In this week’s episode, Jenny discusses candidate recruiting and how marketing teams can lean in to help build a full and successful candidate pipeline.
Healthcare marketing is a pendulum. On one end, marketing efforts are focused on new patient acquisition. On the other end, HR and recruiting teams need to invest time and resources into finding quality providers to deliver the care you are promising new patients.
Jenny outlines three key steps for recruiting marketing:
- Strategy
Jenny states that in today’s hiring landscape, it’s essential to do research to figure out the competitive landscape for recruiting. You can’t just rely on throwing up a job posting and expecting a full pipeline of qualified candidates.
Do research to figure out the pay range for similar positions in your area, key differentiators, and value propositions. Create a variety of postings to test what positioning works best and figure out ways to stand out. - User Journey
Jenny explains that the next step is putting yourself in a candidate’s shoes to figure out what journey they have to take to apply for your position. Do they have to add their information multiple times? Is there a way to easily add a phone number or email to get a file started? Document the steps a candidate takes, and optimize to improve.
In today’s world, there are two ways people find you: they could either be actively looking for a new position, or they could be the right person for the job but not actively looking. In order to catch the latter, you may have to spend a little to promote your posting and make sure it’s seen by the right people. - Optimization
Finally, Jenny recommends treating your candidate recruiting efforts like patient acquisition. Every dollar counts. Figure out how much you’re spending for each stage of your recruiting process – interviews, applicants, hires, and employee retention – and optimize.
Connect with Jenny:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
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. I am the CEO and Founder here at Hedy and Hopp. We are a full service healthcare-exclusive marketing agency based in the Midwest. And we are the Founders and the hosts of the podcast.
So thank you for joining today. I’m going to jump right in. We’ve been having a lot of really interesting conversations over the last three weeks around candidate recruiting. So as far back as we’ve been doing healthcare marketing. So eight years ago, whenever we, whenever I started the agency we realized this, it’s a pendulum, right?
You’re either doing marketing for patient acquisitions. You’re trying to help patients find the care that they need within your organization, or you’re actively trying to find and hire providers to be able to make sure you can deliver the care that you’re promising to patients. So, we’re kind of that pendulum is [00:01:00] swinging back.
We’re having lots of conversations right now about how marketing can lean in and assist HR and the recruiting teams to be able to get a more full and successful candidate pipeline. So I want to talk a little bit about that process. And there are three key steps in the process that I want to outline.
We have strategy, user journey, and optimization. So I’m going to go through each of them briefly. So the first one, strategy, it’s so important whenever you’re leaning in as a healthcare marketer to assist the HR or recruiting teams, if you’re leaning in to be able to help them be able to more fill the patient funnel, let’s say you are a
system or a provider group in Colorado, and you desperately need more RNs. The first thing you should do is spend some time on job boards finding out what the other offers are. So if I’m an RN in [00:02:00] Boulder and I go on Indeed, what are the competing offers? What is the pay? What are the main value propositions?
What are the differentiators? Just like in marketing, how you have to figure out how you’re going to have differentiators for your patients. To have them choose you for care, you have to do the same thing for recruiting. It is way too tight of a job market to assume that you can simply put a job posting together, throw it up on Indeed, and you’ll have a whole funnel full of candidates.
You have to be very strategic. What we recommend is spending a few hours going through and really documenting what are the different opportunities that those roles or those individuals for those roles have? What are the decisions that they can make if they’re looking for an open position? So really documenting what are the pay ranges that you see?
What are the key differentiators? Is it schedule flexibility? Is it hiring bonus? Is it retention bonus? [00:03:00] Whatever. There’s financial and non-financial reasons why somebody may choose to work with you. So document the decision matrix and what other options are out there outside of your organization.
Then create another document or part of the document that lists out all of the different things you can offer and figure out what is going to make your job posting actually stand out. What we love doing is once we’ve created this matrix is really identify three to four key messaging and positions that you can test.
So, perhaps leading with different differentiators or testing different financial structures. Of course, you always have the hourly or the salary, but then maybe you’re leading more heavily with the hiring bonus because that’s what everybody’s doing in that market, so you have to do that as a bare minimum or whatever it may be, but identifying what those three to four testing components are and then making a variety of job postings that reallyhighlight those different [00:04:00] positionings, the different ways that you can stand out.
