3 Steps to Writing Medical Job Postings That Will Bring In the Best Talent
Our 2017 survey on Top Technology Trends involved nearly 700 small and midsize businesses (SMBs) and sought to identify major challenges, goals and trends for the coming years.
One question in the survey asked respondents to rank the most pressing roadblocks to achieving their business goals. The highest ranking concern for small and medium health care providers was “hiring the right people,” followed closely by “motivating and retaining staff.”
For medical professionals, this won’t come as a surprise. Many doctors have been dealing with these hiring challenges firsthand for a good amount of time.
In a recent study, Mercer HPA found that in the next seven years, the U.S. will likely see a shortage of:
446,300 home health aides
98,700 medical and lab techs
95,000 nursing assistants
29,400 nurse practitioners
The problem becomes even more overwhelming for small practices that have to compete with larger hospitals to attract qualified talent, considering those bigger organizations can offer more robust benefits packages and faster access to state-of-the-art technology.
Here’s one piece of good news: Medical schools in the U.S. are on track to achieve their goal of a 30 percent enrollment increase by next year, and small practices may have the advantage over their larger competitors when it comes to employee satisfaction.
There are qualified candidates out there that small practices have a shot at recruiting, but the first step to bringing those applicants in is to write a well-crafted medical job posting.
Here’s how you do that:
Use Data to Understand Who You’re Talking to and What They Need to Know [Read more]
Write the Best Medical Job Posting on the Internet [Read more]
Get It in Front of the Right Audience [Read more]
Use Data to Understand Who You’re Talking to and What They Need to Know
In order to write the best medical job posting you possibly can, you’re going to have to do some legwork beforehand. The more information you have, the more accurate your job description will be, resulting in more qualified applicants.
Here are four questions you must ask yourself and answer before sitting down to write your job posting:
What makes my practice a great place to work?
Physician, know thyself. And try to know who you’re competing with too so you can better highlight the things about your practice that make it a better place to work.
The best job postings are those that include details about the employer that go beyond salary and hours. According to Glassdoor, two of the top five things applicants look for when evaluating job postings are “what makes it an attractive place to work” and “company mission, vision and values.”
So think long and hard about what those things are at your practice, then make sure to include them when drafting the job posting.
How hard will it be to fill this position?
It’s always good to go into the hiring process with an ideal timeline in mind, and understanding what you’re looking for will help you do that.
Be realistic about your expectations versus the qualifications of actual job seekers in your specialty, though. Long hiring processes can be disheartening—and impractical, if you really, really need someone—so you need to walk the line between holding out for the best candidate and being too picky.
Who are your candidates?
This is where you think about what kinds of skills and certifications your ideal candidate will have, how many years of experience you expect them to have, what type of personality will mesh well with your existing team etc.
You’ll also want to think about how best to reach the people you should be talking to. For example, Craigslist, while an excellent place to find a gently used couch or sell pallets to industrious hipsters, is not the ideal site for connecting with nurse practitioners looking for work.
What can I offer new employees?
Get down to brass tacks and figure out exactly how much you can afford to pay your new hire. State the salary (or a salary range, if you plan to negotiate depending on level of experience and certifications) clearly in your job posting. Otherwise you risk having qualified applicants skip over your post to keep looking for others that include that detail.
You should also be thinking about other advantages you can offer future employees to include in this part of the post—things like benefits and career growth opportunities.
A Gallup poll recently found that 87 percent of millennials said career development was a vital part of any job, and outlining clear promotional paths is a great way to keep younger employees from leaving to look for other jobs.
Write the Best Medical Job Posting on the Internet
In the past, we’ve covered how to write compelling job postings in general, and all of those tips absolutely apply to medical-specific job postings. Here are the elements you must include:
Job title and description
Don’t try to dress it up by playing with the wording here—keep it simple and state clearly what the job is. If you want a physician’s assistant, say that. If you want a nurse who has passed the NCLEX, put “registered nurse” in big bold letters right at the top of the post.
And right underneath the job title, you’ll want to include a paragraph to explain the duties you expect a person with that job title to be responsible for. Remember that different practices do things differently, so being as clear as you can in the job description will raise your chances of bringing in more people who are prepared to meet those expectations.
Required qualifications
Speaking of exams, remember earlier when you spent all that time thinking out exactly what skills, qualifications and certifications you want your new hire to have? Here’s where you list them all out and make it clear that applicants without these required qualifications will not be considered.
Being as clear as you can about this will save you from having to filter out as many unqualified candidates.
About you
Don’t be shy, and don’t be afraid to go on too long about your practice. Job hunters want to know as much as possible about what it’s like to work for you—your philosophies, hours, work/life balance, job responsibilities, office culture etc.
This is your chance to sell yourself over other practices looking to fill the same position, so really take all the great things you have to offer (that you thought long and hard about in the previous step) and highlight them here.
BUT: There’s one caveat that is crucial for this part of the job posting—do not lie, embellish or otherwise stretch the truth. If you do, you’ll either have to come clean to the candidate during the interview process or find yourself dealing with a disillusioned (and likely disgruntled) employee down the line. Either way, lying about your practice will only result in you having to spend more time looking for people to work for you, and that’s not ideal.
Pay and benefits
You already know that salary is the the most important thing to include in a job posting, so just consider this a friendly reminder to get it in there—and to go a step beyond compensation to include:
Popular benefits: Things like your paid time off plan, health insurance and anything else that your employees enjoy about working for you.
Advancement opportunities: Remember, millennials are interested in jobs with built-in paths of growth, so including a line or two about the options you offer will make your posting more attractive.
Get It in Front of the Right Audience
Alright, you’ve done the research, you know what you’re looking for and you’ve written the job posting to include every important detail. Don’t let all that time and effort go to waste by not getting your post in front of the right crowd.
Know Where to post
Look for hiring sites that skew toward a more professional crowd, or even consider one of the many job search sites that are specific to the medical industry. By posting on these specialized sites, you’ll get your listing in front of more qualified eyes and raise the bar for applicants.
Use what you’ve got
Another great way to bring in the right candidates is to utilize your existing team with a referral program that rewards employees for finding new hires. The people who already work for you can speak to the benefits of working at your practice, so you get some free and positive publicity if they share that with their acquaintances.
Plus, by referring new talent, your employees are vouching for those people, which makes it easier for you to decide how well the candidates will mesh with your existing team.
Don’t forget social media
Finally, make sure you’re spreading the word on popular social channels to expand your reach. Create posts for Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn that are easy to share so your team can post them on their own profiles.
Information on the Top Technology Trends Survey
We conducted this survey in April-May 2017 among 699 US-based SMBs, with more than 10 employees and annual revenue of less than $100 million. The survey excluded not-for-profit organizations. The qualified respondents are decision makers, or have significant influence on the decisions related to purchasing technologies for their organization.