Making a Career as a Medical Professional: Qualities Every Applicant Needs

Editorial Team

Making a Career as a Medical Professional

Are you looking to hire a healthcare professional to fill a specific position that’s been vacant for just a little too long? Well, it turns out that you aren’t alone.

With more than 1,000 hospitals across the U.S. experiencing critical staff shortages, healthcare professionals are needed in various fields, from front-line nurses to physician’s assistants. Job postings are piling up on many sites, and as hospitals’ current staff experience severe burnout from dealing with wave after wave of the pandemic, the staff shortage worsens with each passing week.

You need qualified professionals to hear about and start looking into your job postings. The only problem is none seem to be showing up.

Recruitment Agencies Can Help

Part of the problem may be built into your recruitment strategy. Suppose you suspect that the processes you’re using to hook candidates and bring them in may be part of the reason why you aren’t able to attract new candidates. In that case, you might want to consider enlisting the services of a physician recruitment agency.

A qualified physician recruitment agency has tenured associates managing separate regions, being intimately familiar with the proper means of reaching and acquiring candidates in those regions. Hiring an agency may be the fastest way to acquire quality candidates and fill needed vacancies quickly.

The Search for the Ideal Candidate

Regardless of whether you choose to enlist outside help in your search for the perfect candidate, there are certain qualities that you should screen for. These qualities are required across most healthcare fields, as they will serve your facility well and enable the candidate to provide maximum-quality care for patients. You can also look up tips and tricks that employees use to stand out during interviews: while some of them aren’t featured below, if a candidate takes the time to learn about the history of your facility and puts their best foot forward, they’re showing valuable enthusiasm for the position.

Let’s talk about what some of those qualities are.

Superb Communication Skills

While your employee is on duty, their communication skills could literally mean life or death for any number of patients. If a patient communicates their needs, your candidate should be able to understand them and strive to meet those needs without fail, as well as be able to communicate them to supervisors and coworkers clearly.

Communication skills are very important in any number of healthcare settings, as how well your team works together often depends on their collective ability to communicate with one another. Especially with the high-pressure nature of the field at the moment, which can cause the environment to become hectic and make every second count, clear communication is an absolute must.

Emotional Fortitude

Sometimes, the business of healthcare can get messy. Patients can suffer long-term or quit without much warning, and it takes a special type of person to put their feelings about it aside, turning to help the others in their care.

While emotional fortitude is hardly something you can test for, you can perhaps weed out those who are less capable of being in that environment by being upfront with them about the nature of the job. Most med students will be prepared for the above eventualities, but people transitioning to the medical field from an unrelated focus may not: it’s better for you to enlighten them before they sign on than have them discover the reality of the job afterward.

Attention to Detail

This, however, you can test for. Sometimes in the healthcare field, not paying attention to the small details can literally be a life and death situation: prescribing somebody the wrong medicine, for example, or missing a component on their chart that results in them not getting proper treatment. Your ideal candidate must be detail-oriented and unwilling to cut corners, understanding the potential consequences of doing so.

A Compassionate Spirit

More than anything else, your ideal candidate should have an empathetic mindset and the ability to be attentive to the needs of others. Being able to put yourself in the place of the patient is an incredibly important skill, one which some jaded long-term healthcare professionals still struggle with. Burnt out healthcare individuals might not have the emotional capacity to put themselves into patients’ shoes, resulting in a lackluster bedside manner.

You want someone who has that “fresh out of medical school” passion for taking care of others, the drive to make the world a better place with what they do at your facility. That drive will be the thing that keeps your candidate around through the rougher times, as hospitals are still struggling from post-pandemic fallout.

Hunting for the ideal candidate can be difficult, especially when the healthcare industry at large is in such dire straits. However, keeping these qualities in mind and enlisting a recruitment agency to facilitate your hiring process, you might just stumble upon the right person to fill that vacant position.