2025
Hiring
Insights
Report
Healthcare
Challenges, trends, and opportunities
from over 100 healthcare talent leaders.
Healthcare hiring in 2024 was defined by urgent demand, mounting pressures, and high stakes. The industry’s ongoing talent shortage collided with growing provider burnout and turnover, leaving TA leaders struggling to maintain workforce levels essential to patient care. Meanwhile, candidates, aware of their value in such a constrained labor market, demanded faster, more transparent hiring processes and a seamless experience. These challenges, combined with unmanageable workloads for recruiters and hiring managers, created a perfect storm for healthcare TA teams.
Despite these hurdles, healthcare organizations took important steps forward by embracing technology, improving candidate engagement, and streamlining processes. Yet, persistent bottlenecks—like untrained interviewers, scheduling inefficiencies, and slow decision-making—continued to hamper progress. This section of our report examines how these factors reshaped healthcare hiring strategies, driving a shift toward innovation while exposing areas still in need of attention.
As the sector looks to 2025, healthcare TA leaders have an opportunity to transform their approach to hiring. By prioritizing operational efficiency, leveraging automation, and fostering meaningful candidate relationships, the industry can begin to alleviate workforce shortages and build more sustainable hiring practices. Let’s look at the lessons of 2024 and the strategies healthcare leaders can deploy to address the challenges ahead.
Executive summary
Percentage of hiring
goals achieved
51% said the healthcare hiring landscape became more competitive
Top hiring challenge:
Retaining top talent
57% of leaders said
time-to-hire increased
Top priority in 2025:
Improving overall hiring efficiency
Looking back at 2024: Healthcare hiring jolts forward in the face of major challenges
The healthcare sector made measurable progress in 2024, achieving 56% of its hiring goals—a significant improvement from 46% in 2023. However, hiring leaders faced numerous challenges that reflect the unique pressures of the industry.
Operational inefficiencies added to these difficulties, with organizations citing challenges such as adapting to hybrid or remote interview processes, managing large applicant volumes, and navigating outdated hiring technology. Candidate no-shows and dropouts—often tied to poor communication or lack of engagement—disrupted hiring timelines, while untrained hiring managers further slowed progress.
These challenges illustrate the steep hurdles healthcare organizations continue to face in a landscape defined by workforce shortages and high burnout. Despite improvements in hiring outcomes, 2024 emphasized the pressing need for healthcare leaders to adopt innovative solutions that address these unique challenges and ensure more sustainable progress.
Time-to-hire challenges continue to strain healthcare hiring amid provider shortages
How healthcare tackled hiring challenges in 2024
Organizations also prioritized time-to-hire (40%) and cost-per-hire (39%) improvements, recognizing that speed and cost efficiency are critical to staying competitive in a constrained labor market. Investments in AI and automation (37%) played a growing role in streamlining scheduling and reducing administrative burdens, while a smaller percentage (23%) began upgrading hiring technologies to modernize processes.
While technology upgrades ranked lower on the list of focus areas (23%), the data suggests that teams may be underutilizing hiring technology as a solution to some of their top challenges. Investing in the right tools—particularly those that streamline scheduling and reduce administrative tasks—could help address persistent bottlenecks like time-to-hire, cost efficiency, and candidate engagement.
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Building a fast and simple recruiting process for candidates
In 2024, healthcare organizations focused on simplifying the hiring process, with improved scheduling efficiency (54%) and fast interview-to-offer timelines (52%) topping the list of priorities.
Tools to enhance the candidate experience and provide transparency in the process further helped streamline hiring and boost engagement.
By enabling automated scheduling and offering flexibility, such as rescheduling through platforms (47%), organizations reduced friction and created a more candidate-friendly process.
How healthcare hiring teams measure success
In 2024, healthcare organizations prioritized metrics focused on retention and hiring efficiency, with employee turnover rate (53%) and quality of hire (46%) leading the way. Metrics like offer acceptance rate (43%) and cost-per-hire (42%) highlighted the focus on operational efficiency, while diversity of candidates (38%) and time-to-hire (37%) reflected priorities around balancing equity and speed.
How healthcare talent leaders are gearing up for 2025
Interestingly, 47% believe the hiring landscape will become less competitive due to an increase in available talent, despite the ongoing shortage of qualified providers3. This contradiction may stem from a broader pool of job seekers entering the market, but not all candidates may meet the specific qualifications required in the healthcare industry. As a result, while talent availability may rise, the demand for highly specialized, credentialed professionals will likely remain a critical challenge.
Key challenges for 2025 include retaining top talent (34%), mismatched skills among applicants (32%), and unmanageable workloads for recruiting teams (27%). Candidate dropouts and difficulties adapting to hybrid interview processes are expected to persist, adding further complexity. Addressing these challenges will require healthcare organizations to refine their hiring processes and invest in tools that support speed, personalization, and flexibility, while also focusing on retaining skilled workers in an increasingly demanding landscape.
Healthcare leaders prioritize efficiency above all else in 2025
Final thoughts and key takeaways
This year, healthcare hiring teams faced immense challenges, from a shortage of qualified providers to extended time-to-hire and inefficiencies in hiring processes. As demand for healthcare talent surged, the sector increasingly turned to technology and automation to streamline workflows and improve the candidate experience. However, challenges such as high recruitment team turnover, unmanageable workloads, and growing candidate demands highlighted the need for continued innovation and adaptability.
Looking ahead to 2025, healthcare leaders should prioritize:
Investing in hiring technology:
Upgrading tools to optimize workflows, improve scheduling, and enhance communication will be crucial for reducing time-to-hire and increasing operational efficiency.
Enhancing candidate engagement:
Personalization, transparency, and fast hiring processes will help attract and retain top talent in an increasingly competitive market.
Building recruiter and hiring manager capacity:
Providing training and leveraging automation can ease the burden on recruitment teams, enabling them to manage workflows more effectively while maintaining high hiring standards.
Tracking meaningful metrics:
Expanding the focus on candidate experience metrics alongside efficiency measures like time-to-hire will provide actionable insights to refine processes and remain competitive.
