Let candidates approach you
Healthcare recruiters face a serious challenge. There is a huge shortage of qualified personnel, candidate willingness to apply is low, pressure on recruitment budgets is high, and traditional sourcing is not delivering enough. It is time for innovation. A different approach. A solution for all these recruitment challenges is to generate and nurture candidates in an accessible way with the help of tooling. With that, candidates will come to you!
Sourcing little effective in healthcare recruitment
There are plenty of healthcare recruiters who want to get rid of sourcing. Searching and approaching candidates takes a lot of time, and at the bottom line it produces few candidates. The problem lies in the low response rates, a target group that is not very active on well-known sourcing platforms - such as Linkedin - and regularly also the unwritten rule that you do not steal healthcare personnel from other healthcare institutions.
But then, what to do? The willingness to apply is very low throughout the labor market, leading to low conversions on work-at-home sites. On average, only 1% of visitors to a recruitment site apply. And then you have the ever shrinking recruitment budgets due to rising labor costs and the frequent hiring of freelancers. It is logical that many healthcare recruiters are turning back to sourcing, even though it is very time-consuming and not always successful.
Lead generation as a solution to challenges in healthcare recruitment
But thanks to technological innovations, there is a solution. With lead generation, the healthcare recruiter catches 3 birds with one stone. Because you lower the threshold to respond, the conversion rate on your work-at-home site increases. This equal way of contact also fits better with the target group of aides, caretakers and nurses, as a result of which the candidates come to you and sourcing is (almost) no longer necessary.
"Thanks to recruitment marketing software, we don't have to worry about the entire preliminary process in recruitment. We don't have to sourced ourselves or use other recruitment channels to bring in candidates. We get responses for our vacancies in an automated way." - Sanne Schouten, HR consultant at Childcare Mundo
With lead generation tooling, you offer potential candidates an approachable opportunity to contact you. It's a great intermediate step for many candidates. They are not yet ready to apply for a job, but asking a question or leaving their details for a no-obligation call might be what they want. With lead generation, you make it super simple for candidates to contact you. Consider, for example, a Whatsapp pop-up on your work-at-home site. This makes you very approachable and accessible in one fell swoop.
Making it easy to respond and make contact works very well with care staff. You see this for example at 's Heeren Loo, a nationwide care organization. In 2023 they threw out the traditional application process with a resume and motivation and made the threshold to respond as low as possible. This is already paying off!
Deborah Hempenius, communications advisor HR and labor market communications, says: "Our target group does not sit much behind a computer. They are at the bedside or in the group and see us as an employer passing by quickly. They don't have a resume ready, let alone a cover letter. Thanks to our new recruitment method, these documents are no longer the first impression. For many candidates, that works enormously to lower the threshold."
Her colleague Pamela de Man, recruitment specialist at 's Heeren Loo, adds: "Candidates really like the fact that they can easily contact us. We notice that this is appreciated!"
In short, by making making contact more accessible, candidates will come to you instead of you having to chase them. As a result, your recruitment funnel is continuously filled and you, as a healthcare recruiter, can put your sourcing on hold!
The next step: nurturing
But bringing in leads alone won't get you there. It is just as important to convert this first contact into a candidate who is willing to come and talk about a healthcare position. You do this by introducing leads to you as an employer step by step and getting them increasingly enthusiastic. Of course, this cannot be done manually. You can't contact hundreds of potential candidates. Then it becomes impersonal and you have already lost that time saving on sourcing to all the contact moments with leads.
With recruitment marketing automation, aimed at lead nurturing, you organize this in an efficient way. It allows you to organize contact moments in the form of campaigns in which the potential candidate regularly hears from you via Skype or e-mail. Think, for example, of a 'behind the scenes' video of the team in which the candidate has shown interest or an infographic based on your employee satisfaction survey. You can set up all kinds of lead nurturing campaigns and because you automate them, it remains personal and efficient. This way, you create a talent pool with engaged candidates that you can draw from for today's and tomorrow's healthcare vacancies.
The result: more candidates at a lower cost-per-hire
So with lead generation and nurturing software, you increase the effectiveness and efficiency of your recruitment efforts. Candidates contact you, without you spending a lot of time on this - as with sourcing. Thanks to this boost in efficiency and effectiveness, you bring in more candidates in less time and at lower costs. Win-win!
