An interesting trend we see at H&H is the pendulum swing between candidate recruiting marketing and patient acquisition. Right now, we are seeing candidate recruiting marketing gain momentum as organizations shift their focus slightly from patient acquisition to recruitment. In this week’s episode, we plan to guide you through the key aspects of developing a successful recruiting marketing strategy.
In a previous podcast episode, we discussed the foundations of recruiting marketing, emphasizing the importance of the internal marketing team partnering with HR to understand marketing and positioning goals. Today, we tackle specific questions and provide advice to help you succeed.
Questions Answered:
- Do we need a recruiting section on our website?
Yes! It’s crucial to communicate your organization’s differentiators. Be sure to create a content strategy around it with a clear call to action. - Who should own job descriptions and promotions?
Successful strategies involve collaboration between the marketing department and HR. It’s important to think about all content, including job descriptions, as part of your marketing efforts. - How can we improve the application process?
Test the application process, especially on mobile devices, and make necessary modifications to improve the candidate experience. - What should be our follow-up timelines?
Measure the time it takes to follow up with applicants and establish desired response timelines from that information. Explore automation options to increase efficiency if needed. - Which recruitment channels should we use?
Consider platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Google search, and programmatic advertising. Focus on where your target candidates spend their time.
Connect with Jenny:
Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
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Give the previous podcast mentioned a listen if you haven’t already!
Unpacking Candidate Recruiting Marketing
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow. I am your host, and I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy and Hopp. We are a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency, and we are very passionate about helping patients access care by leveraging our talents to make it easier for them to find and book that care online. So we work with providers, payers across the country and are very passionate about that work.
A recurring trend that I’ve seen over just the last few weeks, I’ve had more and more conversations with folks that are necessarily shifting their attention from patient acquisition, but they’re definitely adding attention to recruiting marketing, and this is an interesting pendulum swing that we’ve seen happen quite often over my career in healthcare marketing. I actually started my career 20 years ago in healthcare recruiting. So that is near and dear [00:01:00] to my heart. And most of the work we do is focused around patient acquisition, but it feels as though the pendulum swings as far as internal focus on patient acquisition, and then you’ll see it shift over and more budget will be going over to candidate recruiting marketing. So that’s what I want to chat about today. There’s a prior episode, I’ll link to it in the show notes, where we talk about the foundations of recruiting marketing.
So I’m going to link to that 101 or a primer, but a couple of best practices and things to think about is, basically, what we’re talking about is your marketing and communications team within your organization partnering with HR and viewing HR really as another service line that you’re working with.
So helping them really understand their messaging, their positioning, their channels and tactics about how they’re going to go to market and accomplish their goals. They’re not doing patient acquisition work, but they do have specific metrics they need to hit as far as filling open [00:02:00] positions so we very often see within larger organizations Marketing and HR partnering to be able to make that a better applicant experience. So listen to that first podcast.
If you haven’t already, it’s a great one on one. Today what I’m going to do is just answer some really specific questions and kind of have it be a Q&A, because I’ve had a couple of specific questions.
I’ve seen rise to the top or a couple of assumptions that folks have been making about candidates recruiting marketing that I’d love to chat about. The first is, do we need a recruiting or career section of our website? Can’t we just link out to the third party job board that we have acquired or begun using?
The answer is yes, you absolutely need a section of your site. Some organizations go as far as creating a microsite or a subdomain where it’s really the entire ecosystem of that digital property, but this is your opportunity to really tell the story. Why should people want to work at your [00:03:00] organization?
Definitely having things like testimonials from current employees, really talking about the benefits, talking about the differentiators. We talked a little bit in the previous episode I’m linking to about understanding the competition. So, for example, if you’re actively trying to recruit RNs, really understanding what benefits do you offer that are different from the guy up the street or the gal up the street that’s an employer and making sure that you communicate those really clearly.
So, number one, do you have to have a section of your site dedicated to recruiting? The answer is absolutely yes. If you want to have a successful campaign rollout, you absolutely need to have a home base on your own digital ecosystem or property. I definitely recommend creating a content strategy around it.
So having it be, you know, just like if you were promoting a service line, what would you know, how would you build out that content strategy? What’s the call to action going to be? How are you going to highlight specific departments or functions that you’re trying to recruit [00:04:00] heavily for, and then build the content using those organizational priorities.
The next question or kind of uncertainty that I see a lot in conversations is marketing teams often feel like HR owns the job descriptions. And the job promotions and in the most successful rollouts that we have seen and that we’ve worked with. That is not the case. HR and marketing needs to work collaboratively.
So think about that content strategy, the benefits, all the promotional language that you used within that new microsite or landing page that you designed. All of that needed to be reflective in your job description. So, again, just like if you’re doing a patient acquisition campaign, you can’t necessarily guide a person’s journey.
