HUS year 2022: Personnel availability and recruitment

Personnel availability continued to be a challenge in 2022. There were nearly 4,000 vacancies at HUS, with more than 26,000 applicants. 

Personnel availability was affected by the general national availability of health and social services personnel and by the profiling of HUS as a desirable workplace. Our personnel is our most important resource, and we continuously strive to find sustainable solutions to ensure sufficient personnel in the short and long term while considering local differences within our area of operation.

Several regional recruiters joined us in 2022 to support supervisors with recruitment and to ensure better applicant experiences. 

Personnel availability was affected by the HUS employer profile, which was found to be poor among potential applicants (Luottamus&Maine survey 8/2022). Workplace atmosphere, career prospects and pay levels were considered particularly poor. In 2022, we used approximately EUR 7 million to increase wages and approximately EUR 2.7 million to extend one-time bonuses.

Various internal personnel studies show that there are a lot of good things at HUS as well, but these are not so prominent in the employer profile projected to the outside. Our strategic goal is to be the best community for research, learning and meaningful work, and because of this it is important for our internal and external employer profile and our employee experience to be consistent.  

Systematically improving our employer profile 

The average duration of employment at HUS is 11.6 years. It was found in a survey for new employees that 90% of them would recommend HUS as an employer. The same question posed in a survey for all HUS employees returned a recommendation rate of 69%.

In 2022, a road map for continuous improvement of our employer profile was created for systematic publicity about HUS as an employer and for measuring the effectiveness of measures taken. This will also help us improve our operations. In this project, we also updated our recruitment concept, considering brand consistency and the employer promise we adopted in 2020: At HUS, you have the job of your life.  

International recruitment 

International recruitment is considered an important part of overall recruitment at HUS. In 2022, we joined the international recruitment network of the wellbeing services counties, the purpose of which is to engage with stakeholders nationwide for the purpose of finding ways to secure availability of health and social services personnel.

Towards the end of 2022, HUS launched an internal survey in multi-discipline cooperation to gauge the potential for ensuring availability through international recruitment. A pilot project on international nurse recruitment was run with a partner in 2022, and this work will continue in 2023.