Hiring the wrong nurse for the job comes with a hefty price tag. RN turnover is estimated to cost $56,300 per nurse who leaves the organization — roughly $3.9 to $5.8 million in losses per year for an average-sized hospital. Job matching offers a solution-forward framework for finding the right candidate for the job by ensuring that qualifications, skills, experience, and preferences align with organizational requirements and culture. Mastering this jobs-matching recruitment strategy in healthcare can help limit financial losses while stabilizing facility staffing.
This is a critical step that goes beyond simply checking credentials. Learning how to hire the right candidate involves assessing both sides of the hiring equation — the job opening and the nurse who may fill it. In this guide, we'll examine productive employee-job matches within the healthcare context, and offer key methods to improve this step of the recruiting and hiring process at your facility.
By adding this framework to your arsenal of nursing recruitment strategies, you’ll be better positioned to fill your vacancies with top-performing team members, benefitting patient outcomes, operational health, and overall revenue.
What Does Job Matching Look Like in Healthcare?
There’s no singular job match test. Instead, successful job placement in healthcare connects a clinical candidate with an open position based on accurate and unbiased information about the prospective employee and the position requirements. When the two align, the candidate is considered a good fit for that vacancy.
The actual matching procedure can be done manually or with the help of software and algorithms. In fact, it’s becoming increasingly common to use emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) to drive job matching. AI, among other digital tools, offers employers an expedited approach to identifying the parallels that contribute to positive hiring outcomes.
Examples of nursing information that may inform a manual (or online) job matching template in healthcare include:
- Qualifications and credentials (for example, an RN license)
- Clinical experience
- Education
- Area of specialization
- Clinical practice preferences (for example, a type of nursing task)
- Patient population preferences
- Availability
- Geographic proximity to the facility (or interest in relocating)
In addition, the employer will need detailed information about the job that needs to be filled, including:
- The level of nursing required (for example, LPN or RN)
- Nursing tasks that will be frequently performed
- Required and preferred clinical skills
- The facility's company culture
- The facility's organizational values and goals
- Schedule
- Pay scale and benefits
Hiring managers then manually search for points of intersection or leverage digital tools to compare a clinician's qualities to the specific criteria of the open position. Online platforms that are designed to facilitate the hiring process can help streamline this comparison task. For example, most high-quality nursing job boards now have built-in applicant tracking software (ATS) that collect and analyze candidates' information, matching them to vacancies that align with their expertise.
Why Is Clinical Job Matching Important in Healthcare?
Making a successful job match based on resumes, interviews, job descriptions, and mission-based values requires data analysis, people-reading skills, attention to detail, and a commitment to the process. That's a lot – but finding the right candidate for the job is worth the effort because of the pain points it can alleviate.
In addition to the costs associated with hiring on a rinse-and-repeat cycle, adding a misaligned nurse into a multidisciplinary team can have negative effects, jeopardizing patient safety, operational efficiency, and the workplace environment. In one review, researchers found that a sub-optimal skill mix within a care team risks negative outcomes as severe as patient mortality. With so much on the line, it's clear that hiring the right candidate is critical.
As many healthcare leaders know, finding and retaining high-quality nursing professionals can be challenging due to the nationwide nursing shortage, high turnover rates, and a complex nursing hierarchy. This means that there's little room for error in the hiring process, and strategic practices are crucial to success.
How to Improve Your Jobs Matching Process: 5 Tips
Healthcare recruitment has undergone significant changes in recent years, largely due to the use of emerging technologies and the ease of candidate-driven job matching online through advanced search filters and AI assistance. Keeping up with evolving tactics isn’t just a great step toward optimizing your hiring process, it’s an industry necessity.
Ready to dig deeper into matching tactics to fill clinical vacancies at your facility? Finding the right match for jobs in healthcare involves a comprehensive view of the open position and your nursing candidates. Use the tips below to help broaden these perspectives, strengthening your candidate selection process and job-match approach.
