If you’re a hiring manager in the health care industry, you don’t have to be told that it’s a challenging time to make new hires. You’re faced with a candidate-centric economy and an ongoing skills gap issue, while at the same time you’re busier than ever and often have less resources available to help you do your job.
While every open position has its own set of obstacles, one that likely keeps many health care hiring managers up at night is that of the registered nurse. Considering there are more than 200,000 registered nurse job postings in the U.S.*, competition for the best candidates is steep (to say the least).
So, how do you overcome the challenges that come with hiring for RNs? We’ll show you how using the right data solutions can make your life easier and get you those top candidates faster and more efficiently – whether you’re searching for RNs or another tough-to-fill position.
1. Use Data to Target the Right Markets
If you’re only searching for RNs in your backyard, you could be making a critical mistake. While on paper it might seem easier to recruit local nurses, if supply is low and you’re surrounded by health care organizations hungry for these hires, you’ll end up wasting more time and money than if you were to look beyond your location.
With CareerBuilder Supply & Demand, you can easily determine which locations have a higher supply than demand, enabling you to better target your recruitment efforts. The Hiring Indicator within the Supply & Demand portal tells you how easy or difficult it will be to source your positions based on marketplace trends. The Hiring Indicator score shows a number between 1 and 100, with a lower score revealing a more challenging position in that market.
Looking at Texas, for example, Austin has a score of 30, meaning it’s more challenging to hire for RNs in the Austin market. Yet the city of San Antonio, with a high volume of candidates and a score of 41, makes it an attractive alternative option to seek out RN candidates. To find the right people, you’ll either need to invest more resources in the Austin market or identify another city like San Antonio, which has a higher Hiring Indicator score.
2. Use Data to Advertise Better
We’ve already told you why your business needs job postings. Not only is having job postings important, but it’s just as crucial to think about the exposure of your postings and the content included within them.
You need to know where your competition is advertising for a similar position, so you can maximize your visibility – and receive the best candidates. The Job Posting Analytics feature within CareerBuilder's Labor Market Analytics helps you do this by comparing the volume of job postings for a particular position to the number of hires made, demonstrating how much effort other organizations are putting in to attracting candidates for a position. Based on this data, you can determine whether you need to step up your efforts and increase resources to source talent.
You also must think about what you’re putting into your job posting. If you’re trying to stand out by giving your open positions unique or complicated names, you may be missing out on candidates who wouldn’t know to search for those names when looking for jobs. CareerBuilder's Supply & Demand portal leverages candidate profiles to show you the most common job titles used, so you can tailor expectations to what’s available in the marketplace.
3. Use Data to Predict a Market’s Hiring Trends
It’s hard enough to find time to devote to your current job openings, so thinking about future hiring plans might be low on your priority list. Yet understanding the changing labor market is crucial to your organization’s long-term success.
Labor Market Analytics allows you to identify key economic trends and plan strategically for future opportunities with 10-year projections. For instance, you can see the projected health of nursing jobs in a particular market, which will help inform your talent acquisition strategy in that market and determine whether new markets for sourcing talent should be identified.
Analyzing data can seem scary – but not finding candidates to fill open health care positions can be scarier. With Supply & Demand and Labor Market Analytics, you have access to key recruitment analytics at your fingertips, allowing you to focus more of your time on winning over those top candidates.
*Based on demand data from CareerBuilder Supply & Demand
Learn more about how CareerBuilder Supply & Demand can help you fill your hard-to-fill positions now.
