How AI-Powered Tools Can Help Recruiters & HR Teams in Healthcare
The United States Healthcare system is facing severe shortages in 2023. The American Hospital Association estimates that the industry will face a shortage of up to 124,000 physicians in 2033, and in order to keep up with demand moving forward, US hospital systems will need to hire at least 200,000 nurses per year.
The good news is, technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are powerful tools for HR teams looking to hire. These tools can help recruiters quickly sort through large amounts of candidate data, allowing them to suggest high-quality candidate matches without sorting through stacks of resumes manually.
Hospital systems and other Healthcare organizations are in need of qualified talent with the right skills. AI can enable HR and Talent Acquisition (TA) teams in Healthcare to attract and hire ideal candidates with the right skills, and keep them engaged.
Using AI to attract talent
In the Healthcare industry, organizations are often looking for talent with specific and specialized skills. These organizations must learn how to attract (and convert) the talent they need, and connect those candidates to the right roles at the right times.
Hospital systems can use AI to:
Provide personalized candidate journeys
It’s not just patients that expect personalized experiences in Healthcare – today’s candidates expect the same level of personalization from potential employers, as patients do from their Healthcare providers. They want smart job recommendations and learning opportunities based on their skills and career goals, and relevant content around topics they have shown interest in.
For Healthcare organizations looking to offer these types of candidate experiences, AI job matching can suggest open roles to ‘best-fit’ candidates. You can also use AI to offer unique talent journeys through your Career Sites, and ensure that potential employees get the best possible experience when applying for a role at your company.
By making the application and candidate experiences as seamless as possible, Healthcare employers are able to boost their employer brand, which can help attract even more top talent.
Remain compliant
One thing Healthcare organizations understand very well is the importance of privacy and consent. Just like protecting patient data is critical in Healthcare, candidate and employee data should be protected as well.
AI can be used within candidate preference center applications to ensure that candidate preferences and consent are being collected and stored in one centralized place. HR teams should also be able to easily track changes to preferences and report on this at any given time, allowing your legal team to be confident that compliance standards are being met.
Identify the highest quality candidates
It’s important that employers in Healthcare evaluate candidates based on their skills and potential. AI allows you to do that with the help of automation – highlighting individuals who are best suited for each role or gig.
The World Health Organization predicts a shortfall of 15 million Healthcare workers by 2030.
Hospital systems are already feeling the pinch of labor shortages, so the ability to quickly identify the right candidates and match them with roles is vital.
AI can help HR teams in Healthcare match roles and candidates, based on their skills, to help score applicants against what Hiring Managers are looking for. This gives TA teams a much more streamlined approach, saving them time by focusing on the best-fit candidates first. AI can also evaluate your Healthcare organization’s highest performing employees, and can identify common characteristics among them. This enables your sourcers and recruiters to search for candidates with those same characteristics.
Hiring Managers and recruiters can also easily change their search criteria (e.g. add or remove skills), and then let the AI generate a pool of suitable candidates based on those changes. Especially in the Healthcare industry where labor shortages are prevalent, it can be extremely helpful to see which candidates become available after making these subtle changes, if the talent pool is looking small.
Increase diversity and inclusion
According to our research study of business leaders, Navigating The Changing Talent Landscape, 36% of Healthcare leaders said that Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DE&I) was one of the biggest challenges they will face in the coming year.
AI can help you uncover candidates you might not have considered with a manual sourcing and recruiting process. As algorithms become more sophisticated and learn which skills are relevant for particular jobs, it can also infer the adjacent skills someone might have or could develop in the future. Based on these inferences, the technology can recommend candidates you may have previously overlooked.
It’s important to remember that every decision that is aided by AI, must be explainable. Healthcare employers must know and understand who is a good fit for the role and why the technology suggested each of those candidates. This allows employers to explain the recommendations and decisions to the candidates themselves as well.
Focus on hard-to-fill roles
In the Healthcare industry especially, some roles are really hard to fill, based on skill availability and scarcity. For example, a hospital may have an easier time filling positions for skilled medical coders as opposed to Registered Nurses. The International Centre on Nurse Migration predicts there will be a global shortage of nurses – 13 million – by the year 2030. That’s significant considering the shortage of nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic was 6 million.
