How Health System Marketing Drives Recruitment Success
The New Year brings fresh starts, new goals, and, for many, a renewed focus on career aspirations. We’ve yet to work with a healthcare organization flush with providers and employees, making January prime time for recruitment engagement. Marketing departments and healthcare agencies are perfectly positioned to attract New Year’s resolution job seekers.
Here are some ways marketing can help turn this annual job-hunting wave into a competitive advantage for recruiting employees and physicians.
- Build a culture that aligns with your brand
Seize the opportunity to hire based on your brand promise. When Springboard helped open Holy Cross Germantown Hospital in Maryland, the brand promise was to be “most responsive to the community’s health care needs” – so the KPI for new hires was their responsiveness. The recruitment ads promoted responsiveness, the careers page backed up responsiveness, and the new hospital took a big step toward creating a culture aligned with its brand and mission.
- Recruit with your “Why”
No one knows your organization’s “Why” better than marketing. And that “Why” must be front-and-center on the Careers page of your website – likely one of the most visited pages on your site.
The organizational benefits here are twofold:
- Establish brand awareness and perception beyond your service area – recruitment can be much more regional and even national in reach.
- Marketing’s efforts may reduce the time to fill essential positions – helping to increase access to quality providers and generate organizational revenue.
- Turn your Careers page into your Brand page
If your Careers page offers little to no information about your brand, relying on prospective employees to search through job posts that are more laundry list than engaging content – marketing can help. It’s time to think about the Careers page as your front door and best foot forward, and that includes engaging with your brand position, promise, and vision.
In addition, you need to make it easy for prospective employees to see themselves excelling in your environment. Use existing brand content, strengths and differentiators, testimonial videos, and shortcuts to career events to engage and attract top talent to fill critical roles.
- Run recruitment like a service line campaign
Contrary to the saying, unfortunately, if you build it, they will not come – you must push recruitment to those most likely to seek or make a move. Eye-catching creative, engaging messaging, and digital marketing are essential for reaching New Year’s resolution job seekers.
- Develop brand-forward creative – as discussed, the creative needs to make prospective employees feel at home in your organization – but let’s also make sure they are a fit for your brand promise.
- Implement a strategic media plan – increasing awareness for a better career can take a few approaches:
- Social media is more of a shotgun because of its lack of targeting.
- Programmatic media targets populations and behaviors, including display, video, audio & native ads.
- Inspire passive job seekers with LinkedIn’s tools and career-focused content.
- Measure success – work in partnership with HR to put KPIs and metrics in place that track, analyze, and optimize the performance of the recruitment campaign.
The benefits to HR in establishing a partnership with marketing and an agency like Springboard will be borne out of our combined skillsets:
- A brand-first organizational focus on positioning and perception
- Writing and creative support
- Video ideation and production
- Recruitment ad development
- Media planning, placement, and reporting
Health system marketing and agency teams have the tools to turn New Year’s resolution energy into a recruitment advantage, helping build a dedicated workforce to drive success in the year ahead. If you’d like to talk to Springboard about recruitment campaigns or internal communications, please contact mike@springboardbrand.com.