Healthcare is a notoriously slow industry. It is – understandably – heavily regulated in order to take care of consumers. However, all those regulations also mean that things are slowed down on the administrative side.
Kopi Nadarajah is trying to help the industry with at least one aspect of the time consuming administrative side through HealthcareLink, a job search platform built specifically for healthcare professionals.
HealthcareLink was originally a recruitment agency, which Nadarajah says opened his eyes to the challenges both employers and job searchers in the medical industry face.
“Employers face a high cost of recruitment, either through agencies or even independently, in the form of time taken to advertise the job through sufficient avenues, sift through applications and deal with rating and shortlisting candidates,” Nadarajah says.
“Health professionals, on the other hand, face the challenge of not having a quality source of medical and healthcare jobs and not having access to a technology that made their job search experience better, having to rely too much on a handful of recruitment agencies to find the vacancies for them.”
At first glance, the job search market seems incredibly saturated. One would imagine that between them, big players Seek and CareerOne have cornered the market, but Nadarajah believes that the healthcare industry is not being served well by existing job search platforms.
“The healthcare industry is highly regulated in Australia, which means employer needs to tick off a lot of different types of boxes before being able to shortlist a candidate. This isn’t possible on other job platforms and it makes the hiring process very manual and time-consuming,” he says.
It is true that a job in the healthcare industry requires a set of qualifications and experience vastly different to jobs in other industries that are regularly advertised on big platforms like Seek. It’s easy to filter communications or data entry jobs, for example, and quickly send through a resume, but healthcare requires a little bit extra.
HeathcareLink allows employers to set criteria for and then filter through the type of candidates they are looking for, including specialty, AHPRA registration, visa, job type, and availability.
“Using this, they can sort through candidates quickly and shortlist the ones that are best suited for the job vacancy. Medical professionals seeking jobs can also use this filtering function to find the jobs that suit them best, based on their criteria,” Nadarajah says.
HealthcareLink already has a number of clients, including medical centres, diagnostic clinics, and both public and private hospitals. Nadarajah says HealthcareLink is growing on both the employer and job seeker ends precisely because it is a niche platform, which means it is attracting experienced health professionals.
“Speaking particularly to the job platforms such as Seek or CareerOne, when a healthcare job vacancy is listed, they don’t receive the number or quality of applications as, say a vacancy in accounting, marketing or IT might,” Nadarajah says.
The platform is free to use through the basic model. A job seeker can create a profile where they can add in their education and experience, while employers can set up a profile for their business and post job ads and receive direct applications. Employers can then pay for an add-on package to view profiles of job seekers who fit their selection criteria and to promote their job ad above others.
The HealthcareLink team aims to attract at least 5 percent of Australia’s estimated 45,000 healthcare employers within the next year.
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