It’s Physician and Provider Recruitment Professionals Week! During a time of growing physician shortages, we want to honor the healthcare recruiters whose dedication ensures that patients can continue to access quality care—even in the midst of physician shortages.
The responsibilities in healthcare recruitment have become more challenging in recent years, as physician shortages grow. We sat down with Senior Consultants James Turner and Gerrick Ladnier to talk about how the healthcare recruitment process has changed over the years, the biggest challenges healthcare recruiters are facing, and how locums consultants and healthcare recruiters work together to maintain access to quality healthcare for everyone.
The challenges of healthcare recruitment are growing.
The landscape of healthcare recruitment has changed dramatically in the past five years.
The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated already existing physician shortages—and no specialty was immune.
“The pandemic impacted every single specialty in a completely different way, whether it was elective surgeries being put off, or critical care and emergency medicine physicians burning out,” says oncology Senior Consultant James Turner. “Since then, a lot of physicians who were working full time reevaluated their goals professionally and personally, and that changed the landscape of what these physicians want their career to look like.”
These changing priorities make healthcare recruitment even more challenging, as recruiters have to balance the needs of physicians—both their existing staff physicians, and potential candidates they’re hoping to recruit—with the realities of their hospital.
“Healthcare recruiters have an extremely difficult job,” says urology Senior Consultant Gerrick Ladnier. “There are often only one or two recruiters for an entire hospital system, and they only have so much bandwidth.”
“As specialty-specific consultants, we become very knowledgeable about our specialty—but hospital recruiters have to be experts in every specialty,” agrees Turner. “They’re inundated with hundreds of emails and calls regarding all of these different specialties, so they’re getting pulled in a lot of different directions. And with only a couple of recruiters, it’s next to impossible to target every single potential candidate.”
The stakes of healthcare recruitment couldn’t be higher.
Recruitment can be a difficult job in any industry. But healthcare recruiters are under much greater pressure to find candidates, because the stakes of filling those roles can literally be life-and-death.
“A lot of people assume that healthcare recruitment is similar to other types of recruitment, but it’s definitely different,” says Turner. “Finding physicians to fill a staffing shortage—whether it’s from vacation, illness, or someone retiring—could potentially save someone’s life.”
Unfilled staffing gaps can mean months-long waitlists for patients who need critical screenings, or a trauma center shutting down a service line because they can’t keep it staffed—which can mean patients having to travel hundreds of miles to access care. In some cases, staffing gaps can literally be the difference between life and death for a patient. Our consultants have seen that firsthand—especially during the pandemic.
“In early 2020 during the COVID pandemic, I was working with pulmonary critical care physicians,” says Turner. “It was a very, very busy time for pulmonologists. There were so many unknowns about whether patients were going to survive. At the time, I’d been checking in with a specific hospital for months, but they hadn’t so far had a need for a physician. Then, when the pandemic hit, they called to say they needed a pulmonologist to start the next week. My team was able to find someone who lived an hour away, was already licensed in Minnesota, and was willing to drop everything to work full-time for six months to help manage patient volumes at the peak of the pandemic. We got an email from the wife of one of the patients he’d treated, who wanted to thank him for saving her husband’s life. That was really special, for us and for him.”
Locums helps extend the capacity of healthcare recruiters
When the stakes are high, hospital recruiters need trusted partners they can rely on.
A strong partnership with a locum tenens agency can help extend the capacity of healthcare recruiters, by helping fill temporary staffing gaps, so they can focus on finding permanent staffing solutions.
While the ultimate goal is to find permanent staff, every healthcare recruiter knows it’s not always that easy. Vacancies are harder to fill in certain locations, or certain specialties that are seeing higher shortages.
“That’s where we come into play,” says Ladnier. “If a hospital recruiter is struggling to find a doctor for a specific specialty, they know that they have an additional recruitment arm available to them in Hayes Locums. One or two recruiters becomes ten or fifteen recruiters, which extends their outreach.”
One way Hayes Locums extends the reach of healthcare recruiters is by building partnerships that last beyond a single assignment.
“Over the years, our job as consultants has shifted from being reactive to specific needs, to being proactive in building relationships with healthcare recruiters,” says Turner. “We’ve become experts in our specialty, so we build relationships with hospitals so that even if they don’t have a need now, they know they can call us when they have a need within that particular specialty.”
The level of trust we build means that hospitals feel comfortable to reach out to us in any situation—even the tricky ones.
“We worked with a healthcare recruiter who was advised that they were going to lose one of their employed physicians,” says Ladnier. “We were able to build out the equivalent of a full-time schedule with three or four different urologists, so that by the time the urologist left, the practice didn’t skip a beat: patients continued to be seen, and surgeries continued to be performed. Because we had a solid relationship with the recruiter, they were able to rely on us to help them in a pinch.”
Ultimately, our consultants view their role as part of the healthcare recruitment team, where we all have the same goal: making sure patients get the care that they need.
“With the relationships we build with healthcare recruiters, we can potentially save lives,” says Turner.
Healthcare recruitment is a difficult job—especially in a time of growing physician shortages—but locums can help by offering reliable support for the hardest-to-fill cases.
“Healthcare recruiters deserve respect, because I don’t think people understand how hard their jobs are,” says Ladnier. “We’re glad to be able to hopefully make their jobs a little bit easier.”
We are grateful for the work of dedicated healthcare recruiters who stand in the gap of physician shortages, and we are honored to partner with you in making sure patients can continue to access quality care.
