HealthcareSource Releases 2019 Recruitment Benchmarks, Highlights Featured in 2019 Report: State of Healthcare Recruiting


With the Affordable Care Act bringing more than 20 million people into the healthcare system, aging baby boomers, historically low unemployment, and hundreds of thousands of healthcare workers retiring each year, recruiting qualified talent … has become an ongoing epic challenge.

HealthcareSource®, the leading provider of talent management solutions for the healthcare industry, today released the “2019 Report: State of Healthcare Recruiting,” based on Recruitment Benchmarks by Lean Human Capital. With the hundreds of thousands of data points collected, the 10th annual benchmark features senior living/post-acute data for the first time.

The Lean Human Capital Healthcare Recruitment Benchmarks have become an annual barometer of healthcare recruitment practices and employment trends. The goal of the study is to gauge the health of the healthcare recruiting industry, provide a macro view of labor supply and demand across the industry, identify key drivers, and outline essential strategies to optimize every process in sourcing, recruiting, and hiring. The 2019 report identifies the five most significant recruiting challenges in healthcare, the top trends in key acute and post-acute job families, and the nine best practices for healthcare recruitment in 2019.

“One word sums up the state of the healthcare job market in 2019 – stressed,” said Michael Grossi, HealthcareSource Chief Executive Officer. “With the Affordable Care Act bringing more than 20 million people into the healthcare system, aging baby boomers, historically low unemployment, and hundreds of thousands of healthcare workers retiring each year, recruiting qualified talent for both replacement hires and new jobs has become an ongoing epic challenge.”

Lean Human Capital surveyed more than 3,500 hospitals including post-acute facilities, employing nearly 900,000 clinicians and other staff on six key dimensions of recruiting: speed, efficiency, quality-of-hire, productivity, cost, and quality of service. Data was collected on requisitions for positions in 18 clinical and operational job families, from direct-care nurses to food service workers.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, hospitals alone employed 5.238 million workers in July 2019, and the unemployment rate in the sector was an astonishingly low 1 percent. As of June 2019, there were 1.164 million job openings in healthcare and social services, and healthcare added an average of about 33,000 new jobs per month in each of the 12 months ending July 2019. Those statistics, combined with the technical complexity of medicine, make healthcare one of the most challenging industries to recruit for.

“Healthcare recruiting is not getting any easier, and the challenges healthcare organizations are facing today are likely to only become more complex,” said Carla Kennedy, Managing Director of Lean Human Capital. “The success of any healthcare recruiting organization depends largely on its resources and investment in talent acquisition to meet the organization’s needs and the strength of efforts to evaluate and optimize processes across sourcing, recruiting, and hiring. In this hypercompetitive market, talent acquisition teams need to take action now by finding efficiencies, implementing effective strategies, and ensuring they have the right data to make the important business decisions for today and tomorrow.”

The 2019 Recruitment Benchmark study also shows the business impact of working with Lean Human Capital’s advisory services team. Organizations in their second year or beyond of a successful recruitment transformation journey with Lean Human Capital benefit from:


  • 89-percent rate of positions filled to offers extended
  • 13 days faster time-to-fill for critical, hard-to-fill roles
  • 24 percent fewer openings per recruiter

Obtain a copy of “2019 Report: State of Healthcare Recruiting” here.

About HealthcareSource

HealthcareSource® is the only comprehensive talent management suite designed specifically to support the healthcare talent ecosystem. Our software, services, content, and analytics enable more than 3,500 healthcare organizations, senior care providers, and staffing agencies, spanning over 6,000 locations, to ensure quality patient and client care by recruiting, retaining, and developing quality talent. HealthcareSource and its award-winning healthcare talent management solutions have been recognized by industry analysts and trade groups.

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