Three areas of interest were recently surveyed by Career Builder CB Report regarding healthcare hiring and vacancies.

Overall, 59% of employers cited at least one negative effect of extended vacancies.  The negative effect of vacancies begins with erosion in employee morale. 36% of employers believe morale suffers because existing staff is overworked.  Secondly, 20%  of employers believe patients get less attention.  Thirdly, and fourthly, at 11 and 10 % respectively are higher voluntary turnover and more mistakes in administration of patient care.  A distant fifth at 4%, believe increased lawsuits may result.  Only 41% agree that extended vacancies have not impacted their health care organization.

Thoughts?  Seems 59% of employers have work to do.  They will need to learn why vacancies are becoming extended vacancies.  Time to examine where the job postings are not performing and where to try out new job postings.  Here are some sites to try for targeted job postings:

 AboutHealthcareJobs.com,  AboutCaseManagerJobs.com, AboutDirectorofNursingJobs.com, 

AboutMedicalAssistantJobs.com, AboutNurseAssistantJobs.com, AboutNursePractitionerJobs.com, 

AboutNurseRNJobs.com, AboutPharmacistJobs.com, AboutPhysicianAssistantJobs.com, 

AboutTherapistJobs.com, RNOpportunities.com and RNStaffers.com.

The second area is a separate survey that indicates the barriers to filling healthcare positions. These barriers include:

• applicants not having any relevant experience (47%)
• applicants having salary requirements that are too high (42%)
• applicants having less than 3 years relevant experience,
• not having the proper education or experience and/or lacking good communication skills work schedule/hours are not desirable (38%)

And 30% of employers state they lack the training resources to get inexperienced workers up to speed.

Thoughts?  Could the writing for job postings be improved?  I see many job postings with what appears to be an HR job description.  Could we improve the job posting?  If I am searching for an Operating Room Nurse Manager the person I am looking for if I am an ambulatory surgery center only doing eyes is quite different than the Operating Room Nurse I am looking for to work with my general OR with 18 rooms at a Level I Trauma center.  Everything is probably different: education, experience, salary, soft skills, even the opportunity to advance in the organization is different.

Many of us expect to attract the best applicants and have them go right to an online ATS application that might take an hour to complete while the applicant has no idea if the job really will pay them in a range that they are interested in.  Could this be part of the reason so many applicants are not qualified?  Or their salary requirements are higher than the range? Are we missing well qualified candidates because they will not “apply” because they “think” the salary will not be where they need to be?  Are we missing candidates because the applicant will not apply until they learn more and we do not offer a way for them to learn more as part of the posting?  There are other reasons of course, but the point is we need to reflect on the ads we post and what we are asking candidates to do – Would you do it?

The third area is “Why is Recruiting Nurses a Challenge?  This will be covered in a separate post.