Healthcare workers in high demand yet not easy to fill such roles: Indeed Jobs

New Delhi: 2021 marks almost 18 months of our battle with Covid-19 around the world. The healthcare system globally has been stretched beyond capacity and continues to remain resilient. Approximately 61,00,000 healthcare workers are on Covid duty in India but are they enough?

Needless to say, healthcare workers are in high demand. But it’s not easy to fill those roles.  To identify the hardest-to-fill healthcare roles, we compiled a list based on the percentage of jobs unfilled after two months (Job postings can be open for longer than 60 days for different reasons; in this case Indeed uses this measure as a proxy for hiring difficulty.)

It turns out that many of the hardest-to-fill healthcare roles are quite advanced, with the majority being doctor roles. And of all the roles, nursing roles appear thrice on the list – Nurse to doctor ratio in India estimated to be 1.7:1 on the basis of recent NSSO data.

** Hospitals are also looking for coding specialists and Medical writers.

While nurses jobs are hard to fill, they are also the most posted –  job postings for ‘registered nurses’ saw an increase of 13% in August 2021 as compared to August 2020 on Indeed. Along with nurses, job postings for physicians (7%), laboratory technician (6%), pharmacist (5%) and nurse (4%) also showed a steady increase, reveals data from Indeed.com jobs portal.

A city-wise analysis of the hiring activity in the sector revealed that Bangalore (9%) drove the hiring for healthcare with maximum job postings, followed by Chennai (7%), Mumbai (5%), Hyderabad (4%), and Pune (3%).

Nurses, physicians, laboratory technicians, pharmacists among others have played a crucial role during the pandemic. The trend reflected in Indeed’s data as job seeker interest (clicks) for roles such as registered nurse (13%), laboratory technician (9%), pharmacist (7%), back-office medical assistant (6%), and physician (5%) witnessed growth in August 2021 as compared to August 2020.

Sashi Kumar, Head of Sales, Indeed says “As the government continues to give impetus to the healthcare sector, there is bound to be a growing demand for healthcare job roles. The Central Government is focussed on skilled manpower associated with the healthcare sector. We hope this will positively impact efficiency of health services in the country. The better healthcare employers are able to fill those roles, the healthier we will all be.”