Healthcare and education aren’t just sectors or industries – they’re the foundations of our society, and the building blocks of our collective future. By recruiting exclusively within these two areas, we’re distinctly aware of just how much what we do matters. It is of paramount importance for us to understand exactly who our candidates are; your desires, dreams, likes and challenges as the work that you carry out keeps us and our loved ones safe.

Every day, every Athona candidate affects futures and we don’t take our responsibility in your career journey lightly.

The results from our recent healthcare candidate survey have given us a greater insight into the habits of you; our healthcare candidates, so we can understand more about how you search for your next job role, social media habits, motivation for working with us as an agency and how else we can better support you; both professionally and personally.

You spoke, we listened; below are five key points we are working on from the results:

1. 87% of our candidates said they would be interested if we offered training to earn CPD points

We asked if it would be of interest to you if we offered training where CPD points were available, and the results were overwhelmingly positive. So we’re working hard to continue to offer a series of informative, CPD accredited webinars with financial specialists Wesleyan, who specialise in tailored financial advice for healthcare professionals, teachers and more – you can find out about our next one here. We are also very excited to be in the process of becoming CPD accredited ourselves with CPD UK, so we can further grow our training offering overtime.

2. Our candidates tend to be health-conscious but time-poor

We found that you like to eat healthily, but often lack the time needed to shop for and prepare nutritious meals. We wanted to do something about this to help make your lives easier. So we’re excited to announce we have partnered with the wonderful Mindful Chef to exclusively offer you 25% off your first 2 boxes with the code ATHONA25. Mindful Chef offer fresh, nutritious recipes with all the ingredients delivered directly to your door. With gluten-free, dairy-free and vegan options all available, there’s something for everyone.

3. 78% of our candidates visit our website to look at our jobs board, blog and events

In questions designed to understand your habits when visiting our website, unsurprisingly we found that the jobs board, our blogs and events were the most frequently visited pages. We’re continuously working on tweaks to these sections, and the jobs board is updated daily to reflect all the live jobs we are recruiting for each day, with a new job being posted every 24 minutes on average. Athona also continuously aim to share the most relevant, important updates in our blog posts, and are starting to see more events listed as our webinars continue to run. We are always looking at ways to improve the website for ease of use, and have recently added a ‘custom location’ feature into the job search page and will continue to make improvements to make it the best it can be.

4. ‘Relationship with Recruitment Consultant’ was voted as the number 1 motivating factor for working with an agency

‘Relationship with Recruitment Consultant’ was voted the number one motivating factor for working with an agency. We don’t take this responsibility lightly and continually hire the best, and invest in training for our consultants to make sure they can always offer you the best possible service. We take pride in the fact that nearly 40% of our staff have been with us for over five years, and have built long-term relationships with many candidates over this time. It also takes an average of six months to move from resourcer to recruitment consultant, showing our dedication to training our staff. Charlie Naylor, Business Manager says: ‘I don’t just talk to my candidates about jobs, more often than not we talk about what’s going on in their or my life. Coupled with years of consistently finding them great jobs means that I’ve built very strong relationships with my candidates. I’m here to listen, laugh and help them achieve what they want in life’. Find out more about how we’re affecting futures here.

5. Our candidates have a diverse music taste!

We asked you what your favourite song and genre of music were. This was so we could give back something a little different, and from the results of this we’ve put together a Spotify playlist. On the drive home from hospital after a long shift? Working through the night? Or starting an early morning shift and need some motivation? This unique playlist compiled by like-minded professionals is perfect, there really is something for everyone! You can listen and follow the Athona Healthcare Spotify playlist here.

Lastly, we loved hearing some of the positive things that make you enjoy working in the healthcare industry, and wanted to share some of them here too:

“You can pick and choose which shifts work for you”

“It’s stressful at times, but always fantastic”

“Saving lives and helping others”

“Ability to do a meaningful job”

Want to see more of our healthcare candidates survey findings? Find the full report here.