How to Improve Job Matching in Healthcare: 5 Tips for Facilities

Hiring the wrong nurse for the job comes with costs. RN turnover is estimated to cost $56,300 per nurse who leaves the organization — roughly $3.9 to $5.8 million in losses per year for an average-sized hospital. Job matching in healthcare is the act of aligning nursing candidates’ qualifications, skills, experience, and preferences with the requirements and company culture of a specific healthcare facility or agency. Mastering this important part of the recruiting and hiring process can help limit these losses.

This is a critical step that goes beyond simply checking credentials. Accurate matching involves assessing both sides of the hiring equation — the job opening and the nurse who may fill it. We’ll discuss some ways to improve this step of the recruiting and hiring process at your facility. But first, let’s get a big-picture view of what it means to make a productive employee-job match.

What Does Job Matching Look Like in Healthcare?

Successful job placement in healthcare involves connecting a nurse candidate with an open position based on accurate and unbiased information about the candidate and the open position. If the two align, the nurse can be considered a good fit for the hiring facility.

Job matching can be done manually or with the help of software and algorithms. It involves skills that can get stronger with practice and experience. To make a successful employee-job match, the hiring party gathers information from the nurse candidates, including:

• Qualifications and credentials (for example, an RN license)
• Clinical experience
• Education
• Area of specialization
• Clinical practice preferences (for example, a type of nursing task)
• Patient population preferences
• Availability
• Geographic proximity to the facility (or interest in relocating)

In addition, the hiring party will need detailed information about the job that needs to be filled, including:

• The level of nursing required (for example, LPN or RN)
• Nursing tasks that will be frequently performed
• Required and preferred clinical skills
• The facility’s company culture
• The facility’s organizational values and goals
• Schedule
• Pay scale and benefits

Hiring managers then use manual or digital tools to compare a nurse candidate’s qualities to the specific criteria of the open position and see if they’re aligned. Online platforms that are designed to facilitate the hiring process can help with this comparison. For example, high-quality nursing job boards may have built-in applicant tracking software (ATS) that can be used to collect and analyze candidates’ information.

Why Is Job Matching Important in Healthcare?

Making a successful job match based on resumes, interviews, nurse job descriptions, and healthcare facility values requires data analysis, people-reading skills, attention to detail, and a commitment to the process. That’s a lot – but it’s worth the effort because of the pain points it can alleviate.

In addition to the costs associated with hiring on a rinse-and-repeat cycle, adding a misaligned nurse into a multidisciplinary team can have negative effects that ripple out into a healthcare facility. In one review, researchers found that a sub-optimal skill mix within a care team can lead to missed patient care and adverse patient outcomes, including mortality. With so much on the line, it’s clear that hiring the right nursing professional for the role is an extremely critical matter.

As many healthcare leaders know, finding and retaining high-quality nursing professionals can be challenging due to the nurse shortage, high turnover rates, and a complex nursing hierarchy. This means that there’s little room for error in the hiring process, and strategic practices are crucial to success.

Improve Job Matching at Your Healthcare Facility: 5 Tips

Recruiting has undergone significant changes in recent years, due in part to advances in technology. Keeping up with evolving tactics is a great step toward optimizing your hiring process.

Ready to dig deeper into matching tactics for your facility? Finding the right match for jobs in healthcare involves a comprehensive view of the open position and your nursing candidates. It may be helpful to keep both sides of the equation in mind as you read the following tips.

1. Develop an Understanding of the Job From the Perspective of a Nurse

One of the most important aspects of finding a match for jobs in healthcare is building an awareness of the job from the point of view of the worker. What are the daily nursing tasks involved? What is it like working with the patient population that your facility sees? You can build your awareness through:

• Speaking to nursing staff.
• Reading patient experience surveys.
• Reflecting on staff’s annual performance reviews.
• Observing daily workflows.

Cultivating your understanding of the day-to-day duties and challenges of nursing staff can help you define the desired characteristics and attitudes of the professional you’ll employ.

2. Write a Role-Specific Job Description That Highlights Key Values

The job description is an important key to finding a nurse who will fit within your healthcare organization. As you write the role-specific nursing job description, consider organizational and unit-specific values. Nurses look for these indicators and often use them to determine whether a job will provide satisfaction.

Though some nursing positions come with industry-wide expectations, each facility (and unit) is unique and has distinct values. For example, all dialysis nurses are expected to provide patients with education about managing kidney disease. However, a specific dialysis unit might stand out by offering home-training rooms that facilitate a patient’s independence and control over their condition. Highlighting this value in a thorough job description could attract nurses who also value fostering independence in patients dealing with chronic disease.

This type of alignment may show up overtly in resume job-description matches (for example, when these two pieces of text state similar values), or it could be a subtler pattern that is uncovered during the interview process.

3. Take a Proactive Approach to Nursing Talent Sourcing

In an industry where jobs are plentiful and nurses are scarce, leaders need to take initiative when it comes to sourcing nursing staff. Being proactive involves awareness of staffing trends, anticipating staffing needs, and enhancing your organization’s connections to sources of qualified applicants. For example, collaborating with a local nursing school to offer hands-on learning opportunities to students is one evidence-based strategy for developing your talent pipeline.

4. Maximize Your Pool of Qualified Nurse Candidates

For the best chance at matching the right qualified nurse with your open position, use tactics that will result in a larger pool of qualified candidates to choose from. Driving traffic to an online job posting is one way to ensure a large candidate pool and increase your chances of successful job matching.

Sites that offer nurse-specific job boards can be a great way to get more eyes on your job posting, because nurses actively seeking work check these sources for the convenience of browsing multiple jobs in one place.

5. Don’t Dismiss ‘Soft’ Nursing Skills

Healthcare hiring involves complex regulatory requirements. State nursing boards evaluate the quality of individuals during the process of giving or renewing a nursing license. During a hiring campaign, staffing agencies and facility leaders are often involved in ensuring that a nurse candidate has the required specialized skills and credentials for advertised openings.

With all of this fact-checking going on, it can be tempting to overlook skills that may not be so easily quantified and documented, like a nurses’ ability to empathize with patients. Strong job matching practices involve keeping these “soft” nursing skills in mind. In some cases, nurses highlight these skills on their resume.

Job description matches with a nurse’s soft skills might look like similar language and themes, such as a repetition of the word “communication.” Asking behavioral interview questions is another way to give due diligence to the assessment of these important nursing skills.

Need Assistance Matching With a Qualified Nurse?

Job matching in healthcare is a highly involved and nuanced pursuit, but the good news is that you’re not alone in your efforts. Post your vacant nursing position to our nursing job board, and we can start matching you with a nursing professional who will enhance your care team today.