LinkedIn's hiring tools, which helped them proactively find and reach out to talent through LinkedIn.

Recruiters post their open roles with LinkedIn jobs and build a pipeline of candidates to scale their talent acquisition efforts over time to upskill the workforce and promote learning. CHRISTUS promoted LinkedIn Learning courses to their employees while providing access to the platform that now has over 20,000 expert-led courses. And the results of these efforts were dramatic. They saw an improvement across all of their hiring strategies. This included a 600% increase in candidate leads while also gaining a 10% improvement in LinkedIn messaging response rates. Employer brand awareness also grew significantly, as Ron's team received five times more applications per month and more than doubled the amount of followers on their LinkedIn career page so that they can continue engaging with and hiring great talent on LinkedIn.

Camille Baxter: Thank you for sharing that example for our listeners. David, thank you so much for taking the time to talk about this important topic and helping our listeners to understand how LinkedIn helps them to source opportunities.

David Ellis: Thanks very much, Camille. It's been great to be here with you today to talk about such an important and timely topic.

Camille Baxter: Thank you again to LinkedIn for their collaboration on this sponsored episode of Healthcare Insider. LinkedIn connects professionals worldwide making them more productive and successful. With over 1 billion members, including nearly 8 million healthcare professionals in the U.S., LinkedIn is a great place to hire healthcare talent. 

To our audience, thank you for tuning in today. I'm your host, Camille Baxter. Look for more episodes of Healthcare Insider under the multimedia tab at modernhealthcare.com or subscribe to your preferred podcatcher. Thanks for listening.