Healthcare Industry Hiring: 3 Challenges Solved With Video Interviews

The healthcare industry is changing everyday, and the old methods of hiring and recruiting are becoming obsolete. To meet these new challenges, you need to throw everything you thought you knew about recruiting out the window.

New technology is making it easier than ever before to find the right people for your open positions. From social media to big data recruiting, healthcare professionals are turning to next-gen tech for the answers to their biggest hiring challenges. While looking for solutions to healthcare hiring woes, it's now time to turn to the video interview.

Here are three challenges and the solutions video interviewing can provide:

Healthcare Industry Challenge #1: High Volume Recruiting

Healthcare reform is changing the industry dramatically. Thanks to the Affordable Care Act (or ACA), nearly 32 million Americans will suddenly have health insurance. So, it should come as no surprise that those in the healthcare field are getting a little worried about having enough staff to cover the windfall of new patients.

In 2009, only nine percent of hospital executives pegged hiring as their No. 1 priority. In 2013, this number went up to 42 percent. Patients are coming, and healthcare organizations need to be ready.

Video Interview Solution: Video interviews make it easy to evaluate a high volume of candidates without wasting time in the process. Thanks to the one-way video interview, employers and recruiters can wade through tons of candidates while still getting a personal feel for the right people.

In the one-way video interview, candidates answer an employer's written questions on video. These video answers can then be viewed by recruiters, employers, or staffing pros at any time and for any duration. If you know immediately a candidate is all wrong for the job, you can simply switch gears to focus on someone who will fit your organization. This helps under-the-gun healthcare professionals and recruiters find the best people without losing precious time.

Healthcare Industry Challenge #2: Jumping the Skills Gap

While the ACA is dumping more patients into the system, there's actually a shortage of healthcare professionals. Unsurprisingly, this has lead to a huge skills gap within the healthcare field. A whopping 23 percent of employers have open positions they can't fill because those with the skills necessary are nowhere to be found.

Currently, our nation is short approximately 20,000 doctors, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. More troubling, by 2020, we're set to be short some 90,000 doctors thanks to an influx of new patients, Boomer aging, and physician retirement.

Video Interview Solution: Not every great candidate can be easily found in your organization's backyard. To jump the skills gap, sometimes you have to do a little traveling. While the right talent might not be around the corner, they might just be around the world and ready to relocate for the right opportunity. Video interviews allow you to expand your talent pool and widen your search criteria without breaking the bank. Thanks to live video interviews, you can connect personally and in real-time without shelling out for plane tickets.

Healthcare Industry Challenge #3: Finding the Right Soft Skills

The Fox drama House centered around a curmudgeonly doctor who was curt and sarcastic to patients but made up for it with brilliant medical skills. While it may be fun to watch House on television, in real life, most patients want to be treated well. This requires important soft skills like patience, being able to properly communicate, and understanding the needs of others.

These important personality skills are really impossible to evaluate on a traditional paper resume. A list of credentials can't tell you if a doctor has good bedside manners or if a medical professional can calm down the family of a patient.

Video Interview Solution: Video interviews can easily help recruiters in the healthcare industry find people with the right soft skills. On video and without wasting much time, you can quickly evaluate a candidate's communication skills and personality.

It's easy for a candidate to list "superior communication skills" on a resume but much harder if they have to back up these soft skills on camera. While they answer questions, use the video interview to evaluate a candidate's nonverbal behavior and soft skills to make sure you hire the right patient-facing talent.

There are plenty of challenges involved in hiring the right person for your healthcare industry positions. Thankfully, the video interview can help you connect with the best candidates and hire the healthcare superstars you need.