With so many people connected to the web, online recruitment has blossomed in the last few years, making it the most effective way to find jobs in the healthcare sector. Doctors and nurses can now be targeted directly through their social media profiles, as well as on more specialised medical job boards. With so much more information at recruiters’ fingertips, it is now easier than ever to find the medical staff to fit your company’s culture and ensure you are hiring high-quality professionals for your team.

Social Media Makes Medical Staff More Accessible

Social media has made recruitment a lot more straightforward. For recruiters looking to make quick and pertinent hires, a site like LinkedIn can be a complete game changer. Whereas before recruiters had to wade through CVs looking for viable candidates, social media allows you to search for the exact terms you are looking for.

Social media also enables recruiters to find medical staff who may not be actively seeking employment at the time you are hiring. Passive candidates are often better quality hires than those pursuing employment and are shown to have a higher record of retention. In a sector where consistency is key, this can be a huge advantage for employers.

The other benefit of passive candidates is that they are likely to be established in their field already. If you are approaching a neurosurgeon for a job in your private clinic, then you want to know that they are respected amongst their peers. Whilst there’s a chance that this kind of doctor lies amongst the many CVs in your inbox, there is also a reason these people are actively searching for employment. Your ideal match might not be on the hunt for a job at the time, but the right offer could convince them to turn their attention towards your company instead.

Job Boards Still Attract The Majority Of Doctors And Nurses

However, it’s still difficult to convince doctors that Twitter and Facebook could be a good place to go looking for their next job. Only 15% of medical staff are currently rating social media as a useful job seeking strategy.

In the healthcare sector, it’s the job board that currently exerts the biggest pull. With over 60% of healthcare professionals using the job board as their main form of job search, you can be confident that this method will yield results. With the introduction of niche medical jobs sites, the process is now much simpler for both recruiter and candidate alike.

Specialised job boards enable candidates to find suitable jobs in their field without sifting through listings that are only vaguely related to their profession. Whereas before a doctor of haematology would have had to look through roles in every other department under the sun, the ability to tailor their search to their specialism makes the whole process much slicker. Since it’s crucial that recruitment in the medical sector is done to the highest standards, ensuring more suitable matches in this way can make a huge difference.

With the demand for skilled medical staff only set to increase in the next five years, niche job boards could become even more important to the recruitment process. Around 55% of employers have stated that they believe there is a significant gap between the skills required in the medical sector and the skills that candidates actually have, meaning that more needs to be done to ensure hiring managers are finding the right staff for their team.

Whilst social media may be able to provide a certain percentage of these through passive hires, most recruitment activity is still driven through job boards because doctors and nurses continue to view this method as the quickest route to employment. In order to close the skills gap, recruiters will need to become more aware of the power that specialist job boards wield and learn to use it to their advantage.