Healthcare Hiring Trends for 2023 and Beyond

May 26, 2023

Titus Talent

The hiring landscape for hospitals, clinics, and outpatient centers has changed drastically over the last couple of years and many businesses are searching for new and innovative ways to adapt their hiring practices to meet the changing demands of the market.

While healthcare systems around the world scrambled to staff their hospitals with doctors and nurses, the number of patients needing attention continued to rise, creating a stressful and challenging environment for healthcare professionals and organizations around the world.

The years following the pandemic have forced healthcare organizations, hiring managers, and recruiters to change their approach in order to recruit frontline workers more effectively, and the same scenario will likely be true throughout 2023. This article provides strategies and trends that our healthcare recruiters use to effectively source top talent for healthcare organizations around the country. We focus on three key ingredients that will help your business recruit frontline healthcare workers more effectively:

Who are frontline healthcare workers
Why healthcare recruitment has been a challenge
How to effectively recruit healthcare professionals in 2023

Who are frontline healthcare workers?

Frontline health workers are medical staff members who provide direct care to patients in healthcare settings. They are essential to society, as they’re ultimately responsible for providing a wide array of medical services that involve everything from diagnosing and treating illnesses, taking care of injuries, administering medications, performing tests and procedures, monitoring patient progress, and educating patients about their health.

Common Jobs in This Field for Healthcare Providers

Frontline healthcare workers provide patient care and are in direct contact with patients during their day-to-day work. Today, there are a number of in-demand jobs including nurses, physician assistants, medical assistants, physical therapists, occupational therapists, laboratory technicians, respiratory therapists, and radiologists. These healthcare providers are critical to the success of any facility as they are directly responsible for providing treatment to the their patients.

Why Healthcare Recruitment Has Been a Challenge

So why is it a good idea to partner with a recruiter to hire frontline healthcare workers? Using a recruiting agency can drastically improve the efficiency of your hiring process. Since intense labor shortages have been an ongoing challenge for hospitals all around the world, securing top talent isn’t as easy as it once was. The time it takes to hire is longer, and the market is more competitive, making it increasingly difficult for healthcare organizations to source the talent they need. Working with a recruiting agency can help mitigate these challenges.

If you plan to hire successfully, it’s also important to spend some time researching why healthcare talent has been so hard to find. Here are a few reasons:

Employees can make more money by switching jobs

As demand for healthcare workers has increased, the job market has become increasingly more competitive. Competing organizations have decided to increase their salaries, improve their benefits packages, and started offering more competitive vacation time as a way to attract and retain talent. Many organizations that haven’t followed suit with these offers have lost talent to their competitors. 

The pandemic has led to an increase in retirement rates

Since many places of employment closed or reduced operations during the pandemic, some workers felt safer taking an early retirement, than continuing to work in an environment filled with economic uncertainty. With decreasing job security and fewer prospects of finding new work, many people retired early out of necessity or simply because it appeared to be the best option available.

This not only further contributed to an increased labor shortage, but it also had a direct impact on the quality of the existing labor force – since many of those who retired were among the most qualified and the most experienced. This made experienced healthcare workers difficult to source and expensive to hire.

Staff shortages have caused current employees to be overworked

Staff shortages present a significant challenge to businesses. Staff shortages ultimately mean that your current employees needing to be more productive, and working long hours severely affects employee morale, job satisfaction, and productivity. Overworking your staff can lead to increased levels of absenteeism, and decreased performance in the workplace, and poor sleep quality, fatigue, or burnout. 

Frontline workers have to work longer, more stressful hours without an increase in compensation

Despite having extra work, longer hours, and more patients, many frontline healthcare workers haven’t seen a corresponding increase in compensation. This means these essential workers are enduring unwarranted stress without support or recognition for going above and beyond their job duties. As a result, many healthcare workers are struggling to keep up with the increasing workload, and their quality of life outside of work is becoming more stressful as their income has stagnated.

How to Effectively Recruit Healthcare Professionals in 2023

Healthcare workers often face significant stress levels due to their demanding job, and the long hours they must work. Poor management practices, communication breakdowns between coworkers and hospitals, lack of resources, and ever-changing regulations can often compound this, especially during the pandemic. To improve the working conditions for healthcare workers, employers need to create an atmosphere that better supports healthcare providers.

