It is a tough world out there, especially where it comes to the hiring of nurses. Unless you have a huge bank account to back up, you are going to find it hard to attract the nurses to your organization. Fear not, help at hand (not the Superman kind but hey…). Here are 56 low cost ways for start-up and cash strapped organizations to recruit nurses.

I bet that caught your eye, it certainly did mine when I came across the headline on the Daily Miner website.

Apparently it seems that MedCath, a North Carolina based company; believes it can handle the US-wide shortage of trained nurses. This claim was made when the company revealed plans to build a hospital in the Kingsman area of Arizona.

Now before you go thinking that they have found a magic solution to what has given many a healthcare recruiter sleepless nights, their solution is to recruit heavily from their other hospitals around to US, with one of the enticements being that Kingman is a great place to live in.

That it itself might be true, I have never been to Kingman but I bet you many nurses would say the same things about the cities and towns that they work in, and unless you can really show an improvement in the quality of life, an advancement in their career or an increased pay packet, I serious doubt they would really overcome the nursing shortage that has gripped the US.

Also how do they replace the nurses they manage to convince to move to Kingman, I have a feeling it would be the same way as everybody else facing the same challenges to find skilled nurses.

Nurses, God bless them, are the angels of the health care industry. They are ones who have the most one on one contact with patients and to many, are the face of health care. However there is a problem in countries like the United States and the United Kingdom – there are not enough of them.

The demand for nurses in the these countries can’t seem to be met by number of nursing graduates from their own nursing schools this is the same with other health care professions. It is estimated that a million health care jobs would go unfilled this year only and could be more in upcoming years.

This situation is not unique to America but can be found across the developed world and to help boost the ranks of number of healthcare professionals needed to get industry going, they look to foreign trained professionals from less developed countries.

This now raises many questions such as are the countries the foreign trained professionals coming experiencing a surplus of such professionals or are there in the same boat as the US in need of more of the skilled personnel and if is the need greater or less than of the US? If the need is more in the foreign countries, is it then fair that countries like the US and the UK, absorb such professionals, leaving the those countries with even a greater need than before?

In my experience there are hardly any countries in the world where there is a surplus of healthcare professionals and despite the fact there they are more acute shortages of professionals in their own country, many professionals would still feel the need to migrate to more developed countries like the US to enjoy a better standard of life.

So should the US and other stop these professionals from coming over and depriving their own people of their much needed skills. The answer is a tricky one. It would absurd to prevent the employment of foreign trained workers based on their profession, so long as it is not illegal in the US.

Also it would seem quite hard to ask countries like the US and UK to hiring foreign trained healthcare professionals when they are in need of the same professionals. More especially if those professionals are going to go to other countries that would be more than happy to take them.

So what can be done? Well the obvious answer is to reduce the dependency of foreign trained workers. In the short term, nothing really can be done as any measures taken would only be token measures at best.

In the long term, more incentives to encourage people to get consider a career in the health care sector, especially in the areas most of need of such skilled professionals; more places for training in schools and colleges that offer educational programs; and more funding for research to discover how to increase efficiency and make use of technology to reliance on human intervention in a number of health care processes giving the workers more time to focus on more demanding duties.

These are some of the recommendations of the top of my head, I am sure with a good night sleep and a big breakfast I would be able to churn out more. Till number of more home grown professionals improve I ma afraid that employers and recruiters would have no choice than to turn to the less advantaged countries to lure away some of the prized assets.  

Hi everyone and thank you for visiting the A to Z of Health Care Recruiting. The health care industry is a vast and dynamic industry, accounting for 13.5 million jobs in the US, making it the country’s largest employer of people.

Moreover the Department of labour predicts that the industry would account for 8 of the 20 fastest growing professions in the whole the US. Not bad, considering that there are 10 other supersectors of the economy and the education industry to compete with for the skills and services of the American worker.

When people think of the health care sector, they mostly restrict themselves to doctors, nurses, dentists and pharmacists but they are a lot more professionals than that. It is estimated there are over 500 different career paths in the industry, I personally know of about 300. A lot of the professions are small fields like that of dental ceramists; occupations like nursing have a huge amount of opportunities.

Overt the next coming weeks, months and hopefully years, I hope to look at the challenges facing recruiters in the sector and examining the different methods they employ to get ahead in the game.