Smartphones may be driving your IT department crazy, but your HR team loves them. The reason: Smartphones are helping make it easier to find, and hire, physicians, according to a story published in American Medical News this week.
Mobile savvy docs are using smartphones to find jobs, talk with other physicians about openings, and to quickly respond when employers make a move.
"The parts of the process that get you to the face-to-face can happen in a lot more efficient and user-friendly fashion [with mobile devices] than they ever could," Ralph Henderson, president of health care staffing for recruiting and job placement firm AMN Healthcare Services, tells amednews.
New data from AMN backs him up. In a survey released earlier this month, AMN reports that 41 percent of physicians use their mobile phone or tablet for job or health care-related content in 2011. And that's up from 37 percent in 2010.
Perhaps more interesting, however, is that 17 percent of clinicians are crafting mobile job alert apps to get immediate notification to positions as they come on the Web, the survey reports. One reason: Doctors can use the alerts to "passively" search for a job without spending hours online, Henderson says.
Other strategies physicians are using include mobile-enabled social media, where many hospitals place job listings, and specialized mobile job sites, which can allow docs to apply, and send in paperwork, via the mobile site.
Some are even conducting initial interviews via Skype or FaceTime video chat, or text chatting. So if your hospital is suffering from the physician shortage like most, it might be time to connect with HR and develop some mobile-enabled hiring tools of your own.
To learn more:
- read the American Medical News story
- check out the AMN Healthcare survey