Rural hospitals don't have a recruiting problem. They have a timing problem.
If you're hiring two surgical techs a year, you can't afford to start building your candidate pool the day a position opens. By then, you're competing with every other hospital for the same thin local pool — and often paying an agency premium just to cover the gap while you wait.
That reframe anchored a recent industry panel Craft Education hosted on healthcare staffing, Travelers or Talent: The Math of Healthcare Staffing.
The Panel
- Dr. Angela Jackson (moderator) — Lecturer, Harvard Graduate School of Education; founder, Future Forward Strategies
- Michael Backus — President & CEO, Oswego Health, a sole community hospital in upstate New York
- Mark Sherry — Baylor Scott & White Health executive; national Apprenticeship Ambassador for Central Texas
- Dr. Rayna Letourneau, PhD, RN, FAAN — Executive Director, Florida Center for Nursing
Start With Students, Not Job Postings
Michael Backus described talking with students as early as eighth grade about what a healthcare career actually looks like. Students who move through the pipeline he's built with local schools graduate high school with many of their college prerequisites already finished. That's not a recruiting tactic — it's a multi-year investment in a pipeline that doesn't exist yet if a hospital waits for the job posting.
Mark Sherry described something similar at Baylor Scott & White: a curriculum partnership with Uplift Charter Schools in the Dallas market, built to expose students to healthcare careers before graduation, alongside a new regional sector partnership just getting underway that starts the same eighth-grade outreach model, aimed at allied health roles — the area he flagged as facing the most acute shortage in the Central Texas market right now.
Size Doesn't Disqualify You
One question put this to the test directly. An administrator from a 25-bed critical access hospital — a federal designation capped at 25 inpatient beds — hiring maybe two surgical techs a year, asked whether "grow your own" even works at that scale.
The panel's answer was unanimous: it doesn't just work at a small scale, it may matter more there. A large health system can absorb a bad hiring year or out-recruit a shortage by pulling from a wider labor pool. A 25-bed hospital can't. Mark Sherry noted that in his experience, this kind of program is often more successful in small, rural markets specifically — there's no larger pool to fall back on, so the local pipeline a hospital builds is the only pipeline it has.
Think Lattice, Not Ladder
Dr. Rayna Letourneau offered a reframe worth sitting with: stop thinking in career ladders and start thinking in career lattices. A ladder assumes one path — start at the bottom, move straight up. A lattice assumes people move in multiple directions, sideways and forward, and still land somewhere useful. Her point was that early exposure works best when it introduces students to the range of roles inside healthcare rather than funneling them toward a single destination, so they find where they actually fit instead of the one role a hospital happens to be advertising for.
That distinction matters most for rural hospitals. A pipeline with only one entry point loses every student whose interest doesn't line up with the current opening. A lattice creates more doors — which, for surgical tech, sterile processing, or EKG tech roles, is often the difference between a filled seat and an empty one.
From Outreach to Something You Can Actually Fund and Track
Talking to a school isn't the same as running a program — early exposure only becomes hired once it's backed by something formal enough to fund, credential, and track.
Craft Education assembles that infrastructure:
- Sponsorship — official sponsor of record for the registered apprenticeship
- Braided funding — CTE/Perkins, WIOA, Workforce Pell, SAEF, and RHTP combined, so no single grant covers the cost
- A curriculum partner — delivers the instruction
- Craft Connect — where your coordinators and preceptors log hours and progress themselves
Together, those four pieces turn a school conversation into a program your hospital can actually run, without hiring workforce team to do it.
Your Next Step
You don't need a large system's budget to start this. You need a school partner, a defined pathway, and someone to hold the sponsorship and funding pieces so your team can focus on the relationship, not the paperwork.
For the full context — including the audience Q&A on program size and funding timelines — watch the full panel discussion. If you're a rural hospital ready to build a pipeline for surgical tech, sterile processing tech, or EKG tech roles, contact us to see what building your own actually looks like.
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