4 Tips for Finding and Hiring Top Healthcare Talent

 

Finding and hiring top healthcare talent is your main priority — and your biggest challenge. Here are four tips to help you overcome healthcare recruiting hurdles and fill every opening at your facility with the right candidates.

Work on Your Job Descriptions

Job descriptions aren’t just a place to list the must-have qualifications you want to see in applicants. If you truly want to appeal to top talent, start looking at these descriptions as an opportunity to make your healthcare facility stand out. On top of detailing the experience, skills, and education a candidate must possess, explain some of the perks they’ll access when working for your medical center, such as:

  • Insurance benefits
  • Flexible scheduling
  • Paid time off
  • Retirement planning

Find the Right Place to Post Jobs

Pay careful attention to the job boards you use, because the places you post your job openings matter just as much as the effort you put into writing the descriptions for them. Along with the popular job search engines that any company can access, consider posting on websites exclusive to the healthcare industry. This will guarantee that your listings appear in front of even more clinical and non-clinical healthcare professionals.

Nurture Your Company Culture

If your facility struggles with employee attrition, you’ll have a hard time not only finding top talent but also retaining it. To make your medical center stand out to well-qualified applicants, establish and nurture a company culture that they’d want to be a part of. You can start by surveying your current staff, getting an idea of where your facility excels and where it could improve, and implementing actionable changes as soon as possible.

Partner With a Healthcare Recruiter

Finding top healthcare talent is a multi-layer process. Without the time and resources available to put in extra effort every step of the way, your healthcare facility will have a much harder time attracting the best candidates. That’s why more and more medical centers are partnering with healthcare recruiters that know where to find the perfect fit — every time.

At HealthCare Support, we specialize in placing healthcare professionals in both clinical and non-clinical roles across all 50 states. From administrative openings to executive-level positions, our healthcare recruiters quickly and effectively find, screen, and recommend top talent. And once we find the perfect match to fill your position, we continue to monitor their progress and offer continual support. To learn more about our search process, contact HealthCare Support today at 407-478-0332.

How to List Your Nursing Credentials

Your nursing credentials sum up your education, active licensure, certifications, and greatest professional achievements. Whether you’re filling out a job application or signing a legal document, you’ll need to pay careful attention to how you write them. Here are some tips to help you list your nursing credentials correctly.

Listing Your Nursing Credentials

As a nursing professional, your credentials should appear in the following order:

  1. Highest earned degree (including doctoral degrees, master’s degrees, bachelor’s degrees, and associate degrees)
  2. Licensure (including RN and LPN)
  3. State designations or requirements (including APRN, NP, and CNS)
  4. National certifications (including RN-BC and FNP-BC)
  5. Achievements and awards (such as FAAN)
  6. Other recognitions or certifications

Your highest earned degree comes first in your list of credentials for multiple reasons: Your degree doesn’t require renewal, and it is the least likely of all your credentials to change. Of course, you may continue your education in the future — replacing what you originally listed with the most recent, highest earned degree. Because licensure is necessary to practice nursing and may or may not be renewed, it is always listed second in your line of credentials.

State designations and national certifications follow licensure because these, too, are required for practice and will expire without continued education. Finally, achievements, awards, and other recognitions are left last on your line of credentials. These additional honors aren’t required to practice nursing, but they are still significant to your professional experience and can help you stand out as a competitive nursing candidate.

Once you have finished listing your credentials complete your resume with your experience listed from your most recent position. There is typically no reason to list any employment that surpasses the last 10 years.

Nursing Credentials Q&A

Below are some of the most common questions that nursing professionals have about their credentials:

  • What should I do if I’m unsure how to list my specific degree or state licensure? Consult your state board of nursing for accurate listing information.
  • Am I required to list certain credentials? You should always list the credentials necessary for your profession in your state when signing legal documents.
  • What if I have more than one degree? List your education in order from the highest to lowest level or simply list your highest earned degree.
  • What if I have multiple nursing credentials? While you aren’t required to list multiple nursing credentials in any specific order, it may be useful to list them from most recently acquired to first acquired or in order of relevance to a specific job if you are applying for one.

