Recruitment Win

How to Attract and Keep Top Talent in Your Pipeline

5 min readDec 18, 2024

Say you’re working on talent acquisition and recruitment for a regional healthcare organization. What types of challenges might you face, and what solutions might I suggest?

When you go to the doctor, they ask you a bunch of questions before making recommendations, and while I’m no doctor, I love this framework. Your doctor will want to know what medications you’re taking, what changes you’ve observed, and what issues are bothering you.

I can’t solve a problem if you don’t think it’s a problem. I lead with questions because I want to know which issues you’ve identified. What could you resolve that would relieve some pressure on your recruiters or help you earn a promotion?

Talent shortages seem like an issue I hear about a lot. There is a national shortage of healthcare professionals, particularly in specialized roles such as nurses, medical technologists, radiologists, and mental health professionals. This shortage can be more pronounced in rural or less populated areas. You can read more about it on the Health Resources & Services Administration website.

You can put yourself in the best position to find quality talent by advertising where desired applicants spend their time. That might range from specific medical journals to search engine marketing, a digital advertising strategy that increases a website’s visibility in search engine results pages. For job boards, I recommend taking a programmatic approach, including Indeed. Programmatic recruitment advertising uses software and data to ensure your online job ads are placed in front of the right people, at the right time, and at the best price.

Once you have qualified people looking at your job advertisements, I recommend routing them to your career site to see things like the benefits you offer, your organization’s culture, your DEI-AB and veterans recruiting efforts, your organizational hiring journey so they know what to expect, testimonials from current employees, and career mapping so they can see how they might integrate into your culture, feel successful, and grow with your organization. With branding, you can work with your marketing department to ensure you maintain a consistent look and feel throughout your organization.

A quick-apply function leads to a lot of unqualified applicants. It’s up to you to decide if your team has the bandwidth to handle that. But it leads to outcomes like people on LinkedIn seeing over a thousand clicks on a job and deciding not to apply.

If it were my call, I’d want my career site to be attractive and welcoming, with real photos and good design. I’d want to make it very easy for applicants to apply for jobs they’re qualified for, and if no job is posted, I’d want to invite them to submit a resume or CV in case an appropriate opening arises later.

I’d want to know where they came from to land on my career site. Knowing which job boards, social media apps, SEM, AI search, and other sources drove visits and applications is important. Tracking whether candidates apply and what they did on the career site would improve my understanding of how I want to budget.

With some ATS like Workday, iCIMS, HealthcareSource (now Symplr), depending on the version, Taleo, and SuccessFactors, if you disposition every candidate the same way, you can track Cost per Application and Cost per Quality Application, and you determine what quality means to you. People often choose candidates who move to the interview phase. And finally, you will get the holy grail number, your Cost per Hire. Some ATS now charge for an XML feed, which is a way to get this information; just something to be aware of.

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If a potential applicant clicked on a job and didn’t apply, retargeting them via a CRM or showing an ad for that job later would lead to more applications. Someone may look at a position, particularly on mobile, then decide to update their resume or CV, get distracted, and forget to return to complete the application. Getting someone’s attention is more challenging than it used to be. Our phones, our friends and family, social media, and the news all clamor for our attention, and it generally takes more than one try to engage someone.

A way to keep candidates engaged is to update them about the status of their applications. I’ve seen career sites that allow applicants to check, which I like. But nothing beats a personal outreach. I realize that doing this at scale is challenging, but you have much to lose without it.

Here’s an example of what not to do. I applied to a major software company years ago. I have dozens of friends and alums of my college working there. People were happy to recommend me, and my contact suggested I apply for three specific roles. So, I did that. I got an auto-response that, instead of applying for multiple roles, I should go back to my contact and get clarification about which one I wanted to apply for. Having done every imaginable part of the sales cycle, I would have found it helpful to talk to an experienced recruiter at that point. Instead, I decided to move on to another organization in the talent acquisition space because I enjoy it. When a recruiter contacted me six months later, it was too late. I had secured a job I enjoyed.

Robert Half states that 57% of workers would lose interest in a role if the employer did not contact them within ten business days of submitting their job application. While the period might be longer for a doctor than a salesperson, if the position is competitive, as most healthcare roles are, someone else is going to hire your candidate if you move slowly to at least start the conversation.

Things are challenging and competitive, but you can win at talent acquisition with the right partner(s). I look forward to chatting if you think that might be helpful.

Jessica L. Benjamin