Research has shown that there are three main components to developing a thorough understanding of the stress factors and working conditions that healthcare workers face. This can be done by focusing on the following:

Prioritizing adequately staffed teams & providing competitive wages and benefits
Designing more predictable and sustainable schedules
Addressing concerns and accepting feedback

Prioritizing adequately staffed teams & providing competitive wages and benefits

Prioritizing staff accordingly also allows for a more diverse skill set that can help create efficiencies and ensure mistakes don’t occur. Adequately staffed teams mean better results due to fewer delays, less rework, and more explicit project management techniques that

Designing more predictable and sustainable schedules

Creating predictable and sustainable work schedules is critical to delivering better patient care, maintaining quality standards, and providing a healthy work environment for medical professionals. In addition, a schedule needs to be organized to make it easy to locate critical changes within short amounts of time so that healthcare providers are not adversely affected. With good scheduling practices, healthcare organizations can deliver high-quality care with fewer gaps in continuity.

Addressing concerns and accepting feedback

Frontline health workers play a vital role in providing quality and safe care to patients; thus, their concerns and feedback are essential for better service delivery. Addressing frontline healthcare workers’ concerns also helps improve operational efficiency and patient satisfaction. Furthermore, considering their suggestions and opinions can create trust among healthcare personnel.

Improve Compensation for Healthcare Workers

Improving compensation for healthcare workers is paramount to creating stability among our medical staff. Higher wages can translate to better retention rates and create a sustainable career path for frontline healthcare workers. Improved compensation will be beneficial to both patients and the organization. We must prioritize improving wages for our essential workers to ensure enough qualified care providers are in the system to support our population.

Paying frontline healthcare workers competitive wages

To attract and retain the best healthcare providers, organizations must provide competitive salaries. Additionally, healthcare employers should consistently review and compare their compensation structures against the market to remain in line with industry standards and expectations. Doing so allows them to compete for the most qualified talent, ensure fair employee treatment and maintain a healthy work environment.

Offering Competitive Benefits

Healthcare workers are one of the most critical assets for any organization and deserve competitive benefits packages to reward them for their hard work and loyalty. Offering competitive benefits such as paid time off, tuition reimbursement, flexible schedules, and health insurance can help organizations further strengthen their commitment to their staff.

Modern & innovative payment models (same-day payments)

The shift to modern and innovative payment models for healthcare workers is providing them with a timely solution already in demand by many. Same-day payments can improve healthcare professionals’ current situation by ensuring they are compensated quickly and accurately. This results in a more equitable distribution of wages and provides healthcare workers with the security they need to truly focus on doing what they love: providing quality medical care to others.

Help Healthcare Workers Do Their Job by Investing in Supporting Technology

With the current situation that the world is in, healthcare workers are under more strain than ever before to keep people safe and healthy. That’s why it’s crucial to invest in supporting technologies such as electronic health records and telehealth solutions that can help make their jobs easier. By investing in these technologies, healthcare professionals can access medical records faster and provide more efficient care. This will not only save lives but will also save medical facilities money and time.

Invest in communication and leadership training

Investing in communication and leadership training for healthcare workers is imperative to ensure better patient outcomes and patient experience. Healthcare providers must have the skills necessary to communicate effectively with patients, their families, and other medical personnel to provide quality care. Specialized courses equip them with the skills needed to be influential leaders in therapeutic and administrative roles.

Create an internal support network for better management and oversight

An internal support network for healthcare workers is an invaluable resource in improving the efficiency and quality of patient care. This network can include collaboration between healthcare providers, communication systems, electronic health record systems, and other tools that allow better oversight and management of patients. A well-developed internal support network can thus play a key role in the successful operation of a healthcare organization.

Investing in database technologies that will help frontline workers manage and track their cases

Database technology would allow essential workers to access patient information quickly, see the progress of cases, and streamline patient care processes. By investing in database technologies, we are enabling healthcare workers with better tools to help them be more efficient and provide a higher standard of care.

Partner With a Healthcare Recruiter

Investing in the right strategies and resources to ensure your organization recruits and retains top healthcare talent is crucial. Investing in communication and leadership training, creating an internal support network for better management and oversight, and investing in database technologies can make the recruitment process more manageable. Additionally, utilizing recruiting agencies like Titus Talent can provide insight into industry trends and help you find the top healthcare recruits for your organization. 