Healthcare hiring is at a breaking point. It’s time to rethink it.

For healthcare hiring teams, success has never been just about filling roles faster.

It’s about ensuring critical frontline positions are filled with qualified people who can deliver high-quality care to patients without delay.

But today’s reality makes that goal harder than ever to achieve.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment in healthcare occupations is projected to grow much faster than average through 2034, with approximately 1.9 million openings expected every year. That kind of demand would challenge any industry. For healthcare, it’s compounded by an ongoing shortage of qualified talent and hiring processes that simply can’t keep up.

In many organizations, inefficiencies, overwhelming applicant volumes, and long hiring cycles are the norm. And when projections suggest that many of those roles may remain unfilled, the pressure on hiring teams becomes unsustainable.

Trisearch reports that shortages could reach 124,000 physicians by 2033, while healthcare organizations must hire 200,000 nurses annually just to maintain baseline staffing levels. The nursing shortage is particularly severe, with potential shortfalls of up to 450,000 registered nurses needed for direct patient care.

The result? Healthcare hiring teams are being asked to do the impossible: hire faster, hire better, and hire at scale often with fewer resources and higher stakes than ever before.

3 challenges redefining healthcare hiring

While every organization feels the pressure differently, today’s healthcare hiring landscape is shaped by 3 consistent challenges.

1. Talent and skills scarcity

Healthcare organizations aren’t just competing for applicants. They’re competing for qualified applicants. Identifying candidates with the right skills, credentials, and capabilities for high-impact frontline roles is increasingly difficult. And when resume-based screening fails to reflect real-world performance, top talent can easily be missed.

2. Workforce retention and turnover

Healthcare continues to face a turnover crisis that affects everything from patient experience to team morale. Constant backfilling drains time and budgets, disrupts operations, and keeps hiring teams stuck in a reactive cycle. Without better insight into who will succeed and stay, organizations are left hiring again and again.

3. Hiring efficiency and cost pressure

High applicant volumes combined with manual screening, phone screens, and extended time-to-hire put enormous strain on recruiters. 

Delays don’t just slow hiring. They impact patient care, drive overtime costs, and stretch already-overburdened teams.

Together, these challenges create a hiring environment where speed and quality are often treated as tradeoffs—and where both candidates and hiring teams feel the impact.

A smarter way forward for healthcare hiring

To move forward, healthcare organizations need to rethink how early hiring decisions are made.

Hirevue addresses these challenges by revealing who can actually do the job early in the process, so no time is wasted on the wrong candidates.

With science-backed Assessments and Intelligent Interviewing at the core of the hiring process, Hirevue helps healthcare teams move beyond resumes and gut instinct to focus on what truly matters: skills, capability, and potential for long-term success.

Instead of screening more, teams can screen smarter, identifying best-fit candidates quickly and consistently, even at scale.

What healthcare teams can achieve with Hirevue

When skills and intelligence drive hiring decisions, healthcare teams can:

• Deliver consistent, efficient evaluations that fast-track qualified candidates for critical roles
• Save time without sacrificing quality or candidate experience
• Reduce costly turnover by identifying candidates more likely to succeed and stay
• Hire faster, so teams can focus on what matters most—providing quality care to patients 

Healthcare hiring doesn’t have to be a constant crisis. With the right tools, organizations can build resilient, skilled workforces that keep care moving forward even in the face of unprecedented demand.

Learn more about healthcare hiring here or request a demo.