Ethical Recruiting: How RIG Locums is leading the way in specialist recruitment

RIG Locums is the UK’s leading ethical recruiter of specialist locum doctors. After years of experience within the industry, we have developed expertise in sourcing the very best international doctors for highly specialised and hard to fill locum roles. We are also regarded as a key supplier of locums at speciality doctor and consultant’s level to the National Health Service (NHS) – one of the world’s largest and most well-regarded health care systems.

The NHS employs over 1.7 million people, making it one of the biggest employers globally. However, due to skills shortages in the UK workforce, the NHS has had to broaden its employment scope and recruit doctors from overseas. Nearly 70 years from its inception, the NHS is still sourcing a significant percentage of its specialist doctors from around the world. In fact, in 2014 approximately 37% of the doctors licensed to practice by the General Medical Council (GMC) had received their medical degree from a country outside of the UK. To gain more insight on how and why international doctors decide to transition into the NHS, please read our extensive white paper here.

RIG Locums prides itself on truly understanding the challenges faced by healthcare providers across the country and tailoring our award winning service to meet those needs. We noticed that it was nearly impossible to place suitably qualified specialist doctors without depleting the supply to neighbouring trusts and realised this was not a sustainable or ‘ethical’ approach. We have set out to build a reputation as the leading ethical recruiter of healthcare professionals to help ease departmental pressures, reduce backlogs and improve waiting lists within the health service. We define ethical recruitment as that which incrementally increases the supply of doctors into the NHS rather than using the existing pool of local candidates (which hospitals could already have access to via banks).

Examples of some of the many specialisations we cover include: consultant dermatologists, experience oncologists, consultant radiologists, specialist surgeons and paediatricians. We have been able to achieve such great results by focusing on an ‘incremental supply’ approach, which aims to source the highly skilled professionals our clients would not otherwise have access to – i.e. those who have not already received medical training in the NHS. Unlike other agencies who may simply be matching large volumes of incoming vacancies to candidates already on their databases, the candidates we place do not already exist in the local market and could not have been sourced via a local bank. In fact, 85% of all candidates we have placed at RIG Locums have been trained outside of the UK, meaning we are able to increase the supply of doctors in a way that other agencies could not.

Our data shows that the remaining 15% of candidates (who were trained by the NHS) were actually NHS retirees and doctors who wanted to gain specific assignments, skills and experience in trusts that they would not be able to access through NHS bank systems. We are not simply recycling existing talent from within the system but giving local doctors who want to take on locum work the opportunity to improve their CV or even just take on short-term work after retirement.

What sets us apart from the ‘general’ agencies is that most of our candidates are handpicked through tailored global search campaigns conducted by our specialist recruiters and not only through database mining. Our personalised approach can be demonstrated by the fact that nearly 40% of all our sourced candidates were found through either networking or referrals. Our reach is wide, with extensive global networks giving us access to the best candidates in every continent. The majority of candidates who we have placed thus far have originated from Europe (35%), Asia (31%) and Africa (23%), which has meant that we are able to consistently deliver both highly skilled and diverse candidates.

For further information on how we can support your trust in tailoring recruitment campaigns to meet your demands for specialist locum doctors please email our Business Manager, Debbie Hunter on [email protected] or call on 07584 147 640 to discuss further. 

Or if you’re a medical professional looking to find out more about working in the UK or would like any advice on positions currently available please visit us here or contact us on 0044 (0) 800 690 6044 to speak to one of our specialist recruiters.