Here’s a healthcare staffing trend that’s often overlooked: Turnover rates in hospitals have risen steadily for the past several years, climbing to 16.5% at the end of 2014. Survey sponsor NSI Nursing Solutions Inc. also reports that hospitals lose an average of $4.21 to $6.02 million when a bedside RN leaves. Take this in tandem with the extreme healthcare talent shortage, especially in nursing, and it becomes clear that job candidates hold most of the cards in hiring. How can hospital recruiters respond most effectively? By looking at the hiring process through their candidates’ eyes, and watching for potential red flags that could turn candidates away.

What are Candidates Looking For?

There’s a reason your healthcare candidates are looking for a new job, and it may not be about benefits and compensation. In SHRM’s 2015 Employee Job Satisfaction and Engagement survey, 72% of respondents ranked ‘respectful treatment of all employees at all levels’ as very important to job satisfaction, and just 33% felt satisfied about this at work. That’s pretty telling.  Trust between employees and senior management was ranked very important by 64% of respondents, while just 28% said they felt satisfied about this at work. What’s also interesting is that 64% of respondents felt benefits was very important; 61% said compensation/pay was very important. In other words, though candidates certainly will want to know about benefits and compensation, they’re likely to be looking for other pre-hire indicators of your organization’s culture in the hiring process such as:

• Are candidates and employees treated with respect?
• Is there trust between employees and senior management?
• Do employees have a good relationship with their immediate supervisors?

In a competitive market such as healthcare, chances are your top candidates will have several positions or offers to consider. If you’re competitive on benefits and compensation, then these pre-hire indicators may be the tipping point you need to win them over.

Use Your Candidate Experience to Close the Deal

So how do you ensure high marks from candidates on these pre-hire indicators? By treating candidates to a respectful hiring experience, and making sure you provide the information they seek.

A video interviewing solution designed specifically for hiring will help you do both:

• Start talking sooner: Face-to-face conversation is the fastest way for you and your candidates to get to know each other. While you’re reading body language, absorbing visual cues and using your instincts to form an impression of your candidate as a person, your candidates are doing the same with you. Dialoguing kick-starts connection and gives you an opportunity to demonstrate how respect plays in your culture.
• Respect their time: Use innovative video interviewing technology to eliminate candidates’ travel time to an interview. And, get more of your hiring decision-makers into the live video interview so you aren’t putting candidates through endless rounds of interviews.
• Put your culture in the spotlight: It’s not enough to say trust and respect are cornerstones of your company culture. Think about how much more powerful it would be to let candidates see it for themselves by speaking directly with their potential new supervisor and co-workers. In live video interviews, your candidates can interact with employees and also observe the interaction between employees and managers. Video interviewing makes organization culture accessible to candidates like never before.
• Speed up the process: Video interviewing enables recruiters to cut waiting time out of hiring. Screening can happen the same or next day after first contact with a simple on-demand voice or video interviewing. Then, because you can forward candidate responses by email to your hiring team, decision-making can occur more quickly, allowing candidates to know sooner if they will be moving forward. Every step from there can also take place with less waiting time via a video interviewing platform. There’s no more waiting for a key manager to return from the road, or logistics issues that delay the next interview for days or weeks. You get to your final decisions faster; your candidates are not held in limbo.

Yes, there are candidates who frequently job-hop for better pay, but a majority are looking for a more satisfying job. If your healthcare organization is big on respect and trust in the workplace, make sure these shine through in your hiring experience. You’re more likely to attract right-fit candidates who share the same values as you.