That is a very important step one. Step two is documenting the user journey. So anybody who has been in the job search process recently knows it is so frustrating! I have a lot of friends and prior colleagues that are actively job hunting.
Or even if you just go on LinkedIn, you see so many people complaining about how difficult it is to even just apply for a job because of the clunkiness of the technology. So put yourself in that candidate’s shoes. Actually go through your application process and understand how many clicks does it take before you can actually submit your application?
How much information do you have to have handy? Do you have to upload your resume and manually enter your information? Is it possible to do the application on a mobile device? Is there a separate landing page for this specific role that you’re trying to fill that really outlines those key differentiators and puts them right into a quick [00:05:00] apply situation online, documenting the journey and then identifying opportunities to be able to improve it through smarter marketing, whether it’s landing pages, quick links, et cetera, or technology improvements.
A lot of the candidate tracking software is actually have a new functionality where you can maybe have somebody when they begin the application, enter their cell phone number or their email. And that will initially start their file. So your recruiter can follow up with them in case they don’t actually finish the application.
So there’s all these like technical tricks that you can do to really increase the volume. And then you’re going to be relying of course, on HR and recruiting to have a strong follow up process, which of course, you can lean into as far as communication, timeline, cadence, automation, all that fun stuff.
But the third one is once you have, you know what you’re saying and how you’re standing out, you know that the technology is there, then actually starting promoting. So just like when you’re doing patient recruiting, you have two separate ways people will find you. The first. Is that they’re actively looking for a new position.
So this is on job boards.[00:06:00] Even honestly, in Google, there’s a variety of paid media opportunities. You can make sure that your job posting is front and center, but there’s also the right person, right credentials that isn’t actively searching. And that’s where additional media opportunities, such as Facebook or Meta ads.
Even on TikTok, if you have a strong TikTok presence for your organization, there’s lots of different ways that you can target folks based off of their experience, credentials, et cetera. And then it’s all about optimization. So something we strongly recommend is really viewing it just like the patient acquisition funnel.
How can you measure the dollars you’re spending on marketing for recruiting through the number of applicants that you receive, interviews, and then new hires with one of our prior clients, we actually even had it go through 30 day retention. So we really knew candidates were strong if they not only are interviewed, offered, hired, but then 30 days later, if they were still there, that’s the kind of candidate that our marketing optimized towards.
So making sure you’re measuring [00:07:00] things and optimizing appropriately, treat it just like patient acquisition. You got to make every dollar count.
Last thing, I had two separate people ask me this question yesterday with all of the patient privacy and analytics rules of the changing and the analytics set up the tactics that we can do.
What in the world does that do to candidate marketing? Is candidate marketing beholden to these same rules? Kind of. Is the short answer. So, in an ideal world, you will have a separate recruiting or careers website or micro site that is completely separate from your organization’s website that patients access.
In that situation, you often can get away with using Google Analytics 4 right out of the box. You might even be able to do directly Facebook and Reddit conversion tags on it. If there is no patient-related information. It’s strictly a recruiting and careers website. For most people though, it’s actually a page tab, a section of their current site, [00:08:00] in which case you have two choices, you can bifurcate your website and have some of it have certain kinds of tags and some of it have the other we recommend just going full tilt safe.
Yeah, let’s treat everything the same, figure out what your new solution is, whether you go with our privacy solution, the server side tag manager, hit me up if you want to talk about that. Or if you go with a CDP or a new analytics tool, whatever it is, it’s really easiest if you just do it across the board.
One thing I’ll say is that server-side tag manager is Hedy and Hopp’s privacy oriented solution. We actually have the ability to integrate meta and LinkedIn’s conversion APIs. So you can still get full conversion data on everything, but you’re not unnecessarily collecting IP addresses, device IDs, all of that fun stuff.
So, really can go on the other side. So, thank you so much for tuning in again. If you have any questions about candidate recruiting your HR marketing campaigns, give me a call. We love brainstorming this stuff. We [00:09:00] love sharing ideas. And definitely happy to share some case studies for some cool work that we’ve done recently.
But thank you so much for tuning in. We will see you on a future episode of We Are Marketing Happy.
