If you’re looking for an opportunity to elevate the value of marketing within your hospital or health system, share a big idea that helps solve a big challenge.
Hospital employer branding is one of the most effective approaches you can take to address hospital staffing gaps. It’s a critical component of a hospital's talent acquisition and retention strategy. It’s also essential for building a strong, engaged, and diverse workforce.
Try these 10 steps to launch a successful employer brand at your organization.
Employer branding for hospitals means creating and promoting a positive image of your hospital as an exceptional healthcare employer. It’s about developing and communicating your hospital's unique values, culture, and benefits so you reap the rewards of attracting and retaining highly skilled and qualified physicians and nurses.
A strong employer brand establishes you as the hospital employer of choice and builds a powerful reputation as a provider of high-quality healthcare services.
But it’s important to recognize that hospitals cannot create an exceptional healthcare employee experience solely through marketing and branding efforts. Hospitals seeking top talent must offer competitive compensation packages, provide opportunities for healthcare career growth and development, promote a positive work-life balance, support an inclusive workplace culture, and commit to patient care and community service.
It takes a commitment from C-suite executives at the organizational level and a strong partnership between administrators, clinical leaders, HR, and Marketing to make employer branding work.
Employer branding must seamlessly integrate with your external brand to create a cohesive and compelling image of your organization. Just as your external brand represents your hospital's values, mission, and unique offerings to the public, your employer brand should reflect these qualities to prospective employees.
By aligning your external brand with your employer brand, you establish consistency and authenticity in the eyes of both patients and potential employees. This integration ensures that your organization's reputation as a trusted healthcare provider extends to its reputation as an exceptional employer. It strengthens your overall brand identity and attracts top talent who align with your organization's values, leading to long-term employee engagement and retention. When employer branding and external branding work hand in hand, they create a powerful synergy that sets your hospital apart and reinforces its position as a destination of choice for both patients and healthcare professionals.
If you’re trying to convince your boss and hospital executives that healthcare employer branding has a huge payoff, consider the following steps:
Quantify the returns on this investment in employer branding, such as reduced recruitment costs, greater retention of top nurses and doctors, increased employee productivity, better employee engagement, and improved patient satisfaction.
If it feels like hospital employer branding projects often fall to the back burner, make it a priority to keep devoting specific and protected dollars to the cause. Set the employer branding budget as a percentage of the overall hospital marketing budget. Partner with HR to determine if there are shared funds available.
Allocate the employer branding budget for your hospital or healthcare provider using common buckets such as incentives, recognition programs, continuing education, events, and recruiting packages. By setting the directive at budget time to finance employer branding, you’ll be able to better prioritize and control it as the year goes on.
Your hospital employees know best what a job with your healthcare organization is like on the inside. Use their guidance to define your hospital employee brand:
Online Employee Experience Survey: A well-crafted survey can capture perspectives about employee experience and brand (what makes you a unique healthcare provider, what’s good, what’s not, why would others want to work here).
Sometimes surveys don’t capture all the context and nuance of employee input. That’s where focus groups come in.
Live Focus Groups: A skilled, impartial moderator can dig deeper into employee experience perspectives and ideas to address or solve challenges and advance a strong employer brand. Focus groups can validate (or not) feedback gathered in surveys. Focus groups also open more dynamic, energized discussions about what employee experiences work (or don’t) in your organization and how to articulate the positive.
How are employees learning about changes in the hospital? Shifts in healthcare happen daily, even hourly. Ask your doctors, nurses, and other employees which communication tools and frequencies work best, such as emails, the intranet, newsletters, text alerts, or in-person and team meetings and discussions.
Focus on your hospital mission and values:
Make sure your employer brand reflects these things.
Equipped with the knowledge of what makes your healthcare organization a wonderful place to work, you’re ready to establish your value proposition. This key statement communicates the potential and promise of building a satisfying career within your healthcare system.
Next, forge an employer brand platform and messaging framework to help differentiate your organization from competitors and articulate your employer brand's mission, personality, and voice.
Marketing—including hospital employer branding—only works when you know and understand your audience.
What roles and employees are you trying to attract to your hospital with your employer brand? What are their needs and wants?
Create personas for the employees your hospital wants to hire:
Now it’s time to make it real. Create, execute, and measure a remarkable employer branding strategy for your hospital:
These proven messaging tools and guidelines ensure that your messages and unique employer value proposition stay consistent through every candidate or employee interaction.
Keep a steady pulse on the efforts and time spent on hospital employer branding. Measuring employee satisfaction, understanding of the brand attributes, communication and awareness of values, and morale will help tell the story. Check patient satisfaction metrics. See what you can learn from their interaction with staff. That feedback reveals opportunities to improve culture and where training may be needed.
Track the number and quality of doctor and nursing candidates engaged by your hospital employer branding and marketing. Monitor and review metrics for employee engagement, retention, and employee satisfaction, as well as the performance of your social media campaigns and the traffic and response to your career page.
Everything you know about branding and marketing will help your hospital recruit and keep the best employees.
You and your marketing team win big when you create a captivating hospital employer brand:
If you’re ready to elevate your hospital’s employer branding and the value and recognition of your healthcare marketing team, Ten Adams is here to help. Contact us today.