Recruiting Healthcare Workers on the International Labor Market: A Megastudy

Summary

Public health organizations in Denmark and most Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries face an urgent demand for nursing staff. However, existing research does not yet offer a systematic understanding of how to attract talent to public healthcare organizations from the international labor markets.

In this study, the researchers will collaborate with a network of Danish public healthcare service providers led by the implementation partner Copenhagen Capacity to implement a large-scale megastudy (n=110,000), aimed at recruiting nurses and nursing assistants from across the European Union to Denmark. The study takes an employer-driven recruitment approach, co-designing and implementing a national recruitment campaign that uses social media job platforms to identify and contact potential recruits with a direct, personal message coming from a national recruitment agency.

The study aims to answer three research questions:

Research Question 1: Does receiving a behaviorally informed recruitment message (relative to a message with no employer value proposition) motivate a prospective employee to engage? Research Question 2: Does receiving any recruitment message (relative to receiving no message) motivate a prospective employee to engage? Research Question 3: What factors - that could be emphasized as employer value propositions in a short message - would motivate a prospective employee to engage?

Study participants will be randomly assigned to one of 10 treatment conditions in which they'll receive a recruitment message highlighting different employer value propositions or a simplified message including no employer value proposition, or to a control group that will receive no message.

Researchers will analyze differences across groups in terms of engagement after receiving a recruitment message, which can involve accepting, declining, responding to the message, clicking on a link within the message, and in this link registering to a national database to receive regular newsletters featuring job advertisements.

Conditions

• Healthy

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Behaviorally informed recruitment message

Study participants will receive a behaviorally informed recruitment message that highlights an employer value proposition.

BEHAVIORAL

Simplified direct message with no employer value proposition

Study participants will receive a simplified message that does not highlight any specific employer value proposition.

BEHAVIORAL

No message

Study participants will not receive a recruitment message.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Harvard University

  collaborator OTHER

• University of Aarhus

  lead OTHER

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

OTHER

Masking

SINGLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2025-01-27

Primary Completion

2025-07-31

Completion

2025-12-31

Countries

• Denmark

Study Locations