How Different Is Physician Recruitment from RN Recruitment – Nurses and medical doctors work under the healthcare umbrella, and both are vital in administering health services. However, the recruitment processes for nurses and doctors are distinct from each other. There are similarities, but there are notable differences.
To be clear, these differences do not entail that one is inferior or superior to the other. The two play different roles and are both essential in ensuring proper patient care. The distinctions clarify the complementary functions they perform.
How Different Is Physician Recruitment from RN Recruitment
Recruitment approach
One of the most notable differences between RN and physician recruitment is the approach. Physicians are usually targeted for recruitment. There is a reason why recruitment sites like mascmedical.com exist. Physicians have specializations and a breadth of experiences that make them suitable for specific roles. There are even cases when headhunters have to hold networking events and medical conferences to target the most suitable physician candidates. In contrast, the recruitment of registered nurses is usually broad-based, and it seldom happens that specific nurses are targeted.
Screening
Studying to be a physician and studying to be a nurse are clearly different. The former involves the completion of a medical degree plus a number of years of residency training in a particular field of specialization. Meanwhile, the education requirement for the latter either takes around three years of college schooling to get a BSN degree or a two-year associate’s degree program.
This difference in educational requirements entails the need for rigorous candidate screening for physicians. This is not to say that there is no scrutiny over nurses’ academic backgrounds. However, the evaluation of nurses is usually not as strict as those of doctors, especially when hospitals are encountering staff shortage.
Required experience
Nurses and doctors are all required to have the necessary experience before they are considered for recruitment. However, headhunters tend to have different ways of looking at the experiences of nurses and doctors. With nurses, recruiters prefer those who have broader experiences in different settings and treatments. It’s the opposite when it comes to doctors since recruiters usually look for physicians who have established mastery in specific fields.
The reason for this is the nature of the two jobs. Nurses are involved in direct patient care, like the administration of medicines and monitoring of patients. They need to be exposed to a wide range of patients and treatment scenarios because they can be assigned to assist different doctors with different specializations. The recruitment of physicians usually focuses on their specialization or reputation in specific fields. Headhunters may also look for general practitioners, but in most cases, recruitment focuses on specialists.
Again, the point of discussing these differences is not to show which healthcare professional is better or more needed. Both are crucial in the healthcare industry. Doctors need nurses to perform their responsibilities. Nurses cannot provide the kind of services doctors provide. They complement each other. However, it makes sense for recruiters to evaluate their credentials and experiences differently since the nature of their work is different, and they fulfill different needs.