Key Elements of a Successful Healthcare Recruiting platform

Healthcare Recruiting is in a category all by itself. As the Recruitment Advertising Industry has continued to migrate more and more online over the past several years, Healthcare recruitment advertising has bucked this trend and continues to be a very offline play.There are several reasons for this, the main one being the fact that Healthcare professionals for the most part are bedside and thus not online while at work. Another reason why Healthcare recruitment advertising continues to be a mostly offline industry is because most Hospitals are large employers within a community. And with a large brick and mortar presence with high visibility, most Healthcare professionals in the community are already aware of the Hospitals within their community. Therefore, you are dealing with a very targeted audience within a relatively tight radius around a location.The primary goal of Healthcare Recruitment Marketing is awareness and differentiation – distinguishing yourself from the rest of the pack. Most recruiting success is defined over years through policies, benefits, community reach, technology investment, and pay rates. Your hospital’s reputation is usually fairly well established and the Healthcare community is a relatively tight-knit one. Everyone has heard stories from friends or acquaintances that work there. It is an ongoing battle to keep employees happy and motivated, because they are one of your most important community marketing vehicles. If your employees are happy, the community you are trying to reach will likely know that you are a good place to work. Conversely, if your employees are not happy, that word will spread equally fast making your job as a Recruiter far more challenging.

So, how does a hospital or Healthcare system stand out from the crowd? The answer is through a direct, personalized approach. The key is to stand out from the crowd and to use offline advertising methods to target the audience you are trying to reach and pull them into the web where you can serve them with a very targeted message. A well designed website, or series of “micro-sites”, will act as a “virtual recruiter” and should include video testimonials, pictures of the facility, slide shows, patient and/or employee testimonials and anything else that can highlight the reasons your employees take pride in working for your organization.

To maximize the effectiveness of an offline-to-online campaign, you should never present too much information on the Ad itself. If you attempt to answer all of your prospective candidates questions within a Newspaper Ad, Trade Magazine Ad, Direct Mail piece, or Radio Ad, you will allow them to make a decision without ever really exploring the full benefits of working for your organization. As awareness is the goal, you should really focus on Personalization (talk to them by name), Awareness and Relevance (“XYZ Hospital is looking for RNS, PTs, and Pharmacists in Madison Wisconsin. To learn more, visit us on line at www.xyzhealth.org”) Or better yet, if you are utilizing direct marketing techniques such as direct mail or email, you should try and utilize PURLs (Personalized URLs) wherever possible. Targeting the right audience, serving them a relevant message (their field of interest and in their area) and then following through with a very focused message on the web is extremely effective and can make the difference.

One last thing to really focus on is the candidate experience. You can be an absolute master of identifying candidates and getting them to your career page, but if you then require them to navigate through 4 or 5 clicks to get to the apply page and then put them through a rigorous 20 minute application, you will very likely fail to convert. Be patient and don’t try to over-automate things. For the most part, they aren’t ready for that yet. Make it easy to submit their resume or key information. As a good general rule, the first point of submission should take no more than 2 minutes. There will be plenty of time for a full application after a recruiter has touched them. Once you have expressed some level of interest in the candidate, they will be far more likely to take the time to go through a rigorous application process and you will better convert on these precious candidates/ applicants.

To summarize, there are systems, rules, and best practices galore for Recruiting in today’s online world. However, if you try to apply these practices to Healthcare, you will struggle. You need to really focus on a handful of best practices to convert.

• Be very targeted in your approach.
• Don’t try to sell them on the Ad, just get their interest and get them on line.
• Tell your story well on the website. Make it meaningful to them.
• Make sure that you have a simple and easy apply process.

And remember, if it’s easy, it wouldn’t be so rewarding. Although Healthcare recruiting can be very difficult and even frustrating at times, it plays an invaluably important function within a hospital and can provide great recognition and exposure. Happy recruiting!

