The UK’s National Health Service has been facing challenges for many years, even before the Coronavirus pandemic, with increasing demand for additional services, budget cuts and staff shortages. However, with unprecedented circumstances and threats to life due to Covid-19, these challenges have only been amplified and the healthcare sector is in urgent need of qualified candidates to fill thousands of job vacancies.
Understaffing has provided a huge challenge for healthcare settings across the UK, many workers who typically operated across several care placements pre-pandemic were no longer able to, due to high demand for staff elsewhere. Changes to immigration law made non-British workers sparse leaving hospitals and health centres under pressure and whilst trying to accommodate large volumes of calls and patients.
There was around 76,500 full-time equivalent advertised vacancies in hospital and community services alone between January and March 2021, and this is expected to significantly rise by the end of 2021. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates a projected shortfall of 18 million health workers by 2030, so it’s crucial the UK regains control providing the right talent where it’s needed.
Challenges faced by the healthcare recruitment sector
Attracting the right candidates can be difficult in any industry but during the pandemic, there were some positive signs for healthcare recruiters as new people were being drawn to the sector as a result of vast unemployment across other areas.
However, as businesses and organisations started to open their doors people started to move away from the healthcare sector, leaving many hospitals and centres once again overwhelmed and understaffed. Recruiters need to find new ways to attract prospects back into the healthcare industry and start hiring candidates.
As pressures around the UK’s healthcare budgets still remain, recruiters are looking for cost-effective alternatives when sourcing new employees. Increased advertising and agency spend are having an enormous effect on the health of the UK economy with the average staffing agency margin in healthcare being 31%.
Around 80% of the NHS’ nursing shortfall is filled by agency workers. By reducing reliance on agencies and reducing permanent staff shortfalls by moving towards in-house contractor management, recruiters could help alleviate the strain on healthcare recruitment budgets.
Hiring managers are also under tension to hire faster in order to meet quotas but also because time-to-hire impacts candidate acceptance rates. 56% of recruiters say their biggest challenge is hiring managers moving candidates through hiring stages too slowly and that it impacts their overall hiring process.
As healthcare professionals, continue to battle with the huge backlogs and pressures from Covid-19 paired with increasing workloads, it comes as no surprise hiring managers have less & less time to dedicate to sourcing new candidates. Hiring managers and recruiters need to secure new ways to accelerate the recruitment of new staff if they want to reduce the burden.
How we can help
We’re the market-leading supplier of innovative end-to-end recruitment solutions. We provide HR professionals, recruiters and hiring teams with innovative cloud-based technology aimed at streamlining their recruitment process, making it quicker and easier to recruit whilst significantly reducing the time and cost to hire.
As early pioneers of multi-job posting technology our expertise extends into candidate response management, CV comparing and scoring, search capabilities through to candidate onboarding and more.
Our involvement starts with the design and promotion of your career’s website. It is imperative that your careers page attracts the right kind of talent. It is also essential that your careers page promotes your brand and ethos and is also quick, secure, mobile compatible and has a seamless application process.
We can manage the balance between having a great-looking and engaging careers website with good quality content, whilst also including the very latest, candidate-friendly, efficient recruitment technology.
What’s more, here at Recruitive we can build career websites or job boards to show in Google allowing you can rake in the benefits without having to put all the leg work in to get there!
We simply activate an XML feed, which displays the technical details of every live job on a recruitment website. We then submit the feed directly to Google jobs allowing candidates to see the opportunities you have available.
Our applicant tracking software system can cover everything a recruitment team could possibly need to hire directly from the initial job posting through to onboarding and everything in between. We uniquely design the solution for you and only include what you need. If you need something we don’t have – we will work with you to build the technology you need.
Some of our features and functions include; client branding, multi-posting, task management, SMS communication, onboarding, detailed and bespoke reports, second stage applicant forms, online DBS and medical checks, Learning Management systems (to check candidates qualifications and training) and video interviewing.
Our video interviewing tool is becoming a hugely popular feature amongst new clients and is integrated into our software to further save time and money. This offers a greater candidate experience from the very start of the process, allowing you to create a personalised experience.
If you’d like more information about our recruitment software services and solutions, click here. Alternatively get in touch and chat with a member of our team using our LIVE chat tool on our website.
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