How Text Can Simplify Healthcare Hiring and Staff Communications

In today’s crowded and competitive healthcare market finding, recruiting, and maintaining qualified medical staff in a timely manner remains a major challenge. It’s also one of the most expensive efforts all healthcare organizations – from hospitals to home care agencies and nursing homes to rehabilitation centers – must address.

Managing a large and dispersed workforce in an ever-changing environment represents still another major challenge.

Fortunately, text messaging has evolved to help forward-thinking administrators, staffers, and recruiters meet both these challenges by streamlining processes while cutting associated costs.

To understand the growing power of text, several facts are helpful:

• 98% of all text messages are read
• 90% within 30 minutes of delivery
• Texts have an engagement rate 138% more than email

And among the 18-34-year-old age group, text is the preferred channel for notifications from businesses. Here are just three ways text messaging can quickly become indispensable to your healthcare staffing and recruiting needs:

Alert Candidates to New Healthcare Positions

Speed up your recruitment processes and hire employees faster by using text messaging to alert qualified candidates to new opportunities. After all, even if your email makes it to a candidate’s inbox, you have less than a 20% chance of receiving a reply. A phone call is no better–candidates are often unlikely to answer a call from an unknown number, and text messaging eliminates wasting valuable time spent waiting for candidates to call back.

Schedule Interviews & Send Reminders

Send text reminders to schedule interview times, fill out necessary paperwork, and notify candidates of important deadlines. Keep the process moving.

Coordinate Changes in Scheduling

Use text messaging to connect quickly with your entire mobile workforce and enable easy, last-minute shift scheduling. This will also allow you to quickly bulk up on staffing in response to changing demand. These are just three ways in which text messaging can simplify and speed up processes while cutting your organization’s associated costs.

The more efficiently you can identify and hire candidates, the more smoothly your facility will run, freeing administrators, nurses, and doctors to be happier and more productive.

- Bill Bremer