Recruitment marketing can support stronger hiring performance by helping healthcare organizations attract, engage, and retain quality talent. Use this guide to understand the role recruitment marketing plays in healthcare recruiting, the outcomes it can influence, and the tactics teams can use to strengthen their approach.
You might think recruiting and marketing have little in common, but healthcare organizations that integrate marketing techniques into their recruitment strategy reduce time-to-fill and improve their quality of hire, all while shrinking recruitment costs.
Organizations that leverage employer branding, sourcing strategies and engagement technologies are seeing a true return on investment for those efforts. With recruitment marketing, you can decrease your advertising spend by 50% while increasing your conversion-to-applicant rate by 2x, resulting in significant savings. This proves that it literally pays to incorporate this method into your recruitment process.
In today’s competitive labor market, healthcare organizations need to think outside the box and adopt more modern recruiting techniques to attract top talent, regardless of whether the jobseeker is actively looking. It’s also important to make sure it’s easy for them to find their next role.
Using proven marketing tactics to attract talent to your brand and putting jobs in front of candidates across several channels will help you hire the right people better, faster and more cost-efficiently. There are many options to consider depending on where your healthcare organization is in its recruitment marketing journey.
50%
2x
39%
The importance of employer branding and how to develop a strong brand
Various employer branding tools and channels and what they’re best designed for
How to use sourcing technology to grow and manage your candidate database
Ways to stay engaged with talent so you can fill open roles faster
Your employer brand is your organization’s public persona and, in a competitive talent market, it can be what separates you from other healthcare employers.
Your employer brand gives candidates a sneak peek into what it’s like to work at your hospital, senior care community or agency. When you show your organization’s culture via social media, career sites, job postings, email communications and other channels, candidates will be more inclined to join your talent network or apply to an open position.
It’s important to have the right channels, processes, and technology in place to attract and recruit talent on a recurring basis.
Giving jobseekers an inside look at your brand with recruitment marketing can help attract talent quickly who will likely stay longer, avoiding the costs of drawn-out recruitment periods and decreasing the dependency on overtime or agency support to fill critical positions.
To craft the right brand message, you need to understand what information your candidates are seeking and in what formats, and then make sure it is easily discoverable. A LinkedIn study revealed that having a great employer brand can lead to a 50% cost-per-hire reduction and 50% more qualified applicants.
Keep in mind that prospective employees put the highest value on information that focuses on an organization’s values and culture. Job-related information is also important, with job descriptions, detailed and optimized for search, carrying the most weight. Salary ranges, compensation structures and benefit details are also useful.
A great employer brand can lead to a:
cost-per-hire reduction
more qualified applicants
Once you know what you want to show your candidates about your organization, you must choose which channels to use. Digital platforms are the most effective for reaching new prospects and include:
Year after year, career sites prove to be the most valuable channel for candidates when researching an employer. They’re still the first destination once a candidate has identified an employer and a job to conduct their own research as part of their job search, diving deeper into career sites, social media and review sites. If you have a great career site, candidates will quickly find the information most important to them and feel more inclined to apply for open positions. The more candidates you have, the more confident you can be with choosing the right candidate while also filling positions quicker. Your career page is a great place to show off your culture, values and any competitive differentiators that clearly outline why a candidate should choose your organization.
A branded and active social media presence keeps your organization in front of passive candidates. Using channels like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and even Instagram to share high-value, relevant content increases awareness and overall positive sentiment. For example, patient or resident stories make great social content that shows the premium your organization places on delivering care. Weaving job listings into your social media channels can also keep opportunities at your organization top-of-mind to interested candidates. Savvy recruitment marketers create content both native for the social media platform as well as use social media to drive traffic back to their career sites.
Email is a very powerful tool for extending your employer brand. In addition to emailing job openings to your talent network, you can also use email to drive traffic to your career site, share company news that supports your employer brand, and generally keep your organization in the back of candidates’ minds by providing relevant communications on a regular basis. As long as the candidate has consented to receive your emails, they will be eager and happy to receive valuable communications from you, helping build your employer brand in the process.
