Recruiting Healthcare Workers on the International Labor Market: A Megastudy

Not Applicable

Recruiting

• Conditions: Healthy

• Registration Number: NCT06793592
• Lead Sponsor: University of Aarhus

Brief 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.

Detailed Description

Not available

Study Timeline

• Status Verified: 2025-01
• Study First Submitted: 2025-01-20
• Study First Submitted QC: 2025-01-20
• Study Start: 2025-01-27
• Study First Posted: 2025-03-25
• Last Update Submitted: 2025-03-26
• Last Update Posted: 2025-04-01
• Primary Completion: 2025-06-30
• Study Completion: 2025-09

Recruitment & Eligibility

• Status: RECRUITING
• Sex: All
• Target Recruitment: 110000

Inclusion Criteria

Not provided

Exclusion Criteria

Not provided

Study & Design

• Study Type: INTERVENTIONAL
• Study Design: PARALLEL

Primary Outcome Measures

Name	Time	Method
Any engagement with recruitment message	Up to 4 weeks after reception of recruitment message	A binary indicator defined at the individual level, where 1 indicates that the individual, up to 4 weeks after receiving the message, accepted or declined the recruitment message, and/or wrote a text response to the recruitment message, and/or clicked on the link within the message.

Secondary Outcome Measures

Name	Time	Method
Positive engagement with recruitment message	Up to 4 weeks after reception of recruitment message	A binary indicator defined at the individual level, where 1 indicates that the individual, up to 4 weeks after receiving the message, accepted the recruitment message, and/or wrote a text response to the recruitment message, and/or clicked on the link within the message. Otherwise, the variable equals 0.
Click on the landing page	Up to 4 weeks after reception of recruitment message	A binary indicator at the individual level, where 1 indicates that the individual clicked the link to access the recruitment landing page up to 4 weeks after receiving the recruitment message. Otherwise, the variable equals 0.
Registration to the national database	Up to 12 weeks after after receiving the recruitment message (or having been expected to receive the recruitment message had they not been assigned to the control group)	A binary indicator at the individual level, where 1 indicates that the individual submitted their email address to sign up to the national database up to 12 weeks after receiving the recruitment message (or having been expected to receive the recruitment message had they not been assigned to the control group).; In the event that a study participant registers to the national database prior to having received a recruitment message (or for the control group, prior to the date they would have received the recruitment message), and in all other cases, the variable equals zero.

Trial Locations

Locations (1)

Aarhus University; 🇩🇰 Aarhus, Denmark