How Modern Hiring Tools are Transforming Nurse Recruitment

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, nurses make up more than 50% of the United States’ crucial healthcare workforce. The industry increasingly relies on the skills, support, and knowledge of these educated and specialized professionals.

But that means they’re in high demand, and unfortunately, the availability of candidates doesn’t quite match up to current needs.

The reasons for this shortage are many, and include an aging population with increasing healthcare needs, an evolving industry, and lower enrollment in nursing programs. A significant contributing factor, however, comes in the form of burnout.

It’s a huge problem and solving it won’t be easy. But, like many facets of workplace culture, it starts with recruitment. Giving your candidates the best first impression can go a long way in hiring the top talent your organization needs.

Modern hiring tools—including video interviewing software, AI applications, interview scheduling, and more—can help you begin this journey toward full, and happy, healthcare staffing.

Challenges in Nurse Recruitment

Recruiters looking to fill nursing vacancies certainly have their work cut out for them. Common challenges we’ve heard from this cohort include:

• Nurse Shortages: There is a steady growth in demand for nurses, but an increasingly limited supply. States like California, Georgia, New Jersey, and Washington have a talent gap of more than 25%—a veritable crisis adding to healthcare hiring challenges.
• High Turnover Rates: Burnout and job dissatisfaction have led to frequent job changes among nurses in the US. In one study, 87% of nurses reported feeling burnout, 61% said they felt unappreciated, and 58% reported feeling unsafe at work. It’s no wonder they’re moving away from such circumstances.
• Time-Sensitive Recruitment: Most healthcare employers need to hire quickly, but they can’t compromise on quality. Doing so would only lead to more turnover, a lower standard of care, and further disruption in the long run.
• Geographic Barriers: It’s difficult to reach candidates from a wide geographic margin, but doing so is becoming crucial to draw in a sufficiently rich talent pool. This is a particular challenge in rural or underserved areas.
• Traveling Nurses: Over the last several years, traveling nursing roles have become increasingly prevalent. This trend has contributed to steep competition and significant logistical challenges in recruiting and onboarding temporary or contract nurses in particular.

How Video Interviewing Simplifies Nurse Recruitment

Modern nurse recruitment tools can make a huge difference in overcoming these barriers. First among them is video interviewing.

By bringing video into your interviewing process, you can expand your reach to new candidates in far-flung places; move them through the recruitment process faster; and offer flexibility for busy applicants, helping them feel seen and appreciated as they share their limited time with you.

Overall benefits of video interviewing for healthcare vacancies include:

• Reduced time to hire and less wasted time for everyone involved
• Greater geographic spread for your talent pool, even across time zones
• A flexible option for busy healthcare candidates to complete interviews, no commute or traveling logistics required
• An accurate sense of candidates’ communication and interpersonal skills compared to traditional screening calls
• Reduced scheduling conflicts thanks to one-way video interviews and scheduling tools

The Power of AI Tools in Nurse Recruitment

The charge to hire better nursing candidates, from wider areas, faster, is asking a lot of recruiters—who are already under heavy pressure and only have so much time each day.

Fortunately, technology makes a perfect partner to ensure a better recruiting process doesn’t mean a heavier one for recruiting teams. Modern healthcare hiring solutions, including virtual interviewing software, are meant to help.

Another solution comes in the use of AI in nurse recruitment. For example, AI-powered interview summaries can help streamline your evaluations for busy hiring managers and recruiters—offering a source of automated, objective notes on every interview.

Additionally, AI can offer insights into your top candidates. Use it to identify top candidates faster, minimize time spent on mismatches, and accelerate your everyday screening workflows.

Real-World Impact of Modern Hiring Tools

Healthcare recruiting teams are already seeing significant impacts thanks to the implementation of these tools. Faster time-to-hire, reduced stress on understaffed teams, an improved candidate experience, and more impactful onboarding—the benefits are abundant.

Take the Johns Hopkins Health System Corporation (JHHS). Hoping to expedite their screening processes, find better scheduling solutions, and better support and staff the many hospitals they serve, they implemented interviewstream.

The result? 7,818 hours saved on screening candidates, 496 job vacancies filled, 20,395 on-demand interviews conducted—and a lot more. Today, JHHS leverages interviewstream to screen and interview candidates, making scheduling those interviews easier via self-service and calendar syncing, onboarding and checking in with employees, and facilitating the candidate intake process during and after large hiring events.

Why Choose interviewstream for Nurse Recruitment

After seeing these impacts on her team, JHHS’s vice president for talent acquisition, Yvonne Mitchell, said: “I cannot say enough about how much time we have saved using this tool and how much more organized our events are with interviewstream.”

Teams like yours can bring interviewstream into your tech stack and quickly take advantage of a ton of features made for healthcare recruiters in a chaotic, competitive marketplace. With interviewstream, you can:

• Seamlessly integrate with your existing healthcare systems and ATS platforms
• See real results in reducing your time-to-hire and other metrics
• Enjoy a user-friendly platform that improves collaboration between HR teams and hiring managers
• Offers all the features you need to modernize your recruiting practices, including video screening, automated interview scheduling, AI interview summary, and AI recruiting assistant which creates templates and customizations for building interview questions, and more.

For those looking to keep up with the talent pipeline, and keep the staff they already have, modernizing your strategy with the best nurse recruiter tools is an essential first step. Get started exploring the bottom-line impact video interviewing, scheduling, and AI can have on your workflows and you’ll soon see exactly what we mean.

If you’re ready to jump in and see what interviewstream can do, we can’t wait to help! Check out our eBook, “Humanizing Healthcare Hiring: How to Optimize Your Recruiting Process to Attract More Talent,” to gather all of our high-level insights on how to get started. And when you’re ready, reach out and schedule a demo with us to see how interviewstream can support your team’s unique needs.

About The Author

Drew Whitehurst is the Director of Marketing, RevOps, and Product Strategy at interviewstream. He's been with the company since 2014 working in client services and marketing. He is an analytical thinker, coffee enthusiast, and hobbyist at heart.