Recently qualified healthcare professionals face a different labour market compared to recent years. A checklist for employers, outlines options to consider when helping newly qualified healthcare professionals secure their first permanent post.
See the Shared learning section for examples of what trusts have done, often working with their SHA, to support healthcare graduates. Examples include:
Supporting new qualifiers - checklist for employers
- Review the skill mix every time a vacancy arises and look to up-skill existing staff to free up space for newly qualified healthcare professionals.
Post vacancies for new qualifiers on the e-recruitment service, NHS Jobs, that is accessed by graduates.
- Consider introducing accelerated development programmes to up-skill the current workforce into specialist roles to free up posts for new qualifiers - for example up-skilling junior physios could mean more vacancies for graduates, as well as filling currently hard-to-fill senior physio roles.
- Review temporary staffing policies to better use the skills of new qualifiers through flexible staff pools, and then redeploy them to permanent posts as they arise.
- Maximise the opportunities to redesign or reconfigure services to support newly qualified healthcare professionals by not placing unnecessary conditions on employment, for example specifying periods or types of post-qualification experience.
- Review the use of fixed-term and temporary contracts and when the opportunity arises, consider offering these to new qualifiers - this will also reduce recruitment and turnover costs.
- Provide additional training or personalised training in primary care to enable new qualifiers to go directly into community roles without acute experience.
Work with the range of employers in local government, independent and third sectors to identify opportunities across all sectors.
- Encourage newly qualifieds (as well as final year students) to register on NHS Jobs, which has the facility to set both pre-application and filtering questions for each vacancy, to improve candidate quality - newly qualifieds should have the chance to apply for posts at Band 5.
- Also encourage new qualifiers to register for NHS Jobs profile pools to get the most out of NHS Jobs and to access additional vacancy information that might not be available through NHS Jobs.