Nursing Tips, Tricks, and Preparation

Are you a recent nursing graduate applying for jobs or an experienced nursing professional that’s ready to hop back on the job market? If so, you’ll not only need to get your credentials in order, but also have an interview-ready resume and virtually unlimited access to relevant job postings. That’s where HealthCare Support comes in. Our team of healthcare recruiters will help you find jobs, prepare for interviews, and settle into your new position. To learn more, contact HealthCare Support today at 407-478-0332.

Writing a Resume the Right Way

It’s time. You’ve put this off for months now and it’s constantly nagging you in the back of your mind. It’s time to update your resume. Resume work is one of the most tedious tasks because there are so many wrong ways to do it and contradicting tips across the internet. There’s also the common rule that resumes should be one page long, whether you’re struggling to fill it or your experience is overflowing, don’t let this trip you up. We’re here to make resume writing a skill all can succeed at!

So, what should be put on it and what should not?

A resume is composed of four main sections:

  1. Contact Information

  2. Skills/Professional Summary

  3. Experience

  4. Education

The way it is organized should be based on how you want to format your resume and how you want to prioritize your information.

  1. Contact Information

The important contact information you must include on your resume:

  • Your name
  • Current email address
  • Current phone number

Adding your mailing address to your resume is optional, but certainly makes it easier for recruiters to make sure they are contacting you only for positions that are near you. Remember that if any of your contact information changes you should update your LinkedIn and any other locations your resume is housed.

  1. Skills/Professional Summary

Consider this a snapshot of your experience and the part that will capture the reader’s attention and determine whether or not they’ll continue reading your resume. The ‘Skills’ or ‘Professional Summary’ section is a list compiled of your best skills and is most commonly shown using bullet points.

You might list something like:

  • 5+ years medical front office experience
  • Sufficient in Microsoft Suite, specific scheduling software, etc.
  • Ability to answer multi-line phone with 100 inbound calls per day while operating check-in window
  1. Experience

This section will take up a good chunk of the space, but keep in mind that not every job will go on it. You only want the jobs you’ve had in the past 10 years or the most relevant ones. Also, make sure there are no gaps in your job history.

You want to have your most recent job at the top of your ‘Experience’ list and then have your jobs listed in reverse-chronological order. When labeling your experiences, you should have a maximum of five bullet points under each job.

Here’s a tip! If you are applying for a job, go off the advertised job description and elaborate your experience for that skill on your resume. When you get the chance, use numbers to quantify your experience.

  1. Education

The ‘Education’ section should list the schools you attended and the degrees you’ve earned. Just like in your ‘Experience’ section, this should be in reverse-chronological order. If you’ve graduated from schools higher than high school, leave your high school off.

Add your major and what you studied or concentrated in. Along with your studies, fill in any awards or honors you received whether it’s Valedictorian or Honor’s Society. If you don’t think your GPA is good enough, don’t put it. And, if you’re not a student, don’t put it at all. Also, make sure to put the month and year you graduated.

Now that we know what to put in your resume, let’s go over some things that absolutely shouldn’t be on your resume.

  1. Anything personal such as your height, weight, social security number, marital status, your religious beliefs, or your sex.
  2. Don’t be that person who has the word “Resume” written at the top of it. The employer will know 100% that it is, indeed, a resume.
  3. Leave your photographs out of it. Selfies cropped to remove friends from the picture and even some professional head shots can be a laughing stock. And due to Equal Employment Opportunity legislation, an employer would never ask for this.
  4. Grammar and Spelling Errors!!! Make sure you double, triple check that you have no errors on your resume.

At HealthCare Support, our recruiters are resume writing experts. In fact, one of our recruiters average at least 20 resumes a week. If you feel stuck and need a hand, we are here to help you display your skills to the best of your ability and land your dream job!