Recruiting Healthcare Workers on the International Labor Market: A Megastudy

Recruiting a robust healthcare workforce has become an urgent policy priority globally, as current vacancy levels pose a public health risk. Yet there is limited causal evidence on what works to recruit more healthcare workers, especially across an international labor market. In collaboration with Danish healthcare service providers, we randomly assign 110,000 European nurses to receive one of 10 different digital messages (or a control condition) encouraging them to apply for a job in Denmark. We select the interventions to test based on a replicable approach we name “community-led intervention design” (CID) that systematically balances three forms of expertise: academic expertise, practitioner expertise, and user lived experience. This megastudy has far-reaching implications not only for our understanding of decision-making on the international labor market, as well as the human capital crisis in healthcare, but also contributes methodologically to calls for more systematic approaches to hypothesis generation in behavioral science.