Recruiting Healthcare Workers on the International Labor Market: A Megastudy

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 nati