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Recruiting registered nurses who are qualified, can work in stressful conditions, good listening and problem-solving ability have become more challenging than ever before.
A satisfied customer for any healthcare organization is a timely recovered patient. That smile of gratitude and satisfaction on the face of patients and their loved ones is the ultimate motivation for the doctors. But do you think it’s only the efforts of doctors that make this happen?
Clearly no.
A fully recovered patient is the combined effort of doctors and nurses. For any healthcare organization Recruiting registered nurses is equally important as doctors.
The optimum numbers of nurses help in administering medications, checking vital signs, liaising with physicians and specialists, and answering patients‘ questions.
And the shortage of registered nurses creates great havoc in terms of overcrowding of emergency rooms, long waiting hours for patients, overload of existing staff, etc.
That’s why the demand for registered nurses is increasing day by day. But following correct registered nurse recruitment strategies will help you to cope up with this increased demand for registered nurses and ease your burden of shortage of registered nurses.
According to the US Bureau of labor statistics, approximately 194500 demands for registered nurses are going to be created every year till 2030.
This will make the recruiting process for registered nurses even more challenging. There is a huge gap between the demand and supply of registered nurses.
Wondering why?
Let’s explore the reasons behind this huge peak in demand for registered nurses.
Reasons for the Huge Gap in Demand and Supply of Registered Nurses
The registered nurse recruitment process has become very difficult because the experienced nurses are on the verge of leaving the profession due to many reasons, and on the other hand hospitals don’t find fresher nurses suitable for the workload they have in their hospital.
Let’s see the more common reasons for this huge gap.
1. According to the American association of critical care nurses, almost 66% of nurses have considered leaving their profession due to burnout during covid.
2. According to the nursing world, about 50000 nurses are going to retire by the end of this year.
3. According to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, in 2020 nursing schools had declined by 80251 applications due to inadequate staffing and teaching faculties.
Thus, day-by-day decline in the number of nurses and increase demand for nurses, require a strategic recruitment process to hire a nurse.
Let’s dive deeper to discuss the need for registered nurses and the strategies for recruiting registered nurses.
Needs to Hire Registered Nurses
The presence of registered nurses makes the process smooth for doctors and patients.
Let’s discuss some of the important functions of nurses in healthcare organizations.
- To manage patients’ intake and collect health histories
- To assess patients’ vital signs and coordinate care
- To educate patients and their loved ones about diagnosis, medications, and care regimes
- To consult with physicians to develop and deliver care plans
- To populate and maintain electronic health records
Skills and Qualifications to Look For In Registered Nurses
Though there is a huge gap between the demand and supply of registered nurses, you can’t compromise with certain skills and qualifications while hiring a candidate.
Let’s see the essential required and preferred skills and qualifications.
| Required Skills and qualifications | Preferred skills and qualifications |
| Bachelor of Science in Nursing | Empathetic, and helpful |
| Current, unencumbered nursing license | Prior clinical experience |
| Basic life support certification | Strong focus on every detail |
| Strong written and verbal communication skills | Critical thinking and problem-solving skills |
10 Registered Nurse Recruitment Strategies
1. Craft an Irresistible Job Description
The job description you craft should urge the right candidate to apply immediately. For that your job description should tell the kind of role involved, to let them decide whether they are the right fit or not.
The job description you craft should include a thorough and accurate description of the title, role, responsibilities, and qualifications.
To recruit the right candidate, the employer must be clear with the requirement of the exact skills they want in the candidate and should focus on the required specialty.
2. Advertise As Much As Possible
Once you create the job description, it’s time to spread that as much as possible.
Advertise the vacancy through multiple online and offline mediums like email marketing, placing advertisements on the website, through various social media platforms, advertising in medical journals both online and offline, sponsoring education programs, etc.
3. Emphasize Professional Growth
The challenge of recruiting registered nurses can be combated by combining economic growth with professional growth.
In this highly competitive market, you have to be different, if you want to attract quality registered nurses.
For that, you can combine earning with learning.
You can offer them various certification programs which may help them to grow in their career.
4. Set the Flexible Schedules
Every human being loves flexibility when it comes to working. Offer flexibility in terms of working hours to attract and retain good registered nurses.
Long working hours cause burnout in nurses and force them to end their careers. So help them to balance their personal and professional life in return for their long-term service.
5. Give Attractive Compensation
The important nurse recruitment strategy you can’t avoid and works like wonder is offering good compensation.
