Many medical institutions are currently experiencing a shortage of qualified physicians. There are many reasons why this shortage exists, but one lesser-known reason is that many medical institutions don’t understand the best practices for attracting, interviewing, hiring, and onboarding candidates.
A stressful and drawn-out hiring process is one way to drive away qualified physicians, and so is a lack of information about a clinic or hospital. All types of businesses can benefit from these three hiring tips, but these are specific to hospital owners, private practices, and other types of medical institutions.
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1. Create An Employer Brand
No matter what type of business you’re in, one of the first things you need to do when recruiting employees is to create your brand. Branding is much more than just a logo and business name— it’s your business’s identity. A brand identity is something needed to attract customers or clients/patients, and it’s also used to attract future employees.
When it comes to hospitals and other medical practices, here are some tips to follow to attract new physicians.
Developing and Executing Your Unique Selling Point (USP)
Determining your USP is something you’ll do to attract new patients, but you can also do this to attract qualified physicians. When attracting potential candidates, your USP will focus on your company culture and what you have to offer your physicians. Some things that physicians look for in a hospital or clinic is a positive work environment and work-life balance.
Once you’ve developed your USP, the next step is to communicate it to potential employees. Potential candidates will want to see your brand and company culture in action, and this can be done through short videos and testimonials from your current physicians on the career section of your practice’s website. If you don’t know where to begin, consider consulting with a physician recruitment service to help get you started.
2. Keep An Open Line Of Communication With Your Candidates
Communication is key, and this is also true when it comes to hiring. Once you’ve gotten a response from prospective physicians, keep in contact with them throughout the entering hiring process. This includes the selection process, the interviewing process, and afterward. Even candidates who aren’t selected for a position report having a better candidate experience when the employer kept an open line of communication.
Two ways to ensure regular and consistent communication include:
- Checking in frequently with candidates, whether through emails, phone calls, text messages, or on networking sites such as LinkedIn
- Fully explaining your specific hiring process, including the average time it takes
Doing this also puts your practice in a more positive light for future physicians that may apply to your practice in the future. Job-seekers don’t like to waste their time with employers if they’ve heard that they don’t respond after they’ve submitted their application.
3, Ensure That Your Application And Hiring Processes Are Efficient
While you’re openly communicating with your potential employees, make sure that your application, hiring, and even background screening processes aren’t extremely long. If any of these steps take a long time, your candidates are more likely to abandon their applications and seek employment elsewhere.
Ways to streamline these processes include:
- Make the application shorter— don’t require your applicants to put in the same information (i.e., home address and phone number) more than once.
- Create a talent pipeline to nurture potential candidates as they’re waiting during the hiring process.
- Use background screening software that allows both you as an employer and your candidates to see where they stand during their background checks.
The onboarding/training process should also be a positive experience for your new employees. One way to achieve this is to give your new physicians the opportunity to look over your policies and meet with the other physicians before the onboarding process actually starts. This will help them understand what to expect before they actually begin working at your practice/hospital/clinic/etc.
A physician recruitment service can help you build your practice’s brand in order to attract the best candidates for hire. They can help establish your brand identity and create a unique selling point that will entice the best physicians to apply to your practice. Once you’ve attracted this talent, it’s now up to you to make sure that they don’t become uninterested in practice due to long application, hiring, screening, and onboarding processes. It’s important to keep your candidates engaged during the entire process.
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