10 healthcare recruiting strategies to cut time-to-hire and boost quality of care

July 16, 2025

 

Alex Oliver

10 min read

Great healthcare isn’t about having the latest state-of-the-art equipment, facilities, and techniques — it’s about having the right people. But finding qualified healthcare professionals is getting harder every year. Staff shortages, high turnover, and slow hiring processes are putting patient care at risk.

Here’s the reality: replacing a bedside nurse costs around $61,110. You can’t afford to lose good people, and you can’t afford to hire slowly. You need proven talent acquisition strategies that allow you to meet minimum Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) ratios without cutting corners on quality.

Let’s dive into 10 healthcare recruitment strategies that leverage tech to simplify your talent search and help you build a stronger team.

1. Embrace AI-powered talent matching

When you’re drowning in applications, AI is a lifeboat. An AI-powered applicant tracking system (ATS) acts like your personal assistant, helping you:

• Pair credentialed nurses, techs, and specialists to the right departments.
• Flag applicants with expired credentials and licenses.
• Identify applicants with preferred certifications, like Advanced Cardiovascular Life Support (ACLS).
• Filter and prioritize applicants by key attributes, including shifts, specialties, and credentials.

AI-powered talent matching surfaces top nurses, doctors, locum tenens, surgeons, pharmacists, and administrative staff while you retain all final decision-making power. This keeps you competitive in a fast-moving market where top talent gets snatched quickly.

2. Strengthen employer branding

In healthcare, brutal hours and the threat of burnout are ever-present. Sometimes, it only takes a little extra pay for great staff to leave for greener pastures.

A strong employer brand that highlights your employer value proposition (EVP) may be the antidote to intense job hopping.

Don’t just use recruitment marketing to talk about your pay, benefits, and culture. Healthcare workers want to see:

• Real stories from your team: Let current nurses, doctors, and allied health workers share why they love working there.
• Patient impact: Show how your staff makes a real difference in people’s lives.
• Growth support: Market your support for your talent’s professional ambitions, such as secondments, career pathways, and reimbursements for credential renewals, mandatory CEUs, and tuition.
• Burnout prevention: Be upfront about your mental health resources, like on-site counseling, wellness apps, and employee assistance programs (EAPs).
• Your mission: ANCC Magnet designation? Serving underserved populations? High Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) scores? Don’t be afraid to show it off.

Want an easy way to demonstrate your EVP? Check out iCIMS Employer Branding for customizable career sites, video testimonials, and AI chat assistants to engage with qualified talent.

3. Optimize mobile and text recruiting

Clinicians don’t have time to meet face-to-face for interviews, let alone sit at a desktop. Virtual recruiting techniques optimized for mobile offer busy frontline staff the flexibility to apply for positions, upload credentials, and engage with recruiters between rounds.

Text recruiting is perfect for this. With SMS, you can quickly reach multiple candidates in your talent pools to fill last-minute shift openings. Candidates can even interact via text to apply for and follow up on job applications.

Take Infirmary Health’s use of iCIMS’ text recruiting software. Texting allowed candidates to complete preboarding paperwork and receive reminders about interviews, background checks, and drug tests. Response times improved dramatically because their candidates could engage without compromising patient care.

4. Prioritize compliance and credential verification

It’s frustrating to find great candidates you can’t hire because of slow credentialing. A recruiting platform that automates license checks, certifications, and background checks reduces hiring pipeline bottlenecks and your reliance on outside agencies.

What’s more, recruiting platforms focused on healthcare compliance come prebuilt with filters, tags, warnings, and advanced search tools to flag candidates with the ideal qualifications.

You can locate staff who require visa sponsorships, work in multiple locations (such as compact nurses), or possess advanced certifications for a more targeted talent approach while maintaining rigorous compliance needs.

Don’t settle for technology that extends your time-to-hire and hurts patient care. With iCIMS, you tap into more than 800 prebuilt integrations, including top healthcare vendors, for quick credential checks.

5. Leverage internal talent pools

When you need staff to fill critical roles immediately, consider your current talent. Internal recruiting allows you to use the clinical staff already familiar with your company’s culture, mission, and values and prepare them for projects or more advanced roles that match your needs and their interests.

As the 2025 Human Progress Report noted, upskilling and reskilling talent is quickly becoming the new standard for modern workforces. Here are some effective internal recruiting strategies that allow you to take a proactive approach to talent shortages:

• Rediscover previous talent: Parse silver medalist candidates, alumni networks, and float staff who’ve previously worked in your system.
• Promote cross-training opportunities: Allow for shadowing, secondments, and mentorship opportunities to jump-start an employee’s technical skills in areas where they are needed, such as preparing med-surg nurses for the intensive care unit (ICU).
• Build mobility paths: Make it easy for administrative staff to move into patient-facing roles through internal training or continuing education reimbursement.