Aside from the more traditional channels like email, social media and a career website, there are additional employer branding tactics you can consider. Use the following to further build your employer brand:
Content is key to your employer branding activities. It is made up of the stories and information you tell to demonstrate who your organization is to potential candidates. This content is not intended to be promotional or salesy. Instead, it should help candidates decide why they want to work with you based on your culture, quality of patient or resident care, career development opportunities, etc.
Examples of branded content include blog posts, infographics, eBooks or whitepapers and case studies or client stories, to name a few. Outline why a candidate should choose your organization.
A type of branded content, video deserves its own bullet. Viewers spend an average 2.6x more time on pages with video, and video can even boost conversion rates by 80%.
Creating short, digestible video content gives a closer look into your people and organization. Examples of the types of videos you can publish include employee testimonials, culture-related activities and even a general ‘about’ video that explains your mission and background. Video content is an engaging, effective addition to your career site and makes excellent social media and email content as well.
The words you use to tell your story are key in the digital age. When building your website and publicly searchable content, you want to think about the questions your target audience might have and the phrases they use to search for information online.
Working that into what you write on your website, social media, in job postings and other content that comes up in search will help your organization rank higher, leading to more eyes on your brand.
You can gain additional exposure for your open roles by using automated job distribution services. These tools allow you to place targeted digital ads on the social channels and job boards your prospects already use, so your organization is at the forefront of their search. Automating the job distribution process will help you take a proactive approach to sourcing so that when it is time to fill a position, top-tier candidates already have your organization in mind and will be more receptive to recruitment outreach, or may even apply on their own.
Using these recruitment marketing tactics will help you boost your employer brand, increase ROI and position your organization for a more competitive future. A solid digital presence that helps you proactively fill your talent pipeline is an investment worth making for continued long-term recruiting success.
Using these recruitment marketing tactics will help you boost your employer brand, increase ROI and position your organization for a more competitive future. A solid digital presence that helps you proactively fill your talent pipeline is an investment worth making for continued long-term recruiting success.
Video content can boost conversion rates by 80%
Today’s hiring technologies can help you do more than recruit. They can help you proactively source candidates so your talent pipelines are continuously full of potential hires. When you leverage technology to help you source, you can spend more time vetting and interviewing the people in your talent network. When a new position is posted, you will already have a set of candidates you can reach out to. Here are a few ways technology can help:
Searching for talent across disparate platforms can be inefficient and ineffective. With the right technology, you can connect to third-party resume databases to search for talent to add to your pipelines in a single interface. This helps you consolidate your search while also giving you more resources to source from.
Creating an opt-in talent network allows jobseekers who visit your career site or in-person events to provide their resumes for future consideration if a position meeting their expertise is not currently available. This gives you the upper hand to quickly fill roles in the future, as it helps you gather talent in advance instead of starting a new search for every position.
Effective technology allows you to organize the candidates you have sourced in a convenient way based on your recruiting process. For example, tags allow you to group candidates based on key attributes, or you can set up review stages such as “new” and “reviewed” to move candidates more effectively through the internal review process.
CRM is used to nurture candidates, giving them the personal and professional connection to your brand they are looking for. Aside from sending job postings, these nurture campaigns can be managed through CRM in channels like email, social and even texting to share other information, such as educational events or webinars, candidate newsletters and materials that help them get to know your brand.
When you can proactively gather talent from various sources and engage with them regularly through different channels and CRM technology, you’ll be in a better position to decrease your time-to-fill in the future.
Jobseekers have high expectations for the recruitment process. Recruitment marketing can help healthcare organizations present a stronger employer brand, keep talent pipelines active, and build meaningful connections with potential candidates.
When healthcare organizations leverage recruitment marketing tactics, they reduce costs associated with employing contingent staff, manually searching for candidates and leaving roles unfilled. Keeping your talent pipelines full of quality candidates will help you optimize your recruitment efforts, reduce time-to-fill and improve your quality of candidates.
Explore how symplr Talent Sourcing can help your organization attract, engage, and hire quality candidates more efficiently.
