Healthcare organizations often focus their talent attraction strategies on tried-and-true external tactics like job board postings and sponsorships, niche site display advertising, and whatever their greatest competitor is doing to poach their talent. Yet more often than not, the hidden possibilities of what an organization owns and earns by reputation are overlooked because of a lack of resources and expertise, and the urgency with which talent for high volume roles is needed. It’s easy to rely on paid media to get applications, but content remains king and authenticity is the great differentiator.
Our approach to attracting healthcare talent is to start by leveraging and nurturing the channels you own, supported by the reputation and influence you earn in the community and industry, and boosted with media that’s trackable and actionable. Here are 24 tactics we’ve deployed for healthcare companies and how we’ve considered them as part of overall recruitment strategies.
OWNED MEDIA
Engaging & Optimized Website Content – Your career website is the undisputed core of your talent acquisition and recruitment marketing strategy and can be used not only as a destination but also to attract talent through SEO best practices and content that gives an authentic view of what it’s like to work for your organization. Employee testimonials, robust job descriptions, and powerful creative and messaging are a magnet for healthcare professionals looking for the right opportunities.
Informative Blog Posts – Creating blog content is a great way to tell your stories, showcase working for your organization, and establish authority. It’s also a crucial element of informing Google that your site is continuously growing – a dynamic, content-rich destination that gives career seekers the results they are looking for when searching for jobs. Search engines and candidates alike value meaningful blog content, and creating it is one of our top strategies to establish and keep healthcare employers as part of the ever-growing conversation regarding healthcare careers.
Email Newsletters – Regular newsletters featuring job openings, company and industry news, and links to other owned content (like blog posts) are easy to create and automate through your CRM, ATS, or even your company email provider. It’s surprising that many healthcare organizations don’t take advantage of sending regular communications to career website visitors who register for your Talent Community (other than job alerts).
ATS Mining and Experience Enhancements – Speaking of your ATS, we recommend curating a list of qualified candidates who have applied to jobs in your ATS over the last 18 months but have not been hired and invite them to view and apply to available jobs again. It’s likely they have lost interest in your company or got discouraged from not being interviewed or hired for the previous role. And, an audit of your ATS process can find barriers to completion, reasons for drop-off, and functional optimizations that can increase candidate flow and qualified applicant conversions.
Social Media Profiles – It’s never too late to check social media off your list of things your organization MUST consider from a recruitment perspective. No matter your target audience, every candidate uses one or more of the big 5 – LinkedIn, Facebook, X, Instagram, and yes – TikTok. For authentic storytelling, you’ve got to be there, create, engage, and repeat. Your content and messaging are crucial here – creative storytelling is more important than the targeting itself.
Branded Content – Videos, personas, infographics, and ideal candidate profile visuals for specific roles are impactful content types to consider building to engage and convert your audiences. AI can be used here for inspiration, not final executions. Our intent when developing branded content is to create long form content that can be used and reused in different formats, lengths, and contexts to ensure maximum segmentation, visibility, and relevance.
Video Content – Video content remains the most likely to be shared of any media type and it also receives the highest engagement rates. YouTube is owned by Google and is the 2nd most visited website in the world. Now, give your employees the power to create their own video content (called user generated content or UGC) about why they chose your company and why they stay, and you have an authentic story that becomes part of your company’s DNA.
Employee Referrals – Using technology to help encourage referrals, increase visibility of referral-eligible jobs to your employees, and automate payouts and communications is a huge benefit to any organization. But really, any efforts you take at all to let your employees or candidates refer or get referred to open roles will decrease advertising spend, increase quality and likelihood of hire, boost retention rates, and reduce time-to-fill. The more strategic an employee referral program is, the better the chance of success – aiming for 35% of hires coming from referrals is a good place to start.
EARNED MEDIA
Press Releases – Announcing your hiring initiatives and milestones, educational partnerships, and innovative practices and technology from the perspective of employees can generate valuable media coverage and increase brand visibility. By collaborating with your PR and Marketing departments, you’ll become an asset to the organization rather than the department that is often the first to see reductions in budget.
Media Interviews – The opportunity to communicate your company’s employer brand story to industry publications and news outlets presents an opportunity to create new audiences at a mass scale. Your community events, facility openings, and on location hiring events should be branded and involve Talent Acquisition & Recruitment Marketing representatives who you will be proud of being the ambassadors for your employer brand.
Podcasts – Certainly one of the most popular channels for content creators right now is Podcasting. You can allow select employees to showcase company values, work/life balance, and achievements in an engaging and accessible format. Podcasts can be far reaching yet intimate in nature with video, audio, and transcribed content used together or separately and edited for many formats and lengths. A 30-minute podcast with an industry pundit and a Nurse Practitioner can generate short-form content for weeks or months.
