How will healthcare recruiting change post-COVID?

Every industry is undergoing massive disruption due to COVID-19. Some will bounce back sooner than others. Some will never bounce back. But one industry will surely bounce back because it is a human necessity: healthcare.

That said, the delivery of healthcare services post-COVID will likely be quite different than before, and so will the recruitment of healthcare workers. How will healthcare recruitment change? In many ways, but for this post let’s just focus on the areas that College Recruiter focuses on: the intersection between online, recruitment advertising and the hiring of students and recent graduates of one-, two-, and four-year colleges and universities.

Healthcare companies that hire at scale need to understand the significant difference between duration- and performance-based job posting ads. A typical job posting ad on a typical job board should deliver enough candidates to the employer that it can hire maybe one person. That’s fine as most employers who post a job ad only want to hire one person, so it would be a negative if they received enough applications to hire 10, 50, or 500 people. But if the healthcare company wants to hire 10, 50, or 500 people then they need the job posting ad to generate 10, 50, or 500 times as many applications. That’s feasible with a cost-per-click (CPC) job posting ad as you’re paying for the number of candidates who respond instead of how many ads you run.

Hospitals, clinics, and other healthcare facilities are going to need to learn how to hire nurses and others at scale because so many have been furloughed due to the massive decline in elective surgeries. 
When those surgeries and related manpower needs come back, will those nurses and others also come back? Unlikely. The separation they’ve experienced from their previous employer will make it mentally and economically easier for them to return to work for another employer, which will lead to far greater vacancies than many healthcare providers probably anticipate. 

What evidence do I have for this? Every industry that has already started to re-open, from retailers to restaurants. Their initial hires have largely been from previous employees, but most of their hiring has been of candidates who used to work for other employers. There’s no reason why healthcare will be immune from this trend.