Healthcare hiring is expected to increase this year but at a slower pace than last year, according to background check firm HireRight’s Health Care Spotlight, a subset of its annual Employment Screening Benchmark Survey. Sixty-seven percent of health care organizations reported they expect to hire and increase the size of their workforce this year, down 7 percent from the 2013 report.

Most of this growth is expected to be from direct hiring of employees, rather than contract or temporary workers. Fifty-seven percent of respondents indicated their staff increases would be from hiring traditional permanent employees while 33 percent expected to grow their staff by hiring contingent or temporary workers or the other extended workforce.

Expected change to workforce in 2014:

• Grow by 6 percent-plus: 20 percent
• Grow by 3 to 5 percent: 23 percent
• Grow by 1 to 2 percent: 24 percent
• No change: 28 percent
• Decline by 1 to 2 percent: 3 percent
• Decline by 3 to 5 percent: 24 percent

This HireRight Health Care Spotlight is an analysis of employer screening practices of 534 respondents who selected “health care” as their primary industry and answered both general questions and those specific to health care screening in the HireRight 2014 Employment Background Screening Benchmark Survey.