Leveraging AI to Improve Recruitment Efficiency in Rural Healthcare

In 2024, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services identified more than 7,500 areas in the country experiencing a shortage of healthcare workers. Over 66% of these areas are rural. 

Healthcare providers in rural areas experience unique challenges in recruiting employees, including workforce shortages, limited access to candidates, and high costs of prolonged vacancies. These challenges are only going to get harder to manage. The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that there will be an average of 194,500 job openings for nursing positions alone each year for the next decade. 

Recruiters should turn to technology for solutions to their healthcare hiring challenges. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a game-changing tool that can help healthcare recruiters reach a larger pool of candidates, improve match quality, and optimize hiring efficiency. AI can help cut down on hiring costs and reduce prolonged vacancies in rural healthcare facilities. 

Challenges in Rural Healthcare Recruitment

Rural locations create unique challenges for healthcare recruiters. Rural areas typically have fewer people, which means there’s a smaller pool of job candidates. In the healthcare field, where specialized and often expensive training is required, the pool of job candidates is even smaller. This means that many candidates may need to relocate to a rural area to fill a position, and relocations can be costly. 

Plus, most medical schools and other training programs are located in cities. Newly trained candidates might find the job search to be easier in the city where they graduated, due to professional connections they made while in school. Recent graduates with student debt may also find the frequently higher salaries in urban areas to be difficult to turn down.

Unfortunately, hiring isn’t the only difficulty that rural healthcare recruiters face. Retention is also a challenge. Healthcare facilities in rural areas tend to have higher rates of turnover than facilities in more populated areas. One study found that nursing turnover rates were as high as 27% over a two-year period in some rural communities. Continual rehiring can create a real financial strain for healthcare providers. 

How AI Can Transform Rural Healthcare Recruitment

AI can cut down on the strain of hiring and rehiring by making the process more efficient, so healthcare recruiters can hire qualified employees with less effort. Here are a few ways AI can help with recruitment: 

• Candidate Sourcing: AI can identify and attract candidates from a broader geographic range who may be willing to relocate or work remotely, where applicable. 
• Enhanced Screening and Matching: AI’s data-driven matching assesses critical factors, including experience, cultural fit, and willingness to work in rural settings, leading to hires who are more likely to stay. 
• Automated Outreach and Engagement: AI tools like ChatGPT can help draft email templates and responses, making outreach to candidates easier. Chatbots give interested candidates the ability to get answers to their hiring questions 24/7, keeping them engaged with less work for you. 
• Predictive Retention Analytics: AI uses predictive analytics to find candidates with high retention potential, so you can prioritize candidates who are most likely to stick around for a long time. 

Strategies to Complement AI-Driven Rural Healthcare Recruitment

AI solutions like Arya can source quality candidates in a matter of minutes, saving recruiters 25 to 30 hours per month in sourcing time. Arya also evaluates candidates based on over 300 parameters and 7 multi-dimensional data points that ensure thorough and objective assessment of candidate compatibility and suitability. But once you’ve identified quality candidates for your roles, how can you increase their likelihood of accepting a rural healthcare position? 

Consider why your job opening in a rural area is different from one in a city, and use that to your advantage when engaging with candidates. Highlight the hidden benefits of living and working in a rural area, such as: 

• A tight-knit sense of community inside and outside of work and the opportunity to develop personal relationships with patients, coworkers and neighbors
• Feeling rewarded by serving an area in need of quality healthcare
• A slower pace of life and greater access to the outdoors
• A lower cost of living that allows their salary to stretch further

Creating opportunities for advancement and growth at your facility, providing relocation stipends, and offering flexible scheduling are other strategies that can also help motivate candidates to join — and remain at — rural healthcare facilities. 

Steps to Implement AI in Rural Healthcare Recruitment

Each healthcare provider is different, so it’s important to evaluate your needs before deciding which AI solutions are right for your hiring team. Here are a few questions to consider:

• What specific challenges does your team face in the hiring process? Perhaps identifying qualified candidates is your biggest challenge. You may want to consider an AI solution that provides targeted candidate sourcing. 
• What positions do you need to fill? If you need to fill a large number of roles, a solution like Applicants on Demand  for high-volume hiring might work well. On the other hand, if you’re struggling to fill a few specialized roles, a concierge solution may be more appropriate. 
• Do any steps in your hiring process feel inefficient? Maybe you feel that your interview process is inefficient. You could look to an AI tool like ChatGPT to help by generating interview questions or summarizing interview notes. 
• What recruitment metrics do you track? Metrics like number of hires, time-to-fill, and retention rates can help you evaluate the performance of your current program. Plus, they’ll act as a benchmark for determining the success of any new solutions that you implement. 

Let the answers to these questions guide your decision on how to implement AI-powered solutions in your hiring processes. 

AI Is Your Rural Healthcare Recruitment Solution

The American nursing shortage will continue into the future, especially in rural areas. Healthcare recruiters should look to AI for help sourcing candidates and then highlight the unique benefits of living and working in rural areas. By improving hiring efficiency, match quality, and retention rates, AI has the potential to bridge the recruitment gap in rural healthcare. 

Explore AI-driven recruitment solutions and book a meeting to learn how AI can solve your rural recruitment challenges.