By Devin Partida, Editor-in-Chief, ReHack.com
LinkedIn: Devin Partida
LinkedIn: ReHack Magazine
As tech sector layoffs continue to impact various industries, a unique hiring opportunity grows more apparent. Can health care facilities take advantage of the growing number of unemployed tech workers?
Strategies for Capitalizing on Tech Sector Layoffs
Healthcare facilities can capitalize on tech sector layoffs if they employ the right strategies.
Hire Aggressively
Speed is crucial for securing tech workers before they find work elsewhere. In the information sector, unemployment lasted slightly over eight weeks in early 2024 — barely enough time to source, interview and onboard. Aggressive hiring ensures a higher chance of success.
Appeal to Candidates
The tech sector can be stressful and overwhelming even without layoffs. Healthcare facilities should express understanding in response. Kindness and respect are powerful social motivators that may convince candidates to accept offers more readily.
Expand Hiring Efforts
Widespread downsizing has impacted all kinds of tech workers. Since layoffs remain typical in the sector, people of all experience levels are unemployed. Expanding hiring efforts to include entry-level, mid-range and senior professionals makes success more likely.
Showcase Innovation
While regulations and standardization limit most health care facilities from adopting the latest technologies, tech workers value digitalization and innovation. IT professionals should showcase modern equipment and systems to compel people to apply.
Emphasize Resilience
Tech workers seeking employment due to layoffs may feel particularly vulnerable, so they will appreciate stability. Hiring professionals should stress the health care industry’s resilience during economic downturn to convince candidates to accept a position.
Offer Remote Work
Healthcare facilities must consider offering hybrid or work-from-home positions. While around 70% of people in the information industry work partially or fully remotely, only 40% of those in health care do — meaning many tech workers expect the option to telecommute.
The Benefits of Hiring Tech Workers in Health Care
The technical skill shortage in health care has stalled industry-wide IT innovation. In other words, it has slowed digital transformation efforts substantially. Even if facilities hire temporary workers externally or leverage third-party vendors, they still miss out on critical expertise.
Workers from the tech sector bring fresh perspectives into the healthcare industry. Their unique experiences and expertise fill in critical knowledge gaps. They can help develop patient care and IT system innovations, furthering facilities’ strategic digitalization goals.
Tech workers can streamline workflows because they aren’t held back by conventional thinking. As a result, they can devise new approaches to longstanding technical and operational issues — improving patient care and giving senior IT leaders more time to prioritize critical tasks.
The Importance of Cultural Fit When Hiring Tech Workers
While the healthcare industry should hurry to take advantage of tech sector layoffs, it should also be strategic in its candidate sourcing and hiring efforts. At the end of the day, new hires’ goals, morals and attitudes should align with their employers.
Hires who are a cultural fit are more likely to experience higher job satisfaction because they enjoy what they’re doing. This improvement causes a domino effect — department-wide collaboration, employee retention and overall productivity rates improve as a result.
While hiring professionals can surely secure productive, collaborative tech workers regardless of how aligned their personal beliefs are with their employer’s goals, scouting and hiring a cultural fit will likely be much more beneficial in the long run.
The Need for Cross-Sector Orientation for Tech Workers
In the context of health care facilities capitalizing on layoffs, cross-sector orientation involves leveraging tech workers’ expertise for healthcare-related challenges. Basically, it revolves around bridging the gap between the two industries.
While tech workers are undoubtedly knowledgeable of many of the technical aspects of the healthcare industry, they may not yet understand the nuances of compliance, patient privacy and the health IT ecosystem. In other words, they will need to learn.
Facilities must prioritize cross-sector orientation for tech workers to help them understand the intricacies of the healthcare IT ecosystem. This way, they can develop industry-specific solutions to accommodate providers and improve patient outcomes.
Unemployed Tech Workers Signal an Opportunity
If the healthcare industry reacts swiftly and strategically, it can acquire top tech talent with little effort. In other words, it can pave the way for sector-wide digital transformation, permanently putting many facilities ahead of the competition.