Recruiting Strategy 101

There are many views on how to best go about creating an effective recruiting strategy. And while there really is no magic bullet, there are some key fundamental techniques that every employer should utilize as they look to identify, convert, and hire key employees into their organization. With all of the competing resources that are available out there, it is very important to have a solid baseline understanding of how you will structure your recruiting efforts. Below is a good formula for how to establish this baseline and how to reduce your reliance on 3rd party recruiters.

1. Employee Referral Programs: One of the most effective methods of bringing talent into an organization is to establish a good Employee Referral Program. And while most companies do have an ERP in place, most do a less than adequate job of communicating the program. Employee awareness is key to managing an effective ERP. Within most companies there is a great deal of confusion as to how much the ERP pays out and to the timing of the payouts. If an employee is unaware that they can make significant money by bringing their friends, former colleagues, and acquaintances into the organization, it will quickly slip into the back of their minds and they will not spend their free time doing so. However, if an organization continuously promotes the ERP and recognizes those who have made successful referrals, the word will quickly spread and everyone in the organization will effectively become a part time recruiter. This is by far the easiest way to make a significant dent in your hiring requirements.

2. Job Boards: While there are a lot of skeptics out there who like to criticize the effectiveness of job boards, it is usually the most cost effective means of getting your positions in front of the largest possible audience for the least amount of money. Even if you have had limited success with job boards in the past, you really need to be out there in case that perfect candidate happens to be looking for a job in your area. A great example of this is with employees who move away from home after college. Many of these are great students who move away to pursue their dreams. Often, after spending a few years building their resume and getting a great deal of experience, they decide to move back home to raise their family. In this case, the most logical way for them to start their job search is to go to the major job boards and do a search for relevant jobs in their hometown. In this instance, if your job is not posted and your competitor’s is, you may very well lose the chance to interview (and hire) this candidate. Besides, job postings are relatively inexpensive, especially when purchased in bulk. Even if you only make one hire for every ten job postings, your cost per hire is well below the typical average.

3. Interactive Advertising: This is a very large “bucket” which includes email campaigns, targeted job ad placements, Search Engine Marketing, targeted sponsorships, direct mail sourcing and more. Interactive advertising is a great way to reach out to the “passive” candidates, because it is very targeted. To most effectively utilize interactive advertising, you should first profile your ideal candidate. Where would this individual go for research or relevant content? What communities might they belong to? What subscriptions might they receive? Once we know these things, we must then meet them where they hang out and serve them a compelling message to convince them to click on your opportunity and check it out. This targeted approach is easily utilized on line, but can also be used for off line advertising as well. For example, through targeted, personalized direct mail such as RecruitCard (www.recruitcard.com), you can reach your target audience at home, by name, speaking to them about a specific opportunity that they are a potentially great fit for.

4. Targeted “landing pages”: Wherever possible, you should try and provide only the content that is relevant to the job seeker that you are going after. Candidates don’t want to have to sort through irrelevant information to get to the information that is important to them. They want to quickly assess the opportunity and to see if it is something they should look into further. By segmenting your audience and serving them only relevant information (video, job function specific testimonials, slide shows, objectives, work environment, opportunities for growth, etc.) you will drastically increase your conversions. Recruital (www.recruital.com) is a great example of audience-specific websites. By driving your traffic to job family specific, targeted website, you can track your visitors by source, enabling you to make more informed decisions on future campaigns.

There will never be a replacement for 3rd party search firms. They provide a valuable service and put a great deal of effort and resources into finding the right candidates for your positions, often in a very timely manner. However, this should be a last resort. The cost of just a few placements can usually cover a strong interactive campaign with a targeted “micro-site”. It is time to be proactive. Doing so will allow you to more effectively compete for scarce talent and, in the end, will drive your recruiting costs down significantly. Happy recruiting!

