I find it interesting as we at Acadiate dig deeper into particular career fields and professions, that the general principles and best practices we recommend are reaffirmed across all of them. Recently, we have been conducting online Talent Marketing webinars for Healthcare professionals with Springer Publishing and a number of their partners, who are graduate Nursing programs at leading US Universities (ie https://dailynurse.com/?s=acadiate) and some of the top Healthcare organizations in the US. Springer Publishing Company is known as an innovative nursing, behavioral and health sciences, and medical publisher.
As we interview and talk to more educators and recruiters in healthcare we realize the greater need for applicants to go beyond the resume and take more methodical approaches to their career development and applying for jobs. Nursing and healthcare is going through rapid changes as the workforce is increasingly retiring, regulatory requirements and new certification standards are changing, and the staffing due diligence requirements are becoming more intense. The average time-to-hire for nurses is 129 days which compares to an average of 24 days for all jobs in the US and about 49 days for Health services in general. If you are a nurse and want to be mobile or ambitious to climb the career ladder, you are facing an incredibly long and drawn out hiring process.
The flip side for healthcare recruiters is intense competition for top talent, but also very expensive and unreliable processes for attracting and retaining talent. Although there are local markets in the US with shortages of nursing talent, there are also local markets with no shortages. What has become interesting as we talk to more people at all levels in the US nursing market that there is a need for better talent marketing by individual nurses to better promote themselves, but also help accelerate hiring decisions. For healthcare facilities it is about better internal development, monitoring and information sharing of their talent within their organization to better retain staff. As we dive deeper into hospital system’s talent management systems we find often incomplete or very basic systems at best.
Acadiate is well positioned to help both sides. Our primary focus is on helping the individual nurse take control of their own career destiny and better understand how they can dramatically improve their talent marketing and job applications by typically 3 times! In fact, from our experience, nursing is one of the professions that we feel can best benefit from our educational processes and showcase format that goes beyond the resume.
Nurses are not typically oriented well to being self-promoting or focused on documenting their career. It is interesting that one of the top certification standards in Nursing, Magnet, has one of its core foundations based on “evidence” based practices and decision-making. The core foundation of Acadiate is the Showcase and the ability to go beyond the resume and provide supporting evidence of skills, accomplishments and experiences. The challenges for nurse recruiters is most nurses do not properly document their own career in a manner that is easily presented to and reviewed by recruiters. Due diligence on nursing candidates is a challenge for recruiters, particularly from outside of their hospital network. One recruiter mentioned they try to talk to a nurse’s precept as quickly as possible in the process, not putting much weight on the resume or even the interview. Others menton this is insufficient.
There is also the challenge around leadership development and advancement in nursing. The rapidly aging workforce is playing particular havoc on senior levels of nursing and also on the instructor side.
We have partnered with Springer to help the industry and nurses in particular to start thinking more methodically about their career and to be more conscious of better documenting and better expressing their talents to help recruiters and the industry better build their talent stock. Our method takes them through educating them on targeting specific employers; better reviewing and assessing their skills; strategizing how to better communicate themselves professionally and market their talents around the needs of employers. What we find is nurses gain much greater control over their job search and dramatically improve their marketability.
The top attributes nurse recruiters are trying to assess is decision-making, adaptability and compassion. We advise nurses to be thinking how they can provide evidence of these top attributes and include them in a Showcase. Some of the items nurses can include beyond the standard resume and cover letter are: a video cover letter, present job description, performance appraisals, academic transcripts, clinical validations, health records, management accomplishments, Inter-hospital work, writing skills from reports or journal papers, presentations to colleagues, research and grant projects, compliments, references etc.
Individuals who embrace and commit themselves often see 3 times the recruiter appeal of their applications. It is interesting as we engage more nurses at the grass roots level they find Acadiate helpful and inspiring. If you are any individual, but particularly in the healthcare industry, we encourage you to at least sign-up for a free basic Acadiate account and to look out for specialty webinars on Nursing Talent Marketing (https://vimeo.com/306217692 ) promoted through Springer Publishing, DailyNurse and MinorityNurse websites or Acadiate’s Twitter and Facebook accounts.
