Top Tips to Help You Hire the Best
If your healthcare facility is trying to fill nurse practitioner jobs, you’ll be aware of the difficulty in ensuring staffing levels can cope with the demand on healthcare – most recently due to coronavirus. It’s not only the level of care that you must deliberate.
When you’re faced with unprecedented demand, you also face unprecedented financial pressures. The American Hospital Association has estimated the loss for hospitals across the nation at around $66.8 billion each month during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Travel nurses are a popular solution. And here’s why:
- They fill short-term staffing needs
- They reduce staffing costs
- They often specialize in certain areas, filling those positions that are difficult to cover
- They reduce burnout on your permanent staff
- The strategy reduces the cost of employing permanent staff
As a result, most healthcare facilities need travel nurses. This means that competition for the best travel nurse practitioners is fierce.
So how can you be the stand-out healthcare company that all the top talent are attracted to? In this article, we provide you the answers.
Be Organized
Understand that travel nurses like to have contracts lined up in order to organize their travel. There may be many travel nurses available, but the top talent is more likely to have agreed contracts in advance.
Knowing this, take inventory of your staffing levels as regularly as you can, so that you can beat your competition and have the best travel nurses in line to fill your pre-empted staffing void.
Compose an Attractive Job Description
Give full details of the skills that are essential for the vacancy, and inform candidates where they will be working. This will ensure that only candidates that match your requirements should apply.
Next, attract talented candidates by highlighting the benefits and perks the position offers. Factors you should highlight include:
- Location – great to attract nurses wanting to tick off their bucket list
- State-of-the-art equipment and facilities
- Recent renovations
- Individual support within a team environment
- Professional development opportunities
- Paid housing policy – if you’re offering this, this is a huge deciding factor and perk for travel nurses
- Healthcare/dental insurances
- Accolades and awards your facility may have received
Your job description should not only request certain skills, but also to promote your organization to a candidate and promise them a rewarding working environment.
Get your skates on
You need to recruit at speed. The top talent will always be snapped up quickly.
Prepare for virtual interviews and prompt responses. Efficiency sells to the best candidates as a quality, and you’ll get that contract signed before your competitors.
Use a staffing agency
Following on from recruiting at speed, using a staffing agency will enhance your ability to reach out to the top candidates, and fast. Staffing agencies have top talent on their books ready and waiting.
They take away the heavy labor of recruitment, so that you can speedily access fully vetted candidates, with the peace of mind that paperwork has been checked and verified too.
Discover what motivates your top talent
While the most talented travel nurse practitioners hold the same skills, they are all individuals with different motivations. Discovering what your favored candidate is looking for and appealing to them is a sure-fire way to get them to choose you. Let’s look at how to influence the decisions of different candidates.
· The Uncertain
If a candidate shows exceptional skills, qualifications, and attributes, yet is a little unsure of transitioning to travel nursing, then provide reassurance:
- Give reams of information about the role and establishment
- Allow plenty of questions, with honest and informative answers
- Perhaps provide feedback from another travel nurse
- Explain the support that will be provided to encourage development and wellbeing
- Be patient – if you push them into a decision, it’ll be a no
Such reassurance will usually tip the scales in your favor.
· The Adventurous
If you’re not in a high-demand location such as Hawaii, promote what you have got locally. This may be:
- Local events
- Famous attractions
- What is appealing about the location – scenic walks, or nightlife?
- Activities that are exclusive or popular in the area
If possible, provide photos – images and visual communication sells.
Be aware that salary isn’t often the deciding factor for the travel nurse explorers. Focus on what appeals to candidates as important to them.
· The Money Motivated
Higher pay is an attractive benefit to travel nurses, and some find it a dealbreaker. Highlight:
- Overtime options
- Your market-beating salary
- Any extra benefits that work towards their income, such as paid utility bills and housing
If you want the most talented travel nurse in your facility, make sure you’re offering a salary that is in line with your location and reflects the duties and responsibilities appropriately.
Take the Next Step to Your Next Talented Nurse Practitioner
We have highly skilled and talented travel nurse practitioners looking for exciting and rewarding opportunities in healthcare. So get in touch with Loyal Source today, and hire your next travel nurse tomorrow.