mobile recruiting in healthcare

What’s Stopping Your Mobile Recruiting Efforts in Healthcare?

Healthcare has seen some of the most innovative leaps in technology ever over the past decade, with electronic health records, remote-controlled robotic surgeons, patient-monitoring apps, and even skin printing methods for burn victims, yet the industry has been slow to adopt the most basic uses of today’s technology: mobile recruitment.

Over the past year healthcare added 390,000 jobs. But as a recruiter you know that adding jobs is not the same as filling jobs. How many of your open requisitions are still out there, buried among pages of other reqs?

On average, it takes roughly 41 days to fill an open healthcare requisition, according to the DHI-DFI Measure of National Mean Vacancy Duration. And that doesn’t include lag time between offer acceptance and start date.

Now certainly it’s not because your career site and requisitions are not optimized for mobile devices that these jobs are not being filled. You and I both know there is a shortage of care givers currently and that makes for an ultra-competitive market.

And it’s not assured that a mobile response to hiring will help fill your requisitions or even shorten the time to fill them, but it definitely opens pathways to new talent searching for healthcare jobs from a mobile device.

Especially when considering as many as 40 percent of job seekers walk away from an organization’s job search if it is not optimized for mobile.

Mobile is already widely adopted in other areas of the industry. There are a plethora of health-related apps available to consumers, and many that are medical based and used exclusively by physicians, as supplemental equipment and patient monitoring.

Also, a growing number of clinicians (about 85 percent currently) are encouraged to use their personal mobile devices while on duty – to view patient information on a secure Wi-Fi network, to look up health information, for educational and training purposes, for notifications, and for communication between colleagues concerning patients.

So as these professionals already use their mobile devices for healthcare related objectives, it seems highly probable that they also use their mobile devices to search for healthcare jobs.

The question is, are your requisitions and career site optimized to let them?

Why the Disconnect Between Employers and Job Seekers?

Promoting your healthcare organization as an employer of choice in an industry reliant on the most current technologies means also offering a mobile experience to job seekers to show you are up-to-date on technology.

Right now, you’re probably not seeing huge numbers in your analytics data to support a mobile strategy. But don’t let these numbers fool you. If your career site is not optimized for mobile, you may see a higher bounce rate. Because your site doesn’t render on their devices, mobile visitors aren’t taking the time to look at your site and therefore leave immediately, often before the visit is recorded.

It’s also because most mobile users don’t expect a career site to work on their devices in the first place, so they don’t even attempt it. Mobile is still a relatively untapped resource in recruiting despite being available for several years now and it’s not just healthcare that is slow to adopt it.

The Corporate Mobile Readiness report put out by iMomentous in the third quarter of 2014 found that a mere half of Fortune 500 companies had mobile-optimized career sites and only 17 percent had mobile applications.

So job seeker expectations are low to begin with and probably account for the low numbers in your data.

However, looking at that same report, the numbers jumped considerably from their first findings in the first quarter of 2013 where only a third of the Fortune 500 had mobile career sites and only sixteen companies had mobile applications.

In that time, mobile career sites nearly doubled while mobile apply more than quadrupled.

As fast as things are moving, it’s best that your organization get on board now and close the gap in your recruiting, or you risk losing top talent to another healthcare system that already has a mobile strategy in place.

What You Can Do to Make the Shift to Mobile

Well, to start I would skip having a native app made. While apps are the go-to standard on most mobile devices, in my opinion, it’s a waste of valuable resources to spend money on creating one for your organization’s career platform.

Chances are great that candidates already have a loaded device full of apps. Having to download one more just to search for your jobs does nothing to compel a job seeker who might be considering other employers in addition to you.

Not to mention the time and money it takes to design, develop, test and then launch two different apps for two different platforms – iOS and Android. They aren’t compatible so you’re spending twice the resources to accommodate both types of users.

Your best money-saving investment is a responsive design overhaul of your current career site, job search and even your application. Responsive design allows your recruiting platform to work on all devices: desktop, tablet and phone. It takes far less time to develop and costs far less than an application design.

More of the affordable responsive design efforts today consist of overlays that integrate and perform seamlessly with your corporate site and your ATS. These are pre-built on the back end so all that is required is set up time and a little customization.

You don’t need to expend major cash flow to make mobile work for you. Just having a responsive design in place enables both your desktop and your mobile traffic to access your jobs.

Despite the current atmosphere citing the importance of mobile in today’s recruiting, you need both. Mobile is only part of the future. Your desktop view is still as necessary and won’t be supplanted solely by mobile.

Mobile alone isn’t going to make or break your recruiting efforts; but it is going to enhance your strategy and bring in talent that would otherwise skip you over for someone who is mobile responsive.

Bottom line is you won’t capture all the traffic you are looking for from implementing a mobile strategy, but you will close more of the gap that has been left from not utilizing one in the ultra-competitive market that is healthcare.

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