1. Understand the Job From the Perspective of the Clinician You Want to Hire
One of the most important aspects of finding a match for jobs in healthcare is building an awareness of the nursing vacancy from the point of view of the prospective hire. What’s incentivizing about performing the listed duties and tasks? What is it like working with the patient population that your facility serves? Clarify these points with an authentic, culture-forward approach, informed by:
- Speaking to nursing staff.
- Reading patient experience surveys.
- Reflecting on staff's annual performance reviews.
- Observing daily workflows.
Cultivating your understanding of the day-to-day duties and challenges of nursing staff can help you define the desired characteristics and attitudes that may maximize interprofessional collaboration and productivity while benefitting the overall organizational culture.
2. Write a Role-Specific Job Description That Highlights Key Values
A high-quality job description is key to incentivizing top nursing talent to apply and sets the stage for hiring the right candidate. As you craft your role-specific nursing job description, consider organizational and unit-specific values. Clinicians look for these indicators as part of their own, informal job-match test and often use them to determine whether a job will provide satisfaction.
Additionally, though many healthcare applicants are motivated by industry-wide considerations (including pay and benefit options), it’s important to note that each facility (and unit) is unique with distinct values and requirements. Clarifying these alignment points early on through a quality job description may reduce time-to-hire by preventing downstream candidate drop-off within the hiring process.
Example:
While all hemodialysis (HD) nurses help patients manage their kidney disease, their responsibilities and work environment can vary significantly by setting. For example, an outpatient HD nurse typically provides scheduled treatments during regular business hours. However, a hospital-based HD nurse often manages routine dialysis care and emergency (higher acuity) situations with on-call requirements. Clearly communicating these differences can help candidates with specific work-life preferences job match themselves, saving recruitment time and the possibility of a downstream job mismatch.
3. Take a Proactive Approach to Nursing Talent Sourcing
In an industry where jobs are plentiful and nursing professionals are scarce, leaders need to take initiative when it comes to sourcing nursing staff and finding the right candidate for the job. Being proactive involves awareness of staffing trends, anticipating staffing needs, and enhancing your organization's connections to sources of qualified applicants. For example, collaborating with a local nursing school to offer hands-on learning opportunities to students is one evidence-based strategy for developing your talent pipeline.
This also requires investing in the appeal of your healthcare brand and community presence. Top clinical candidates typically aren’t looking to overhaul a facility’s negative reputation while also handling a heavy patient caseload. Instead, they want to feel pride in their workplace and secure in the trust that leadership is supporting the processes that promote positive patient outcomes and a successful career.
4. Don't Dismiss 'Soft' Nursing Skills
Healthcare hiring involves complex regulatory requirements. State nursing boards evaluate the quality of individuals during the process of giving or renewing a nursing license. During a hiring campaign, staffing agencies and facility leaders often contribute to ensuring that a nurse candidate has the required specialized skills and credentials for advertised openings.
Amid these multilayered verification processes, it can be tempting to overlook skills that may not be so easily quantified and documented, like a nurses' ability to empathize with patients. Strong job matching practices involve keeping these "soft" nursing skills in mind. In some cases, nurses highlight these skills on their resume.
Job description matches with a nurse's soft skills might look like similar language and themes, such as a repetition of the word "communication." Asking behavioral interview questions is another way to give due diligence to the assessment of these important nursing skills that significantly impact the patient experience.
5. Maximize Your Pool of Qualified Clinicians
For the best chance at matching the right qualified clinician to your open position, use tactics that will result in a larger pool of qualified candidates to choose from. Driving traffic to an online job posting is one way to ensure a large candidate pool and increase your chances of successful job matching.
Sites that offer nurse-specific job boards can be a great way to get more eyes on your job listing, because many of these healthcare hiring platforms tailor the job-seeking experience and incentivize clinicians with a more personalized service. This targeted approach often identifies the qualities and qualifications that facilitate optimal job matches within hiring.
Need to Match With a Qualified Clinician?
Job matching services in healthcare can quickly become overwhelming — and costly. Cut out the noise by partnering with our nursing-focused healthcare job board, and start matching with nursing professionals who are ready to begin enhancing your high-quality, teamwork-driven patient care today.