4 Keys to Winning the War for HealthCare Talent

1. Make a Great First Impression

In an industry where just about every healthcare organization has openings, the task of competitive differentiation can be extremely challenging. And, while any hospital or healthcare organization can quickly articulate the selling points as to why a job-seeking prospect should choose their opportunity over the competitor, the first key is getting their attention and making your opportunity stand out from the other, similar opportunities. In essence, the candidate is interviewing you every bit as much as you are interviewing them, so your first impression is of utmost importance. And while a great first impression can make all the difference, a negative first impression can do more harm than good. It is important that the candidate experience is easy and fluid.

Within most industries, the first impression is usually made through an on line job advertisement. And while Internet Advertising is very efficient and simple to administer, it requires that the target audience be on line to see the job advertisement. Unfortunately, in the healthcare industry, most employees are bed side rather than sitting in front of a computer terminal. This, combined with the fact that most people look for a job while they are at work, heavily limits the effectiveness of on line job advertising for healthcare organizations.

If you just finished working closely with your advertising agency on the development and creation of an aggressive on-line advertising strategy, no need to worry, the branding certainly can’t hurt and some potential new hires will surely result. After all, anyone (even nurses) who graduated in the last 5 years grew up in the MySpace era. The fact of the matter is that virtually everyone is on line; it is just a matter of how often they are on line and what they do while they are on line. Internet browsing at work is one thing; precious time spent on line at home is something else entirely. Most nurses have a hard time keeping up with personal emails, much less browsing around researching for an opportunity. The fact that most nurses are aware that they could very likely walk into just about any healthcare organization and have an offer of employment by the end of the week doesn’t help matters.

2. Follow Through
While getting the attention of prospective candidate’s and making a great first impression is a major key to the hiring process, equally important is following through with a consistently impressive message. “When you get a marlin on the hook, the last thing you want to do is lose focus and miss the opportunity to convert” says Scott Briner, VP of Marketing and head of campaign development at Appendant Marketing Group. One way to accomplish this end-to-end follow through task is through Personalized Direct Mail.

3. Make It Personal

Direct mail itself is anything but a new concept. In fact, if you are reading this article, it likely means that you are in some way tied to hiring healthcare professionals. It also means that the likelihood is very high that you have at some point tried direct mail and perhaps even use it regularly today. But, have you tried personalized direct mail that is tied to a customized, personalized website, designed specifically to answer your candidate’s questions about the specific opportunity that they are qualified for? If not, you should strongly consider it.

Appendant Marketing Group, a team of highly seasoned marketing and recruitment advertising professionals, recently launched RecruitCard, a comprehensive system for identifying qualified prospects and converting them into interested candidates. Essentially, the RecruitCard process allows employers to create a personalized (unique to the individual) postcard and to direct candidates to a personalized Internet landing page where an Internet based Experience Profile is collected and distributed back to the employer. With Internet based tracking software, campaign-effectiveness can be measured, providing real return on investment data.

A distinct advantage of direct mail is that every postcard (or letter) is delivered to a qualified and targeted candidate. Not only can a well-designed direct mail campaign make an immediate impact on recruiting efforts, it can also be one of the best branding vehicles you could hope to find. And, by the nature of licensure and the correlating database availability, it is the only way that you can know that every dollar spent is spent on placing a relevant message in front of a qualified candidate.

4. Choose Your Own Battlefield

So, you have identified great prospects, you have converted them into interested candidates, and you have collected their profiles, now what? There are two highly effectives ways to manage the back end of a RecruitCard Campaign:

First, you can designate someone (recruiter, Hiring Manager, etc.) who will receive the completed profiles and follow up with them immediately while they are at the point of interest. Your window of opportunity can close quickly, so you have to smother the candidates with attention while they are fully engaged in the job interest mindset. A good first impression can make a tremendous impact, but it can quickly dissolve without follow through.

