The Healthcare Recruitment Dilemma
The healthcare recruitment industry is in a strange quandary right now. On the one hand, there’s a big need for the kind of healthcare personnel that healthcare recruitment professionals recruit but on the other hand it’s becoming more and more difficult to get these healthcare professionals where they’re needed the most.
Here (in healthcare and healthcare recruitment) we have an industry that deals with a problem pretty much common to all mankind. A problem that’s been around since the first ‘medicine man’: people get sick and they need healthcare ‘professional’ to help care for them and usher them back into good health and productivity.
The problem for healthcare recruitment professionals is that the people who want to do the job (i.e. be doctors, nurses and other types of medical caregivers) aren’t in the countries where the jobs are. And not only that…..the governments of those countries don’t seem to want to let them in.
Take the US for example. For many years, Filipino nurses studied and trained very hard to get certification as nurses so they could come to the US and work as nurses. For the longest time, Filipino nurses came to the US and worked very successfully as nurses. In most cases they relied upon help from healthcare recruitment professionals to get those jobs.
Not only were they happy to have the jobs which these healthcare recruitment agencies got for them, but in fact those jobs would have gone unfilled by US nurses due to the fact that nursing isn’t generally perceived as a good opportunity in the US right now. Hardly anybody wants those jobs (i.e. in comparison to the demand).
If it wasn’t for the fact that women (and to a lesser extent, men) in developing countries are hungry for an opportunity to earn a decent wage, there would be a nurse shortage even more critical than it presently is right now in the developed countries of the West (particularly the US and UK). For the longest time, healthcare recruitment companies in the US and UK relied upon new recruits from developing countries to satisfy the growing demand for new staff at healthcare facilities all across the US and UK.
But here’s where politics messes things up. Recently laws have been passed in most developed countries that make is all but impossible for healthcare recruitment agencies to get visas for trained nurses from abroad to come to the US and/or UK. It’s possible but extremely difficult. The net effect of these new laws and regulations is that the need for skilled nursing and other types of healthcare professionals is approaching epic proportions in the US and UK.
Nurses and professional health caregivers do earn excellent salaries but many people who’ve worked in that professional for several years are coming to the conclusion that their wages are not commensurate with their investment in training and education or with the pressure they feel they work under. This is another factor that makes it hard for healthcare recruiters to find applicants.
How will these issues ultimately be resolved?
No one really knows. Technology is undoubtedly be part of the answer but technology will never be a total substitute for the human-to-human touch. The other possibility is that ‘free market’ factors might drive wages up to the point where healthcare recruitment agencies and find applicants for their open job positions.