You can’t guarantee they go to that landing page before they apply or see the job description. So you definitely want to make sure that the language tone, the overall vibe of what you’re putting out in the market matches throughout that candidate experience. [00:05:00]
The next thing that I want to share, nobody’s has asked me about this recently, but this is just a great tip. Apply yourself. So again, many times HR has picked an applicant tracking system because of the ease of the back end. Of qualifying candidates, organizing candidates et cetera. But often they have not had the bandwidth time, et cetera, to actually apply themselves to a position and see how many clicks it takes.
With one of our recruiting campaigns, we actually applied for that position ourselves, and we reported back to the client that it actually took over five minutes to get through the first couple of qualification screens. It was a terrible experience. It was really bad on mobile because of the way that the pages loaded.
So understanding most people will be applying on a mobile device, testing that out, seeing what you can do. Most applicant tracking systems actually allow you to really modify that application process. So for [00:06:00] example, a common thing that we love to do, if it’s possible, is to have them select what position they’re interested in and enter their name and cell phone number, and then go to the next screen, but you’ve captured that information so if they do not finish the application, you can then text them to encourage them to finish the application.
So little things like that, again, going back, put your patient acquisition marketing hat on, right? Like, what are we going to do to fill the funnel and then work people through the funnel? Exact same thing here for candidate marketing.
Another thing that we have done quite a bit. And this again, you have to really make sure that you are working closely with HR in a really positive way because this step can get a little tricky. But you need to measure the time it takes for your HR and recruiting teams to actually follow up with a candidate once they have submitted an application.
These people have a lot of options. There’s not a high unemployment rate in nursing. We all know this, right? Like getting candidates through the door is really hard work. So if they’re [00:07:00] taking four days before they respond, you’re likely not going to have a positive recruiting experience or have a lot of success bringing folks through the door.
Okay. So I always recommend and what we do with candidate marketing campaigns that we work with clients is we actually kind of secret shop it and be submitted ourselves. And then with a blinded email and then we wait and see how long it takes for somebody to reach out to us and then we report that back to our client.
And then you can have a really positive conversation with HR and say hey let’s set a couple of things. Number one let’s set some expectations, how long should it take? What is your goal of followup? And then number two, what are some automations that we can put in place? If your team is so short staffed that it will take four days, what are some automations you can do as far as drip email content, telling them that their application is being reviewed, that we’re excited to talk with you, right?
Like, again, if you can’t get a patient on the phone right away to schedule an appointment. Same thing, you’re going to try to nurture them, right? Let’s do the same thing with candidates and see what we can do [00:08:00] to shorten that window. And then if there’s only a certain point to which it can be shortened, then figure out what automations you can put in place.
Okay, let’s talk about channels. This is the last little thing I want to touch on. I’ve seen lots of folks ask me recently about using LinkedIn for recruiting. Folks, nurses are not on LinkedIn. They are not on LinkedIn. The marketing people you want to hire for your marketing team, Are on LinkedIn. With actual clinical folks very few of them are on LinkedIn unless they are entrepreneurial and they’re starting a business. You will not find them there. So it’s not to say that LinkedIn shouldn’t be part of your content promotion strategy, but it’s sure certainly should not be the primary. You really think about where those people for those roles you’re trying to fill, spend their time.
Often you’ll see campaigns, a foundation may be in Meta. So thinking about Facebook and Instagram, those are great channels. There can be [00:09:00] some programmatic spend in there targeting people based off of interest or profession. Google search for people that are proactively trying to find it and then also job specific promotion to be able to increase the visibility of somebody’s out there searching.
There’s a lot of different things that can go into a promotion strategy. But I’ve had a couple of organizations reach out to me and say, “Hey, we want you to create a LinkedIn specific content LinkedIn specific candidate recruiting Program for us. Oh, and we’re trying to hire nurses.” I have to tell them “no, you don’t want to do that. Cost per lead will be very high and visibility will be very low.” So even though Linkedin feels like it’s super relevant for job searchers, that’s because we’re on the business side of the house. We’re not in the clinical side of the house. So just kind of remember that differentiator.
And as you’re thinking about a promotion and outreach strategy, really think more like where the people that we are trying to recruit spending their time and then develop channel specific [00:10:00] strategies in order to reach them. So hopefully this was helpful. Hopefully it gave you some things to think about.
Again, I strongly recommend you listen to the first episode in this series to be able to get a foundation and then hopefully today gave you a little bit of additional things to think about as you are perhaps revisiting a candidate recruiting strategy that you already have in market and looking to optimize or fine tune it. Or you’re thinking about building one for the first time.
So thanks so much for tuning in today. Please give us a rating, give us a follow, share this episode with anybody in your organization that you think would find it relevant. And as always, feel free to reach out. I would love to chat with you.
If this is something you are working on within your organization and you want to bounce any ideas off of us. My email is jenny@hedyandhopp.com. Thank you so much for tuning in today. Have a fabulous rest of your week. We’ll see you on a future episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers.