The benefits of internal recruitment in healthcare far outweigh traditional external recruitment practices alone. Companies that prioritize internal mobility see 53% longer employee tenures, making it a worthwhile investment.

6. Implement effective employee referral programs

Referral programs are a great way to source talent without additional effort from your recruitment teams. But a $25 gift card won’t motivate busy healthcare workers to recruit for you. Make your employee referral program worth it with:

• Bigger rewards: Try $1,000 bonuses for successful new hires.
• Tiered incentives: Offer more money for hard-to-fill roles like night shift ICU staff, travel nurses, or rural physicians.
• Easy sharing: Provide social media templates for staff to promote jobs in their networks.
• Team competition: Create a friendly competition with department-versus-department challenges and group rewards.
• Mission alignment: Advertise company objectives that inspire action: “Help us find caregivers who reflect our community.”
• Success monitoring: Use internal dashboards that track referrals by department, location, and role to understand program effectiveness.

7. Invest in data analytics and key metrics

Your ATS or candidate relationship management (CRM) platform collects a goldmine of data that provides insights into the effectiveness, efficiency, and cost of your recruiting efforts. Leaving this data unmined is the difference between hiring a top RN or losing them to your competition.

You likely already monitor key recruiting metrics such as time-to-fill, source of hire, and onboarding satisfaction.

But to make your insights more meaningful, segment your data by healthcare-specific attributes to pinpoint areas for improvement. And use predictive analytics to forecast staffing needs, so you can be proactive about your talent search.

Here are some questions to get started:

• Which roles or units have the highest early turnover?
• What credential levels struggle most with onboarding?
• When do you need more staff based on seasonal trends?
• Which recruiting sources produce the best long-term hires?

This data allows you to predict and fix staffing issues before they hurt patient care.

Pro tip: Want even more granular insights? Invest in recruitment software that integrates with your human capital management (HCM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), or business intelligence (BI) systems to drill down into your data and uncover what recruitment methods yield the best candidates for the greatest return on investment (ROI).

8. Use social media and networking channels

Your staff is already scrolling through TikTok and Instagram between rounds — meeting them there can be a more authentic way to engage with your next great hire.

Studies support this, with a survey from PracticeMatch indicating that 70% of physicians check Facebook alone daily. Building a presence on channels like Facebook and LinkedIn is a great way to nurture a passive talent pool you can source from as needed.

But if your social media campaigns are not seeing the results you expect, level up with some of these tactics:

• Reach out to niche healthcare groups on LinkedIn, Facebook, and TikTok.
• Engage with healthcare influencers, like nurse creators, through comments, likes, and reposts.
• Post behind-the-scenes content that shows real teamwork during high-pressure care scenarios.
• Partner with healthcare stakeholders, like university and alumni boards, for pipeline building.

9. Streamline video interviewing

Video interviews give everyone more flexibility. Candidates can interview from anywhere when their schedule allows. You can conduct prerecorded, asynchronous interviews for high-volume positions like medical assistants.

Features like virtual panels, self-scheduling capabilities, and automatic reminders also make the process convenient when hiring for remote positions or different locations.

For example, if you’re hiring a clinical director on the opposite coast, a video conference that accommodates multiple interviewers in different time zones allows everyone to evaluate for role fit before investing in possible relocation.

Keep all your interview assessments and notes in one place. Explore how iCIMS ATS and Video Interviewing sync and make candidate interviewing simple and smooth.

10. Elevate the candidate experience through timely onboarding

As soon as the candidate signs your offer letter, start the onboarding process, and shorten new hire time-to-productivity. Use software to:

• Handle required paperwork, such as I-9s and non-competes.
• Remind candidates to submit credentials for verification.
• Assign and start HIPAA and OSHA compliance training.
• Provide practical information related to uniforms, parking, and facility floor maps.
• Welcome new hires with messages from managers and peers.

Onboarding isn’t just about tedious paper-pushing tasks but is the key to employee retention. Go beyond traditional training and employee check-ins, and structure your onboarding program to connect new hires with their role and your company’s culture and values.

For example, consider assigning peer mentors and new hire buddies to all recruits, especially those in high-stress roles or departments like the emergency room (ER). As accessible points of contact for questions and concerns, mentors help new hires adjust faster and reduce early turnover through encouragement and practical support.

Discover the importance of onboarding and effective onboarding strategies for improved employee retention.

Building stronger teams and healthier outcomes

The 10 healthcare recruiting strategies above allow you to build strong teams while ensuring you always have the right talent on hand to provide continuous patient care. And when your facility is well-staffed, you create better working conditions that lead to happier staff and better patient outcomes.

If you’re ready to revamp your recruitment strategy, start small and scale up. Try texting candidates about open positions. Make onboarding more empathetic by assigning peer mentors to support new team members struggling.

Or upgrade your recruitment software to something more comprehensive. See how iCIMS powers better patient care through smarter and faster hiring.