Skip to main content
OpenTrials
Completed

NCT Number: NCT06793592

Recruiting Healthcare Workers on the International Labor Market: A Megastudy

Public health organizations in Denmark and most Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries face an urgent demand for nursing staff. However, existing research does not yet offer a systematic understanding of how to attract talent to public healthcare organizations from the international labor markets.

In this study, the researchers will collaborate with a network of Danish public healthcare service providers led by the implementation partner Copenhagen Capacity to implement a large-scale megastudy (n=110,000), aimed at recruiting nurses and nursing assistants from across the European Union to Denmark. The study takes an employer-driven recruitment approach, co-designing and implementing a national recruitment campaign that uses social media job platforms to identify and contact potential recruits with a direct, personal message coming from a national recruitment agency.

The study aims to answer three research questions:

Research Question 1: Does receiving a behaviorally informed recruitment message (relative to a message with no employer value proposition) motivate a prospective employee to engage? Research Question 2: Does receiving any recruitment message (relative to receiving no message) motivate a prospective employee to engage? Research Question 3: What factors - that could be emphasized as employer value propositions in a short message - would motivate a prospective employee to engage?

Study participants will be randomly assigned to one of 10 treatment conditions in which they'll receive a recruitment message highlighting different employer value propositions or a simplified message including no employer value proposition, or to a control group that will receive no message.

Researchers will analyze differences across groups in terms of engagement after receiving a recruitment message, which can involve accepting, declining, responding to the message, clicking on a link within the message, and in this link registering to a national database to receive regular newsletters featuring job advertisements.

Completed

Looking for future studies?

Notify Me

Key information

Conditions

Healthy

Age range

18 year and older

Sex eligibility

All sexes

Study type

Interventional

Phase

Not applicable

Primary location

Aarhus University

Aarhus, 8000, Denmark

Who can participate

Healthy volunteers accepted: Yes

Only the study team can determine whether someone qualifies for participation.

We define inclusion/exclusion criteria as follows:

  • Their current/primary country/location listed on the public profile corresponds to any of the 26 European Union countries (all European Union member states except Denmark), as well as Norway and Switzerland.
  • They have fewer than 10 years of work experience if their profile includes job entries with corresponding start and end dates. Profiles without job dates (preventing calculation of total experience) or with no listed work experience will also be included in the sample.
  • Their public profile includes any of the following terms in their job titles, either as full terms or partial matches, in English or any local language: "Nurse", "Nursing Assistant", "Registered Nurse", "Intensive Care Nurse", "Emergency Room Nurse", "Surgical Nurse", "Travel Nurse", "Nurse Practitioner", or "Nursing Student" Additionally, their education section lists any of these terms, either as full terms or partial matches: "Nurse", "Nursing", "Registered Nursing/Registered Nurse" or "Nursing Science". We exclude job titles that indicate roles outside the scope of our interest. Examples include: "Midwife", "Dental nurse", "Veterinary nurse", "Occupational health/company nurse", "Cosmetology nurse", "Military/Fire nurse", "Retired nurse", "Nurse consultant/advisor", and "Nurse teacher/professor". In addition, we drop any positions or education records where the job/degree title appears 5 or fewer times in the sample.
  • Individuals with five or more connections on their LinkedIn profile.
  • Individuals with an active profile (i.e. a profile that has been updated) in 2024.

Treatment and study plan

Behaviorally informed recruitment message

Behavioral

Study participants will receive a behaviorally informed recruitment message that highlights an employer value proposition.

Simplified direct message with no employer value proposition

Behavioral

Study participants will receive a simplified message that does not highlight any specific employer value proposition.

No message

Behavioral

Study participants will not receive a recruitment message.

Primary outcomes

  1. Any engagement with recruitment message

    Time frame: Up to 4 weeks after reception of recruitment message

    A binary indicator defined at the individual level, where 1 indicates that the individual, up to 4 weeks after receiving the message, accepted or declined the recruitment message, and/or wrote a text response to the recruitment message, and/or clicked on the link within the message.

Secondary outcomes

  1. Positive engagement with recruitment message

    Time frame: Up to 4 weeks after reception of recruitment message

    A binary indicator defined at the individual level, where 1 indicates that the individual, up to 4 weeks after receiving the message, accepted the recruitment message, and/or wrote a text response to the recruitment message, and/or clicked on the link within the message. Otherwise, the variable equals 0.

  2. Click on the landing page

    Time frame: Up to 4 weeks after reception of recruitment message

    A binary indicator at the individual level, where 1 indicates that the individual clicked the link to access the recruitment landing page up to 4 weeks after receiving the recruitment message. Otherwise, the variable equals 0.

  3. Registration to the national database

    Time frame: Up to 12 weeks after after receiving the recruitment message (or having been expected to receive the recruitment message had they not been assigned to the control group)

    A binary indicator at the individual level, where 1 indicates that the individual submitted their email address to sign up to the national database up to 12 weeks after receiving the recruitment message (or having been expected to receive the recruitment message had they not been assigned to the control group).

    In the event that a study participant registers to the national database prior to having received a recruitment message (or for the control group, prior to the date they would have received the recruitment message), and in all other cases, the variable equals zero.

Sponsors and collaborators

Lead sponsor

University of Aarhus

Other

Collaborators

  • Harvard University

Registry information

Acronym: MORE

Important dates

Study start
2025
Primary completion
2025
Study completion
2025
First posted
Jan 27, 2025
Registry last updated
Apr 30, 2026

OpenTrials presents study information sourced from ClinicalTrials.gov. The official registry record should be consulted for the latest information.

View the official ClinicalTrials.gov record (opens in a new tab)

This listing is for discovery and informational purposes only. It is not medical advice, does not guarantee that a study is recruiting, and does not determine eligibility. Contact the study team and a qualified healthcare professional when considering participation.

Related clinical trials

Published trials that share one or more normalized conditions with this study.