A health care recruiter is a person who seeks out health care professionals such as doctors and nurses and places them in jobs appropriate to their qualifications. A hospital or health care center may hire a health care recruiter to find professionals to fill open positions at the hospital, or a recruiter may work on a freelance basis and take jobs from various hospitals, health care clinics, and other facilities looking for doctors and nurses. While the recruiter does not need to be a doctor or nurse himself, it helps to have a background in the medical field, or at least be knowledgeable about the field.
If a health care recruiter works for a specific hospital or medical facility, he or she will seek out medical professionals to fill positions at that institution. The process may include meeting with the professionals face to face to talk about the medical facility and convince them why it would be a good fit for them; it may also include describing specific programs or processes at the hospital that will seem attractive to the job candidate, and essentially convincing the medical professional to leave his or her current job to come work for the new medical facility.
Sometimes a hospital or other medical facility will hire a freelance health care recruiter who runs his or her own business. This type of health care recruiter can work for several institutions at any given time, and sometimes even all at once. He or she will work on a sub-contracting or freelance basis until the positions at each facility are filled. If this is the route the recruiter takes, he or she will also be responsible for managing any employees, adhering to local, regional, or federal laws, promoting the business, keeping track of profits and losses, and all other activities associated with running an independent business.
At some larger medical facilities, the health care recruiter may be responsible for managing a staff. Several recruiters may be on staff at a larger facility, and depending on the specific structure of that department, some recruiters may be responsible for managing other recruiters. Bookkeeping responsibilities may also fall to the recruiter, as will making phone calls, writing e-mails, contacting potential job candidates, helping that candidate fill out the appropriate paperwork during or after the candidate has chosen to work for a particular institution, and possibly even helping the candidate make moving arrangements.