“Looking to save time and cut hiring costs? A nursing recruitment agency can help you find qualified staff quickly and keep your healthcare team running smoothly.”
If you’ve ever worked in healthcare or recruitment, you’ll know both industries are incredibly stressful in their own right. Now put them together, and you’ve got hospital HR departments – where the combined stress levels could have the cardio team arriving at a run, not a walk on any given day…
So, what parts of hospital HR can a nursing agency actually take care of?
I have personally worked inside the four walls of a hospital, and on the other side as an external recruiter, and I concur that nursing recruitment is more than just finding the best person for the role. It is reviewing hundreds of CVs that don’t fit the brief to find that one golden nugget that has experience in everything required and then some. It’s speaking to nurses and carers, and understanding their motivations and ambitions.
The C word, (compliance), is a huge part of external recruitment. It’s taking the time to work with each candidate to arrange, and sometimes cover the cost of training, support them through the process and get them 100% compliant before even sending the CV over to our friends in hospital HR.
Our entire role is about finding the right nurse, healthcare assistant, or support worker for a hospital, and supporting them through every stage of the recruitment process so when they arrive to the hospital on their first day, you know they are committed to providing the best care and support to your patients, because we provided them with the best care and support from our first conversation, to their first shift with you.
Well how exactly are nursing agencies saving hospitals time and money?
You might say there’s a fatal flaw in that sentence- how can we save hospital’s money by asking them to spend it you ask? Simple. First and foremost, a nursing recruitment agency will drastically reduce your recruitment costs. All that money going into advertising roles and screening/ interviewing candidates is covered by the recruitment company handling the full process. Cost-effective nursing recruitment also means the agency will cover training and compliance expenses, delivering fully compliant staff with no extra fee.
Now, that’s all well and good but you may still ask, is a nursing agency more cost-effective than direct hire? We say, yes! Outsourcing nursing recruitment to an agency will reduce your permanent staff’s burnout and turnover rates, by padding out your rosters and maintaining safe staffing levels with our temporary support.
“Time is money”, especially in the healthcare industry.
If hospital departments are anything, they are time – short. Collaborating with a recruitment agency will give you pockets of time back so you can focus on your other responsibilities, while we focus on your recruitment. Firstly, we speed up the hiring process, with a pool of pre-vetted, ready-to-work nurses for immediate deployment. The administrative side of recruitment that can slow a hospital down is immediately streamlined with our compliance checks, interviewing, and referencing. We spend our days knee deep in admin so you don’t have to!
The pièce de résistance? The 24/7 availability of any healthcare recruitment agency worth their salt. Hospitals don’t close at 5pm, although I’m sure many healthcare workers wished they did! People continue to get sick well into the night and early hours of the morning. This is why nursing agencies operate around the clock, offering last-minute staffing support when hospitals need it most.
Why It’s Not Just About Finding Warm Bodies..
At the end of the day, working with a nursing recruitment agency is about so much more than just filling shifts. It’s about finding the right people who genuinely care and are ready to hit the ground running. It’s about easing the pressure on hospital HR teams and making sure patients get the quality care they deserve from day one. That’s why for so many in-house teams, partnering with an agency isn’t just a choice, it’s a necessity.
