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How Healthcare Marketers Can Help Healthcare Recruitment

Now that 3 in 10 healthcare workers are considering leaving the profession, and many health systems are reporting a 20% loss in the current workforce, recruitment is an all-hands mission.

Not so fast, say many healthcare marketers. We already have full plates. 

We know you do. As a digital performance marketing agency for health and wellness brands, we understand the challenges and full plates of marketers. But reconsider your “not my problem” response to your HR colleagues. After all, you have the insights and sophistication for how to cultivate engagement and acquisition of consumer audiences. You know the best practices and savvy, cutting-edge digital marketing best practices. You might not want to volunteer to manage an Indeed.com media buy. But you can provide your HR counterparts insights to help them with recruiting great talent and shore up staffing shortages.

Here are four best practices you can recommend to help with health system and hospital staffing recruitment.

1. Employer Value Propositions (EVPs)

Employer Value Propositions (EVPs) are similar to brand value propositions in that they are simple, clear documents that summarize the value of the organization and benefits to employment.

EVPs serve as the playbook for key messages to entice talent and invite them to learn why your organization is a great place to work.   

An EVP does the following:

  • Serves as a magnet for the right employees
  • Informs messaging and media channels
  • Gets the internal team “on the same page” 

There are three core elements of an Employer Value Proposition:

  1. Communicates why the brand is valuable and unique
  2. What an employee can expect of the company
  3. What the company can expect from the employee

Following are three steps to developing Employer Value Propositions:

1. Conduct an employer brand audit to gain key insights:

  • Interview high-performing team members
  • Interview prospective job candidates
  • Interview alumni of your organization
  • Conduct a competitive analysis, which includes messages, strategies, incentives, salary compensation, and the overall reputation of the competing organizations

2. Summarize the key benefits of working for your organization (including compensation, benefits, along with culture and career advancement opportunities)

3. Create your message pillars: the key messages that define your organization and make it attractive and distinct in the marketplace.

 

Woman taking blood pressure

Example of a Healthcare Employer Value Proposition template

2. Recruitment Audience Personas

As marketers, you know the power of a well-defined audience persona. Audience personas truly bring your desired audiences to life, and inform messaging, channel planning, and calls-to-action. Recruitment personas are no different in their power to drive engaging recruitment advertising and marketing.

Following are the six elements of recruitment audience personas:

  1. Demographic information on your ideal candidate
  2. Triggers for why your ideal candidate may be seeking employment
  3. Key messages of what your ideal candidate needs to hear from your organization to inspire applying to work for you
  4. Summarize what makes your organization unique and a great place to work
  5. Identify potential barriers to application, such as the online application process
  6. Media channels and tactics to reach your ideal candidate

Speaking of media channels, running job posts on Indeed.com alone won’t cut it in such a tight labor market. To stand out and to reach prospective job seekers, we recommend broadening your media mix to include consumer-driven channels.

3. Consumer-Driven Media Channels 

Supplement traditional job posting and recruitment site advertising with consumer channels to broaden the reach and engagement opportunities with ideal job candidates. After all, your next great healthcare hire is a human being outside of the hospital. She’s on social media. She’s scanning the web for information and entertainment. Reach her outside of career sites and entice her to learn more about your organization and the opportunities it provides. 

Common consumer-driven media channels to supplement your recruitment advertising include:

  1. Your organization’s owned social media channels (through paid advertising and organic posts)
  2. Digital display and digital video 
  3. Leveraging retargeting efforts to remind and reinforce qualified job candidates that your organization is a great place to work
  4. Search marketing
  5. Email marketing (either as a mass email campaign or sending one-to-one nurturing emails to invite an application and interview)

We also encourage our clients to invite their best team members to advocate and refer former colleagues to aid in recruitment. After all, your star employees will likely have a strong sense of what makes a good employee and can help vet and recruit the very best to work for you. 

4. Lending Support Without Taking on the Headaches

Returning to our earlier discussion, we know that as healthcare marketers, your job—to attract new consumers to your organization—is enough to keep you busy. 

That’s why we’re not advocating you or your team members take over Indeed.com job postings! Instead, support your HR counterparts by sharing your expertise.

For example:

  • Providing strategic feedback in the development of Employer Value Propositions (EVPs)
  • Weighing in on Employee Audience Personas creation
  • Offering counsel in the selection of consumer-driven media channels 
  • Guiding how to differentiate your organization’s brand from competing brands in the marketplace
  • Suggesting realistic budget parameters for what will move the needle and deliver ROI
  • Encouraging your HR counterparts to have a “test and learn” mindset

The latter suggestion may be the most challenging for your colleagues, who might be accustomed to running an ad and expecting dozens of job applications to come in. In today’s tight labor market, competition for talent is an all-out war. What worked yesterday for recruitment isn’t guaranteed to move the needle today. 

That’s why recruitment is an all-hands mission.

When HR knocks on your office door, we hope you’ll open it, and support them. That way, your organization will be in a far better position to achieve its long-term strategic goals. And you’ll rest comfortably knowing that the new consumers you’ve driven to the organization will have team members ready to care for them.

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