The healthcare industry is one of the fastest growing industries in the United States with a 13% growth projection through 2031. There are a projected 1.9 million openings each year due to that growth and employee overturn. To date in 2022, nurses alone had an average 27.1% turnover rate. Unfortunately, the growing number of openings cannot be met by the supply of qualified workers, leading to a significant deficit in talent.
This talent deficit, which existed before the pandemic, continues to grow. And, it is sparking change in how the healthcare industry handles staffing and recruiting. The growth in temporary nursing, typically travel nurses, has moved the healthcare industry away from the more conventional healthcare recruiting models and opened them up for additional opportunities.
Thanks to today’s technological advances and this changing mindset, healthcare recruiters and organizations can turn to personally identifiable information as a way to better attract and retain top talent. PII is no longer tied to patients alone, but to candidates for open positions as well. It can be used to identify top talent and tailor communications to keep them engaged from initial outreach through to hire.
Technology in Healthcare Recruiting
Technology is now an integral part of the recruiting process and the healthcare industry is no different. Why is it so quickly becoming a must-have? There are technologies available for talent acquisition and hiring that can simplify the process and save time, money, and resources whether you’re direct sourcing or working with a healthcare recruiter.
Predictive Hire found that 55% of hiring managers have invested in AI recruitment. Jobscan found that most Fortune 500 companies use AI technology to identify viable candidates through resume filtering. You have both HR and business leaders turning to new tools that can increase the impact of their recruiting efforts. They are finding that AI recruitment tools can aid in the identification of the “right” talent while also delivering a better overall candidate experience.
Most of the tools that recruiters and human resource professionals use involve a candidate’s personally identifiable information (PII). The most popular tools include:
- Recruitment Marketing. Some platforms will even go beyond recruitment marketing to talent marketing, which is more proactive and focuses on the entirety of the candidate lifecycle.
- Candidate Relationship Management. Better relationship management leads to better engagement and a better overall candidate experience. With WorkLLama’s AI recruiting platform and workflow-driven engagements, we’ve seen a 46% increase in new or re-engaged candidates.
- Chatbots and Text-Based Recruitment. Chatbots can make it easy to interact with candidates on their terms. Many prefer text-based communications. With seamless omnichannel communications and recruitment opportunities, you can see a 55% reduction in time-to-hire with an average of 10 days saved per hire.
- Shift Management. For industries utilizing shift work or rotating shifts, simplifying shift management can streamline processes. Shift towards on-demand staffing can create a more agile workforce.
Dynamic Talent Pools. Talent pools allow you to segment your talent community and deliver a more personalized candidate experience. Dynamic talent pools can improve DE&I, increase offer acceptance, and make the hiring of quality, diverse talent faster, and more efficient.
What is PII?
If you work in the healthcare industry, you’re already familiar with the HIPAA Privacy Rule. So, you may already be aware of PII, or personally identifiable information. But, PII needs to be protected, regardless of whether or not it is attached to a patient. Personally identifiable information is information that can identify an individual.
This information may include direct information or quasi-identifiers like race, height, or weight that can be combined with other quasi-identifiers to identify someone.
Direct information
- Full name
- Maiden name
- Passport number
- Social security number
- Driver’s license number
- Account numbers
- Credit/Debit card numbers
- Telephone number
- Employment records
Quasi-identifiers
- Place of birth
- Zip code
- Height
- Weight
- Basic demographic information
How Personally Identifiable Information Can Personalize the Candidate Experience
The PII that you gather during the recruitment and hiring process can help your brand to provide the highly personalized candidate experience that today’s talent demands. The candidates you’re sourcing expect an experience that mirrors the customer experience they receive when, for example, shopping from retail establishments.
The personally identifiable information that you gather during the recruitment process, like demographic information, location, certifications, etc., can help to segment your audience into a specific talent pool. From there, you can tailor the candidate communications to meet their individual needs.
Once candidates enter your branded talent community, you will want to segment them into smaller talent pools based on the identifiers you deem important for the role. This can be skills, specializations, certifications, advanced practices, level or years of experience, or candidate preferences.
The automated dynamic talent pooling can make for better candidate communications which can increase engagement and keep candidates warm, fill roles faster, and deliver better matches and higher job satisfaction.
When recruiting for open positions, you want to attract and bring in candidates with the right skill set and relevant certifications and experience. Leveraging AI-based recruiting technologies—whether in-house, through a healthcare recruiter, or another partner—to source talent not only helps accelerate the recruitment process, but attracts the right talent the first time.
Pros and Cons of Tracking Personal Data
As with anything, there are always pros and cons to consider. When it comes to tracking and targeting personally identifiable information (PII), there are definitely some to pay attention to.
PRO: Segmentation
Personally identifiable information allows for the segmentation of candidates into dynamic talent pools. Talent pools can include active or passive candidates, former employees, retirees, or contingent workers. It can also include “silver medalists” from previous recruiting attempts. With WorkLLama, they can be separated by skill set, education, certifications, specialties, and more.
Segmentation allows for better communications and a more personalized candidate experience, leading to higher engagement, higher placements, and reduced time-to-hire.
CON: Bias
Unfortunately, by gathering and tracking personally identifiable information (PII), you unlock the potential for increased bias. When you track the demographic information or geographic information of your candidates, it can create a bias both at the human level—and the AI level when using screening software.
This does not have to be a “con” though. There are ways to remove the human bias when working with AI. You can focus only on specific metrics that have to do with the candidate’s experience and nothing to do with their demographics.
PRO and CON: Targeting
As you build your ideal candidate and begin the recruitment and segmentation, you should be aware that there are both known and unknown pools of talent. Unknown or hidden talent pools are filled with candidates that may not fit the typical criteria, but may be just as fitting for the position. Tracking and targeting based on PII can make it so organizations only focus on the known talent pools, but it can also be tweaked to identify the hidden talent pools and use them to their advantage. These talent pools may come in the form of smaller communities like veterans or stay-at-home parents, a focus on specific soft skills, or something else entirely.
Personally Identifiable Information, Personalized Candidate Experience
With WorkLLama’s total talent acquisition and engagement suite, you can track and target personally identifiable information and personalize your candidate experience with a few clicks. Stay competitive in an industry that is already highly competitive. Schedule a demo!