How AI Empowers Medical Leaders to Drive Physician Hiring

Summary

• Challenge of Physician Recruitment: Medical leaders face difficulties in building cohesive teams due to the physician shortage and outdated recruiting methods, necessitating a broader choice of candidates.
• Value of Passive Candidates: Passive candidates, who are not actively seeking new jobs, represent a significant yet underutilized pool of potential hires, often leading to better long-term matches.
• AI-Driven Solutions: AI tools like Winnow can efficiently identify passive candidates from vast datasets, offering medical leaders a proactive approach to build their ideal physician teams and surpass traditional recruiting limitations.

One of the most critical challenges faced by medical leaders is the process of building and sustaining a cohesive physician team. Finding the right physician for each role is a priority that directly impacts the performance of physician teams, the long-term sustainability of their organizations and patient care.

But most of the time, medical leaders don’t have the luxury to assemble the dream team they want. They’re just hoping that recruiters can fill each open role. Amidst today’s acute physician shortage and the antiquated approach to recruiting, medical leaders can’t afford to be choosy.

That needs to change. A broad array of choices is essential to identify optimal fits, support long-term hires and ensure strong team alignment. 

But how can medical leaders get into the driver’s seat of building their physician teams?

Tap into the 73% Pool of Passive Candidates

It’s time to reexamine some traditional methods of physician recruitment. 

First, the hiring process should not be reduced to a task, and it shouldn’t be shouldered by recruiters alone. Building a thriving physician team should be a team sport. 

As such, medical leaders should be tuned in to one of the most promising yet under-tapped areas for physician hires: passive candidates. These skilled physicians may not be actively seeking new opportunities but could be open to a change under the right circumstances. 

It’s estimated that only 10% of physicians are actively seeking new opportunities at any time, so organizations find themselves competing fiercely for this limited pool. This intense battleground for active candidates is getting more desperate by the year, particularly for healthcare organizations in less sought-after locations struggling to attract talent.

Until now, passive candidates have been an elusive but giant pool just out of reach. They represent the 90% of the global workforce that is not actively searching, offering a greater promise of ideal candidates who will be interested in a given open position.

And, from anecdotal evidence, passive candidates are often more successful hires. Given their lack of urgency in seeking employment, passive candidates tend to make decisions based on genuine compatibility rather than immediate necessity.

But, by their very nature, passive candidates are hard to find. They’re not looking for a job, so they’re sourced through an arbitrary process that usually involves cold calls, “posting and praying” and other random tactics.

All this effort often bears little fruit because it relies on cold outreach to cold targets, informed by databases with decayed data. As a result, the ROI on searching for passive candidates is typically low. It’s a numbers game that barely moves the needle.   

AI has changed that.

The Role of AI in Identifying Passive Candidates

With AI, medical leaders have the ability to easily zero in on passive candidates and take the lead on building their ideal physician teams. 

The first step is leveraging an AI tool like Winnow to instantly and accurately detect passive physician candidates. Unlike traditional recruitment methods, which rely on active engagement and outreach, Winnow can sift through massive datasets to identify candidates who may not be visible through conventional channels and have not identified themselves as active candidates. This proactive approach to physician hiring allows medical leaders to cast a wider net and target candidates who are not actively seeking new opportunities but could be a perfect fit for their organization.

Winnow leverages advanced algorithms and machine learning techniques to analyze vast amounts of data and identify passive candidates who may be open to new opportunities. By assessing thousands of factors such as job history, career trajectory, and claims activity, AI can predict which candidates are most likely to be both ideally suited for a given role and receptive to a change.

Humans Can’t Efficiently Identify Passive Candidates

When it comes to efficiently sourcing passive candidates, what are the alternatives to AI? 

There are no good options. 

Here are some of the current approaches to finding passive candidates, and the pitfalls of those methods:

Social Recruiting

This involves engaging candidates on social platforms. It’s a painstaking manual process of sifting through social profiles, which is further limited by the size and activity level of a candidate’s social network. The reality is that physicians tend to avoid professional social platforms; they don’t have the same incentives to build their professional networks and the risk of opening their doors to spam makes it even less worth their time.

Revisiting an Existing Talent Pool

While there’s potential value in revisiting your talent pool and considering candidates who have previously shown interest in your company — such as withdrawn applicants, former employees or contract workers — low-hanging fruit doesn’t naturally equate into good fits worth your time.

Standard Referral Programs

A standard referral program leverages your providers’ existing networks to identify passive candidates, which is promising. But busy providers are usually limited by a narrow consideration of the candidates who immediately spring to mind. They’re not able to imagine potential candidates that they may be connected to in some way but who aren’t within their immediate social or professional networks.

In-Person Events

In-person opportunities like industry conferences or your own events can provide valuable face-to-face interactions with potential candidates. But these are random analog experiences that take up vast amounts of time and are an inefficient way to find ideal passive candidates.

The ability to identify and engage with passive physician candidates is increasingly critical for building successful physician teams. From social networking to referral programs to events and beyond, AI provides an unparalleled edge, instantaneously processing vast amounts of data points that uncover the best passive candidates for each open role. By using AI to identify passive candidates, medical leaders can access a far broader pool of candidates and benefit immeasurably from predictive insights to meet their needs for each role. 

Humans can’t beat the robots at uncovering passive candidates, but AI doesn’t have the human touch of connecting with those candidates. Working together, AI and medical leaders are a powerful force to unlock the holy grail of passive candidates.