Switzerland is facing a growing physician shortage, with the gap between domestic medical training and projected healthcare demand expected to widen significantly by 2030. To address this, Swiss hospitals increasingly recruit internationally trained physicians from EU and EFTA countries — a process that requires navigating federal diploma recognition, cantonal licensing, and health insurance admission across multiple authorities.
This project examines how design can support that recruitment process at a large Swiss cantonal hospital. The project began with an assumption that the core challenge belonged to the applicant. Field research broke that assumption. Through semi-structured interviews with HR professionals, Chief Physicians, and internationally trained physicians, the real problem emerged — not in applicant navigation, but inside the institution itself.
The central finding is a structural coordination failure between the hospital’s own actors. HR, Chief Physicians, and internationally trained candidates each operate in separate information environments, without designed moments of shared awareness or mutual accountability. Chief Physicians make consequential hiring decisions without access to the regulatory information those decisions depend on. HR carries invisible coordination work the institution does not formally support. Candidates absorb uncertainty and delay as a private burden.
In response, this project developed a three-component design intervention: a recurring Hiring Season Kick-off Session to align HR and Chief Physicians before hiring decisions are made; a Decision Checkpoint applied jointly at the moment of candidate selection; and an HR–CP Pairing Model to build working familiarity across the full hiring cycle.
This graduation project argues that recruitment, understood systemically, is not primarily an information problem — it is a relational one. Design’s contribution is to create the conditions that allow institutional actors to coordinate, learn, and act as a connected system rather than as isolated individuals.