7 Key Recruiting Metrics for Healthcare

Hiring in healthcare is a high-stakes practice. This ultra-competitive field relies on educated, experienced, and dedicated individuals to provide the caliber of care that consistently delivers positive patient outcomes and keeps facilities running. 

And healthcare organizations must build a solid and streamlined recruiting strategy in order to find these quality professionals. Tracking key recruiting metrics can help to give you key insight into your company’s current recruiting process, make improvements, and hire better candidates who are in it for the long-haul.

Healthcare recruiting metrics 101: A review

Before we dive in, let’s quickly review what healthcare recruiting metrics are, and how they can help to make the hiring process more effective for hospitals and other healthcare facilities

Recruiting metrics are designed to measure critical aspects of an organization’s hiring process from start to finish. Effective application of these measurements should establish a baseline for current operations, and additionally demonstrate why certain metrics may be lagging, allowing you to take action and make positive changes within the process.

Why use recruiting metrics in healthcare

Important recruiting metrics are the same across most industries. But within a hospital or clinic, a poor hiring decision may cost the health of a patient later on, and so the value of establishing, tracking, and acting on recruiting metrics is raised considerably. Establishing metrics will help you to quickly and with clarity understand both the successes and challenges within your hiring protocol. This then allows you to optimize your hiring and recruitment strategy to more easily meet organizational goals, including better patient outcomes.

How to track recruiting metrics in healthcare

Key healthcare recruiting metrics may be observed either via digital data gathering, or by interviewing candidates and employees to gain an anecdotal perspective on your hiring process. Both types of observation are equally important, and help to paint a fuller picture of both the areas of success and potential for growth within your recruiting strategy.

Consider adopting an intelligent hiring solution that will allow you to track both kinds of metrics in the same place. A smart platform will be able to automatically quantitative data, such as that involving costs, timelines, and other numeric ratios. In addition, the same platform should be able to incorporate information from candidate interviews and surveys into metric insights so you can make better planning decisions for your recruiting strategy.

Key healthcare recruiting metrics for 2024

Here are 7 critical recruiting metrics that every modern healthcare facility should be tracking.

• Volume of recruiting pool. A competitive field and a fast-evolving landscape within healthcare means that having a roster of qualified candidates at your fingertips is crucial if you’re going to fill urgent vacancies once they arise. This metric will help you keep tabs on the number of both active and passive candidates you have in your talent pool – if it gets low, it might be time to stockpile some new resumes.

• Time to Fill. This metric helps you track the time between when a job is posted to when it is filled. Not only do you need to find quality candidates in healthcare, you need to find and hire them fast. Staff-to-patient ratio mandates and other concerns encourage a thorough but swift hiring process – tracking Time-to-Fill will allow you to establish a baseline, as well as identify and address any bottlenecks in the process.

• Applicant-to-Interview Ratio. How many applicants for one job listing meet the minimum qualifications to merit an interview? A high number here can indicate that your job description may not be specific enough to screen unqualified candidates. A low number might mean you are not doing all you could to attract the candidates your organization wants. Tracking this metric helps you to refine job descriptions or even advocate for better benefits packages to make sure you’re getting the right responses to your posts.

• Cost per Hire. Recruitment is expensive, between advertising fees, agency memberships, staff costs, training, etc. But using this metric to track the exact costs associated with recruiting and hiring for open roles can help you to identify potential savings areas and make recruiting more budget friendly. 

• Source of Hire. This metric helps you to trace the sources from which you are getting your most successful candidates. Understanding where your best hires are seeing job listings can help you streamline your recruiting procedure by indicating less successful sources which may be cut. This also helps you to lower the cost of recruiting as well as the workload for staff involved in hiring.
  
  

• Offer Acceptance Rate. Tracking the percentage of candidates who accept your facility’s offers of employment offers great insight into your organization’s competitiveness as an employer. A high Offer Acceptance Rate is ideal, demonstrating that job seekers in the field of healthcare find your company’s rewards packages desirable. A low number might mean that it’s time to increase salaries, and bolster your employee benefits.

• Quality of Hire. In healthcare, patient outcomes depend highly on the caliber of your staff. The Quality of Hire metric evaluates candidates based on a number of factors including performance, skills, cultural fit, etc., and demonstrates the efficacy of your broader recruiting efforts. Tracking Quality of Hire helps you to refine the hiring process by prioritizing the actions and circumstances more likely to result in a better and longer-lasting employee.

Healthcare facilities may make use of any number of recruiting metrics to establish a better and more effective hiring protocol within the company. Establishing goals and designing a recruitment strategy that will help you to reach those goals will allow you to select those metrics which will be most effective for your company.

Make your healthcare recruiting metrics mean more

If you’re hiring for healthcare, you hope that your Quality of Hire metric will always be as high as possible – CrossChq can help make it happen. 

CrossChq is The Quality of Hire platform with special optimization for healthcare, designed to help you assess, hire, and retain top talent in the medical field. Offering features like automated digital reference checking, actionable candidate insights, and Quality of Hire as a Corporate KPI, CrossChq helps healthcare facilities of all sizes hire with confidence.

Request a demo here.