Influencer Partnerships – Collaborating with influential people in the healthcare industry, healthcare talent acquisition, or TA software or recruitment marketing solutions can lend credibility and increase visibility with talent who value the connection to reputable individuals. We encourage not only saying yes to these opportunities when they come about, but to also seek them out actively.
Recognition & Awards – The surest way to increase your organizations’ chances of receiving industry recognition and awards is to apply to everything that is relevant to you. Best Places to Work, US News and World Report lists, and the DAISY Award are a few of the organizations that can boost employee morale, improve your reputation, and raise your NPS score to make you a more desirable company to work for.
Community & Event Sponsorships – Collaboration with schools and universities, annual 5k runs, and businesses focused on health and wellness are positive ways to strengthen ties with the community and enhance your visibility and reputation. Your employer brand can really shine here - with so much more than a logo in centerfield. Activating your employees to be the voice of your company in their communities supporting the things they believe in can improve employee retention.
Social Media Engagement – In addition to owned social media platforms, it’s important to participate in the conversation happening in your company and the healthcare industry at large. Engaging with and sharing content from others has a reciprocal effect, and it’s just a nice thing to do. Spending 20 minutes per day on the social profiles of competitors, healthcare influencers, and partners can teach you a lot and give you inspiration. This engagement also includes encouraging your employees to post positive reviews of your organization on Glassdoor and to respond to comments.
PAID MEDIA
Google Ads – This tactic will ensure you are in the top position on search engine results pages (SERPS) on Google. It’s straightforward to manage and measure, and becomes more powerful when you use the data it delivers to optimize your strategy and approach. In turn, the results of the enhancements you’ve made can increase organic search engine optimization (SEO) that will enable you to reduce your reliance on paid media.
Job Board Sponsorships – With Indeed’s ever changing rules (that’s mostly a good thing) and move to remove organic (non-paid) traffic, leading the pack of job boards will get a little more competitive for them. Programmatic job technology companies are deservingly all the rage and will remain that way. It’s imperative to set up these campaigns with expert skill and the goal of maximum exposure to qualified candidates who are actively seeking new healthcare roles.
Display Advertising – Their targeting flexibility, format options, and opportunity for creative brand messaging with imagery and video make display a strong tactic for brand awareness. But with lower conversion rates than search advertising and job boards for specific roles, a fine-tuned approach to your display spend and meticulous tracking are the ways to go.
Social Media Advertising – Like organic social and managing your own profiles, social platforms are where everyone is gathering. U.S. paid social media spend is forecasted at $83 billion in 2024, an increase of over 13% from last year. According to the 2023 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, 86% of marketers said that paid social gave their business more exposure, and 76% said that it increased traffic. Content types, audience targeting, and messaging are extremely flexible with native platform search and relevance (what’s trending) being a primary focus.
Retargeting – As we move to a completely cookieless world in the coming months, it’s important to know that retargeting is still possible with zero- and first-party data – the data you collect directly from website visitors, talent network sign-ups, or ATS candidates. Personalizing experiences and using contextual advertising will be at the core of retargeting to make it effective. With first-party data you’ll be able to deliver better targeted job ads across individual platforms and convert talent that has already interacted with you.
Content Syndication – This tactic involves republishing your content on other websites in order to give your brand and the author greater reach. You’ll see this type of content often at the bottom of high traffic sites like cnn.com (see the Paid Content section). This is different from guest blogging which is creating a new piece of content specifically for one publication. There are nuances to creating and publishing syndicated content in terms of authority, linking, and SEO that can greatly affect results.
Video Advertising – YouTube and social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok make targeting, engagement, sharing, conversion, and establishing an emotional connection with your audience easy. The right format and length of your video ad can make all the difference, and it’s important to understand how the different video ad types for each channel are served, controlled by users, and measured. You only have about three seconds to capture attention, so your video ad has got to be impactful the moment it begins.
Native Advertising – Job ads that match the look, feel, and function of the media format where they appear provide a seamless experience to the user and don’t disrupt from the user’s interaction with the site they are on. Sponsored and promoted posts on Instagram and LinkedIn and recommended articles on Yahoo are examples of this tactic. Native ads are typically very polished and clearly labeled as ads, usually easily distinguishable from organic content.
Streaming Video & Audio – With their popularity continuously increasing with promises of better viewing and listening experiences, streaming services are raising rates and adding more ads and commercials to increase revenue. This is an opportunity for healthcare organizations to increase brand awareness within younger audiences to introduce them to careers in the industry at a time when fresh talent is needed the most. The next five years will be crucial to engage and convert an entirely new generation of healthcare workers, and these platforms are where they spend much of their free time.
We can help you develop the attraction strategy that’s right for your organization. That process will likely involve shifting budget from ineffective, expensive, and immeasurable tactics to those that are just the opposite. We’ll do this with baseline data, clear goals and ROI expectations, and your desire to be innovative and enviable by your competition.
