And so it is that after more than a decade of collecting literally thousands and thousands of data points in the field of healthcare recruitment, we have a solid understanding of how people behave when they search for jobs in hospitals, physicians’ offices, surgical and outpatient centers, and free-standing medical clinics.
Here’s what we’ve found: user-experience matters.
Way back in 1990 — long before online job search was a thing, and even before some of today’s job seekers were born — user-experience in job recruitment meant making sure candidates could get their hands on a paper copy of your company’s job application, and a “site visit” involved travel and face-to-face meetings. That year, Cornell University published a study that yielded interesting insights into job seekers’ thoughts and behaviors. One of their major findings was that “subjects interpreted a wide variety of recruitment experiences… as symbolic of broader organizational characteristics.”
Fast forward to today, and this recruitment-as-a-reflection-on-you has expanded to include all areas of your organization’s online presence. So it stands to reason that the better, easier, more fluid your job search and apply processes are, the better job seekers will view your organization and want to become a part of it.
And that’s why we’ve taken a user-centered approach in building the RightJobNow job search engine.
Here’s an example of what makes it such a high quality tool.
We know from our or more than ten years of data collection that when offered multiple types of search (defined job class/location menu select search, map search, keyword search), job hunters will overwhelmingly choose the defined job class/location search available via drop-down menus. In fact, we find them selecting this method more than 85% of the time.
Conversely, the keyword search option is chosen by fewer than 3% of job seekers.
These behaviors make sense, especially when job seekers are visiting your specific organization’s website and online job search. Now, when looking for a job via a national job board service like Indeed or Simply Hired, job seekers are less sure of their job hunt specifics (job class, geography, etc). That’s why they’re visiting a general job board that can cater to a much broader and generalized search.
But job seekers who actually search via your organization’s site have already made a few of those preliminary decisions, and they’ve already found you. Knowing the kind of job they want and having a general idea of where they want to do it, they immediately look for jobs within their particular job field, within a defined geographic area.
And the likelihood that a job seeker will want to quickly home in on a specific job and location is even greater for licensed clinicians, who tend not only to know exactly the job they want and are qualified to perform, but who also possess a great deal of knowledge about specific workplaces.
If you are an organization with multiple job openings, multiple job classes, and perhaps even multiple locations, you know it can get confusing to keep them all straight. When you have many options to present to a job seeker, you don’t need to cut the number of options available but rather, as explained in this Psychology Today post, “present them wisely.” One suggested method of “wise presentation” is filtering.
Which is why — and how — RightJobNow makes it easy to quickly search for jobs, often yielding a list of available positions in the job class someone wants, in the location he wants, in just three clicks, presented through well-organized, drop-down filters.
This user-centered approach make seem like an obviously superior way of delivering job postings to potential applicants, but you wouldn’t know it from the way some other job search engines are designed. With RightJobNow we’ve taken great care to make the job search and apply processes remarkably user-friendly, making sure to not only include those features most appreciated by job seekers — such as offering a variety of relevant search filters — but to also eliminate the frustrations too often encountered in online job searches.
If you’re in recruitment, it’s your responsibility to connect job seekers to job openings, and to make your organization look good while doing so. RightJobNow can help you do just that, while also integrating seamlessly with your current applicant tracking system.
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