There is a shrinking talent gap in the healthcare industry. As the Baby Boomer generation enters retirement age (with longer life expectancies than previous generations), the demand for healthcare services is growing fast. While the Millennial generation presently entering the workforce rivals the Baby Boomers in size, educational institutions designed to produce our future doctors and nurses have not kept pace with the growing demand for talent in the healthcare industry.

These basic facts have put a strain on talent acquisition teams across the healthcare industry. The growing industry requires a vast skill set, but the current talent gap is projected to increase by 2020. What will help your talent acquisition team compete for the top talent available?

A programmatic recruitment strategy can improve your hiring when it comes to the Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, that help you measure success. By reducing time to hire and cost-per-hire and increasing quality of hire, a programmatic recruitment strategy can help keep your healthcare organization’s hiring process running more efficiently in the current, highly competitive climate.

Let’s look more closely at the trifecta of KPIs (cost-per-hire, time to hire, and quality of hire) that are vital to your keeping your healthcare industry hiring on track.

Cost-Per-Hire

Healthcare organizations that don’t use programmatic advertising in their job ads run the risk of spending more per applicant over the course of the hiring process. In a growing industry with multiple vacancies to fill, inefficient spending adds up—particularly because job advertising constitutes a large chunk of the hiring budget.

Organizations often pay a monthly fee on their go-to job site or use the cost-per-click model, which can have you spending dollars when casual browsers click on your ad. Thus, you pay for ad space but may not garner any applications in return. Programmatic recruitment advertising, on the other hand, navigates this process in a more efficient way by using AI technology. For example, there are algorithms that can divide your job advertising budget over many open vacancies and allocate by hard-to-fill index. So, when you need to find a new head hospital administrator, programmatic technology will prioritize spending on key positions and allow you to optimize spending across all your job vacancies.

Time to Hire

Cost per hire is of course closely tied to time to hire—open vacancies cost money, not just in ad spending but also in inefficiencies within your organization. For hospitals or healthcare organizations, this may mean you can’t provide as many services to patients. If heart surgery operations are one of the top grossing services, prioritizing a surgeon vacancy in your budget allocation will mean that you can find a quality candidate more quickly.

But how exactly will an automated process improve this KPI? By using predictive data (and data from historical job ad campaigns), an automated process can target candidates on websites where they are more likely to search based on the job type. This will find candidates more quickly. How do heart surgeons find jobs? Where do radiologists search for jobs? How do head cafeteria chefs find jobs? Programmatic advertising can use algorithms and Big Data to target candidates more efficiently based on job type.

Also, by using real-time data to measure a job ad’s performance (i.e., how many applications you receive over a certain period of time), programmatic advertising can adjust to this new information and increase an ad’s presence where it performs well. By calculating the data and keeping tabs on efficiency, programmatic advertising can ultimately reduce your time to hire.

Quality of Hire

Turnover is yet another issue in the healthcare industry hiring landscape. There are many factors that can affect turnover rates. And while HR teams can increase employee engagement measures, ultimately retention rates are directly tied to quality of hire metrics. After all, if you hire a new nurse who leaves after a month, you can’t call that a quality hire. You need talent and you need talent that will stay with your organization. New hires undergo onboarding and orientation, and an employee’s quality can only grow over time as they become more efficient at their job and add to your organization’s overall mission and success.

With a talent gap in this industry, this KPI is perhaps the most difficult for healthcare organizations to assess because they are pressed by time and money. Yet, finding quality candidates in the first place and getting the best matches for your open positions can help save time and money in the long run by reducing turnover rates and the number of vacancies you need to fill in the future. The main way to increase quality is through quality sourcing. Programmatic recruitment advertising can incorporate assessments of quality sources for your open vacancies, similar to how it targets job seekers quickly based on how particular candidates (like administrators, surgeons, or chefs) search for jobs.

By creating a strategy based on the data, programmatic recruitment can get you the qualified talent you need to fill the open positions both quickly and in a cost-efficient way. With a growing talent gap, a programmatic recruitment strategy can help healthcare organizations keep their vacancies filled in order to provide the vital services to patients.