Second, (and this is highly recommended) use the RecruitCard campaign to drive the marketing for an open house event. The candidates are impressed and they are interested, now it is time to close them! The best way to “follow through” is to roll out the red carpet and show them the facility where they will be working. Let them meet the team. Feed them. Entertain them. Sell them. They are at your facility. Just ask for the business.

The war for talent is no different than any other war. It takes a good strategy, well-executed tactics, and commitment to the original plan. And as any military veteran will tell you, if you can chose the battlefield and prepare for the battle with a good strategy, your chance of winning increases dramatically! The war for healthcare talent is growing more fierce every day, are you prepared?

A Telescopic View of Online Recruiting

In many ways, it seems as though we have always had the Internet. Even for most of those who swore they would never get caught up in it, the memories of going to the study to grab an encyclopedia for a quick research question are distant. Everywhere you look and every thing you see is highlighting some sort of Website address. Virtually every aspect of life is being driven to one Internet destination or another. Whether you are ordering food, looking for a good book, banking, or buying insurance, everything can be done from the comfort of home via the World Wide Web. It is certainly no secret that people have been and are continuing to flock to the Internet by the droves. According to Pew Internet, 70% of the U.S. population is now on line, 50% of which have high-speed Internet access.

What does this mean to on-line recruitment? It means that you can get your job advertisement recruitment message in front of qualified potential candidates faster and easier than ever before. There are various ways of accomplishing this objective.

The first and most obvious way to use the Internet as a recruitment vehicle, is to make sure that you have an effective job board strategy in place. Job Boards such as Monster, HotJobs, and CareerBuilder along with niche and local sites are still and will continue to be the primary on line recruitment vehicle for most positions. With focus and singularity of purpose, job boards provide the most inexpensive method of getting your jobs in front of “job seekers”.

Before leaping out of the box to launch an assault on the passive candidates, it is important that an effective job board strategy first be employed. However, while job boards are the best vehicle for reaching “job seekers”, they are not going to help reach those ideal qualified people who are the perfect candidates, but are gainfully and happily employed. Loyal, hardworking, effective people often have great job security and don’t have the time or the desire to browse job boards.

Attracting these types of people is where it takes the same creativity and targeted profiling that have been used by corporate giants in America for years in marketing their products or services to potential customers. There are various methods for utilizing the Internet to reach potential candidates: targeted email campaigns, buttons, banners, tiles, skyscrapers, “pop-unders”, etc., and those are just the basics. A great thing about the Internet, is that as it has developed and grown in functionality and popularity, so has the sophistication of the tracking and profiling capabilities used by the various Websites. What this allows for, is getting your message in front of only the candidates you are wanting to target.

There are various techniques for establishing exactly what that profile is, but a few have proven to be more effective than others. One of the best of these techniques, is through the construction of profiles based on the most successful individuals within your organization. This is far from a new concept, but exactly what type of profile you are building is very important. For the targeted reach that the Internet can provide, it is important that you talk extensively to your “A players”" as to how they use the Internet. Are they all utilizing on-line banking services? Do they all regularly visit Weather.com? Are they playing games on-line? Do they check their stocks on a particular site? Do they tune in daily to Dilbert.com for the cartoon of the day? You might be surprised.

By determining where and when your top performers are spending their “on-line time”, along with how often they frequent these destinations, you can start crafting your strategy for reaching out to individuals who share this profile.

The Internet is not a fad. It is here and it is here to stay. The challenge is in how you harness the full capabilities of the web to get your message in front of your target audience, in this case, potential employment candidates. While print is still a viable marketing outlet in some cases, it is quickly becoming to advertising what the Encyclopedia has become to research. As the markets rebound and hiring growth returns to normal levels, it will become increasingly important to have a strategy in place to reach out to both active “job seekers” and passive ideal candidates. The good news is that thanks to the reach made possible by the Internet, you can now get your job advertisement recruitment message in front of qualified potential candidates faster and easier than ever before.

