Healthcare has become one of India's largest sectors, both in terms of revenue and employment. Apart from a significant growth in job opportunities, talent challenges have intensified. Add to it another layer of complexity i.e. an increase in automation and work becoming increasingly specialised. To sustain and enable industry growth, there is a need for a pipeline of capable people, who can effectively perform specialised and niche functions. The need for different skills calls for hiring strategies to be innovative and predictive. As skill sets like medical coding, alternate medicines, physical sciences, and pain management are becoming more coveted in the healthcare services industry, the approach to acquire them is also becoming more personalised. According to a recent media report, job opportunities for Artificial intelligence and Robotics experts is all set to grow at a very high rate pertaining to the demand of these skills across industries. In healthcare too, the demand of skilled experts will increase considering how IoT and telemedicine services take an upward leap. To mitigate the challenge of hiring the right talent, it is important for organisations to understand potential candidates in a much-better way and design their recruitment strategies accordingly through introduction of new age hiring tools.

Campus recruitment programmes: Companies concentrating on campus recruitments have dedicated teams that work on sourcing and managing promising contenders. Premium talent from the campus is tagged, vetted, and nurtured for future roles. This practice proves very effective to a company’s talent sourcing strategy and provide access to a broader talent landscape. Healthcare companies hire graduates from leading campuses and train them for medical coding certifications through in-house academies. Generally, the intake from campuses is based on a strong selection mechanism mapped to skill and competency matrix. This selection framework consists of two filters –gauging the reasoning, numerical and language capabilities of applicants, and second, evaluating selected candidates for their cultural fitment. Deploying social gaming recruitment solutions such as hackathons, which challenges programmers to test themselves against their peers, is another valued selection program at campuses.

Bridging the experience gap: Besides employers’ preference for physicians with two to five years of field experience, fresh medical talent has become a chief recruitment pipeline. To bridge this experience gap, organisations are creating robust physician referral programmes to reward existing employees for referring a physician for an open position. This programme highly improves the chances of an experienced physician joining the organisation since their colleague is already an employee there.

Moving beyond the mundane: With the fast changing job scenario, employee referrals may simply not be enough to acquire quality hires. Employers are engaging extensively with millennials through new age social networks, and offering them incentives like company leases for house/car, ample relocation assistance, and sign-on bonuses etc. These added benefits to the base salary give the organization a competitive advantage in medical recruitment.

Replacement to recruitment mode: No matter how novel the hiring strategy is, it will not come to life unless there is a shift from ‘replacement’ to ‘recruitment’ mode.  Talent acquisition and retention have become all-encompassing. This means that companies that evolve with better people culture and practices are sustainable overall and can retain employees. Being in the healthcare sector, there is a need for companies to extensively promote wellness at work and encourage employees and their families to maintain healthy lifestyles. It is a value proposition that contributes greatly to talent attraction and retention.