Due to the huge gap between the demand and supply of registered nurses, you have to offer good compensation if you want to attract quality nurses and retain them.
Offering tuition reimbursement and a loan payment program can be a great perk to nurses.
6. Provide a Self-Care Program to Nurse
Take care of them, if you want them to take care of your patients well. Taking care of patients requires lots of patience which causes a considerable amount of stress.
Promise to offer self-care programs to nurses like counseling to manage job stress and emotional strength to losing patients, which helps you to speed up your recruitment of registered nurses.
7. Spread the Word of Mouth
The other simple yet important nurse recruitment strategy is to spread the good experience of registered nurses already working with you.
Everyone makes a decision based on others’ experiences, and a registered nurse is no different in this.
Make the best nurse brand ambassador and allow them to share their working experiences on various marketing outlets about the kind of work culture.
Use their testimonials in your marketing campaign by making video content.
8. Be Accessible to Them
Don’t just be a recruiter, but a helping hand to nurses and guide them to get recruited for the right opportunity.
For that make yourself available via phone, texts, emails, and in person.
And even if some candidates are not getting selected in your organization, then help them to get recruited somewhere else by talking to your friend.
9. Use Ampliz Healthcare Data Solution
Make Ampliz an important part of the registered nurse recruitment strategy. Ampliz can ramp up your registered nurse recruitment process.
Ampliz is one of the best next-gen healthcare data providers that empowers businesses with extensive contact data, firmographics, and technographic of hospitals, physicians, registered nurses, healthcare executives, and other healthcare providers.
Ampliz provides you with an authentic, reliable, and real-time updated list of potential candidates along with their contact numbers, Email IDs, skill sets, and LinkedIn profiles.
This data provided by Ampliz increases the rate of recruitment of qualified registered nurses.
You can hire registered nurses from the contact data provided by Ampliz.
10. Partner With Nursing School
One of the obvious yet most important registered nurse recruitment strategies is to partner with nursing schools.
This way, those schools have more enrolment due to the on-campus job placement, and healthcare organizations will also have a comparatively easy process of hiring.
Four Essential Tips to Boost Your Nursing Recruitment Campaign
No matter how attractive your job offer looks, if it has not reached the people whom you are looking for, then having the right candidate is very difficult.
In this digital age reaching your ideal candidate is not so difficult if you follow these four tips.
Let’s see what these four tips are:
1. SMS/ Text campaigns: Though one of the oldest but quite effective methods, especially with millennials.
This method involves quite a lot of research, but you can hire third-Party vendors who offer this service, and are well-equipped with all the necessary data.
2. Programmatic and Retargeting Displays: Targeting the potential candidates based on the people who visited your profile but have not applied for the job openings can be a great help in the registered nurse recruitment process.
You can then create a pop-up of banners on every website they visit. In this way, you keep reminding them about the opportunity and the benefits and can convince them to apply for it.
3. Social Media: Leverage the power of social media by connecting to the candidates on a personal and social level.
Share valuable content like videos, photos, surveys, contests, or even free resources to get them into your funnel, to pitch them on a personal level.
4. Direct Email: Once you get the email id of the candidates by your content on social media, you can directly send them a personalized mail in their inbox.
Thus, these are some ways that help you in your registered nurse recruitment process and help you recruit the most suitable candidate for your opening.
Conclusion
Thus, recruiting a good registered nurse in this competitive market is challenging, but with the strategic steps described above, you can ramp up your registered nurse recruitment process and recruit qualified registered nurses.
In this highly competitive market, there is a huge shortage of healthcare workers including registered nurses.
On one hand, experienced and qualified nurses are leaving the profession for various reasons, and on the other hand, the fresher nurses are not that suitable for the available vacancies.
This has created real challenges for healthcare organizations in recruiting registered nurses. In such a situation, contacting healthcare recruitment agencies will be a great help.
These recruiting agencies provide you with a database of candidates’ information to make your recruiting registered nurse process easy and fast.
But this database should be updated, authentic, and targeted. And not all recruiting agencies provide you with such reliable information. That’s where Ampliz comes into the picture.
Ampliz provides you with an authentic, reliable, and real-time updated list of potential candidates along with their contact numbers, Email IDs, skill sets, and LinkedIn profiles.
This data provided by Ampliz increases the rate of recruitment of qualified registered nurses and helps you in accelerating your registered nurse recruitment process.