Building Your Successful Recruitment ‘Dream Home’

Building a successful Internet Recruitment Strategy is much like building a custom home. It takes careful planning, the proper mix of supplies and labor, a well coordinated and thought out scheduling of components, and most importantly, it takes a good initial vision. Unfortunately, unlike a custom homebuilder, many corporations dive into their recruitment strategy with their attention focused on the final exterior of the home, or the features in the kitchen, etc. rather than keeping their attention on the big picture. To really understand what it takes to build the custom “dream home” recruitment strategy, one must first understand what are the various components that make up the final product.The primary benefit of the Internet as a medium for recruitment is that it is fast, easy, and relatively inexpensive to generate candidates. The two questions then become “Where do I find the best candidates?” and “Then what?”
Below are 5 components that should be included in the blueprint for your successful “dream home” recruitment strategy:
1. Candidate database: Depending upon your recruitment budget (which is often heavily under represented in Fortune 1000 companies), some type of private, searchable database is critical to a successful strategy. With a little research, one can find a suitable database regardless of how challenging your budget is. A $500,000 Applicant Tracking System, while very nice, is not necessary to be able to have a private, searchable candidate database. Solutions range from as high to as low as you can afford to pay depending on what functionality you can or can’’t live without.
2. Centralized recruitment: Too often companies keep recruitment as just another part of a Human Resource Generalist’s duties. Unless the company is very small or has virtually no turnover, this approach will usually be a “strategy killer” and result in increased use of expensive 3rd party search firms. Ideally, a company would have dedicated recruiters broken out by functional area with a close working relationship with the hiring managers in those functional areas; an “in house” search firm so to speak. This will enable those recruiters to become specialists in their areas and thus be very effective.
3. Job Boards: Now that you have completed the “dirty work” and laid the foundation, it is time to frame the house. Since your private, searchable database is ready to start receiving candidates and your focused recruiters are ready to start screening resumes, it is time to generate your candidate pool. To do so effectively, one must really understand what roles they will be recruiting for and where. The first step is to identify the “foundational” board or boards for the strategy. This will guarantee an influx of candidates and will allow for the support of all kinds of positions throughout the organization. The next step is to identify key niche job boards whose candidate profile is similar to that of your company workforce. For example, a large I.T. company’’s strategy may consist of two foundational boards, one or two I.T. specific boards, an executive recruitment site, and hopefully a diversity site or two. By incorporating the proper mix of general and niche sites into the strategy, you can ensure not only a large candidate pool, but a quality one as well.
4. Streamline sourcing solutions: In order to make an aggressive, multi-site strategy manageable, it is vital that the recruiters are given the tools to allow them to fully utilize the memberships. If a strategy includes 3+ job boards, and a manual posting and sourcing strategy is in place, the postings may appear on two of the boards, usually just one, but rarely on all three. Further, without single-interface sourcing technology, recruiters will almost always migrate to their favorite job board database and use it exclusively. Sure, there are exceptions, but very few. It is important to provide the technology to enable the recruiters to post jobs to multiple job boards from a single interface and also to source resumes from a single interface.
5. Narrowing/Screening Technology: You have now built your home, time for the exterior “extras” that will make it stand out and give it the curbside appeal that you desire. With a steady stream of candidates pouring into your database; chances are, you have several candidates who are an excellent fit for your open job requisition. But how do you find them? Like candidate databases, there are a slew of solutions out there to help screen and narrow the candidate pool. Without this component, you risk severely limiting the number of job requisitions that can be effectively supported by your recruiters, not to mention the risk of “burn out” by those recruiters.

Before throwing your hands up in the air and settling for a few more years in your “track-builder home”, I would strongly suggest that you first step back and look at your blueprints. The difference between a successful Internet recruitment strategy and an unsuccessful one may just be a few subtle changes in your design specifications. Perhaps instead of cutting back on the budget, the answer may just be to slightly increase it. Or, again, it may just be a couple of tweaks. In any case, your “dream home” recruitment strategy may be a lot closer than you realize!