An extremely useful application of AI is sorting through the open roles in your system and working out which roles will be hardest to fill and how long it is likely to take to fill them, based on skills data as well as broader market insights. This can help recruitment teams in Healthcare prioritize the right things at the right times, and get started quickly (or apply extra effort) to fill the more challenging positions.
Decrease bias in hiring
The traditional ways of hiring almost always involve some sort of bias – selecting candidates based on if they attended a prestigious university, their age, years of experience – the list goes on. In order for Healthcare organizations to reduce bias in hiring, they need the proper tools. AI-powered candidate matching based on skills, makes the recruitment process fairer and more transparent.
When algorithms are trained with the right data, they can bring ‘hidden gems’ from inside or outside of your organization to light. This helps your recruiters identify people who are ideal for a role – but may otherwise have been overlooked.
If your Healthcare organization has diversity targets in place, introducing explainable AI to your recruitment and internal mobility initiatives could help you reduce unconscious bias and achieve better representation within your company.
Speed up your time to hire
With the critical labor shortages facing the Healthcare industry, speed is important in the hiring process. AI can help you find qualified candidates quickly, with suggested contacts or resurfaced contacts, and can then match best-fit candidates to roles, making the hiring process much more efficient.
It should also be easy for HR and TA teams to explain how candidates have been ranked against one another, to help recruiters make faster, well-informed decisions. Explainable AI can also help recruiters predict a candidate’s propensity to leave, or the length of time they will likely stay in their current role. This helps TA teams focus their time on the most valuable candidates who are most likely to remain engaged.
Discover new efficiencies
Getting people into roles faster certainly saves Healthcare organizations money, but it’s not the only savings that AI can bring to the HR function. Most recruiters will tell you they are busy; quickly getting accurate search results from their talent database means they don’t have to waste time reviewing profiles that ultimately won’t be a good fit. During a time when Healthcare organizations need to work towards talent resilience, any methods that improve quality of hire while reducing time to hire will always be preferred.
HR and Talent professionals that use AI can automate manual tasks, so they can focus on more important and meaningful work. And remember that, even when your organization is not actively hiring, AI can run in the background to automate workflows in your Talent CRM – nurturing your Talent Community and keeping information up to date. This way, the next time you are ready to hire, you will know exactly who to reach out to.
Using AI to retain talent
43% of healthcare workers are planning to leave their jobs within a year, or already have a new job lined up – Talent Index
Recruitment is not the only focus for HR professionals in the Healthcare industry – retention is critically important.
AI can be used to enable employee engagement programs, such as internal mobility through a Talent Marketplace to find roles and opportunities for existing employees. Talent mobility programs can also help HR teams in Healthcare fill roles faster – allowing them to skip the lengthy onboarding process that comes with new hires – when an internal employee simply moves from one role to another. Internal mobility has also shown to improve retention rates.
Healthcare organizations can use AI to:
Develop potential career paths for employees
According to our Talent Index research, only 29% of respondents in Healthcare said that their employer has programs in place to help them develop new skills. AI can allow employees to visualize potential career paths: a way to let them freely explore career development options, regardless of the current role they’re in.
This can motivate and engage Healthcare employees by showing them their career possibilities beyond the ‘next step’, and also by showing them other career options they might never have thought of (e.g. lateral moves). Additionally, AI can help individuals understand exactly what training they may need in order to take the next step in their career.
Generate unique opportunities for each employee
Not only should Healthcare employees be empowered to view potential career paths, but HR teams should be able to help facilitate learning and development, to aid employees in reaching their goals and to keep them engaged.
With smart AI-powered recommendations, HR teams in Healthcare can follow an employee’s journey throughout their tenure, and can match employees to training opportunities or apprenticeships that can help them reach the career goals they have set. When employees feel valued and supported on their career paths, they are much more likely to stay engaged.
Keep a pulse on your workforce
Like we’ve already discussed, the Healthcare industry is seeing a lot of turnover. One really helpful application of AI is that it can be used to flag when an employee is at risk of leaving. Knowing when someone is likely to leave is extremely helpful for HR and Talent teams, because they can take action to hopefully re-engage the employee in a personalized way.
The AI in Beamery can help HR teams in the Healthcare industry discover better talent faster, decrease bias with explainable suggestions, and enable retention and engagement programs. Our AI models are not meant to replace the ‘human’ in Human Resources; instead, they support human decision makers by helping them to make better talent decisions.