When to Get Outside Help with Your Healthcare Recruiting
Recruiting and retaining top talent has never been tougher than it is today. Between staffing shortages, employee burnout, and skyrocketing labor costs, finding and keeping good employees is an ongoing challenge for every healthcare organization. So, how do you know when it’s time to bring in outside help? Great question.
Traditionally, recruitment efforts have been handled by HR and recruiters, operating separately from marketing teams. But, this siloed approach to recruiting no longer makes sense in today’s hyper-competitive job market. Marketing professionals are masters at articulating an organization’s unique strengths, crafting messages, sharing brand stories, and calling people to action. They can add a powerful boost to your recruitment marketing efforts, so you'll want to be sure you've got them included as an integral part of your recruitment marketing team.
When you're managing marketers, HR professionals, recruitment firms and executive search teams to get out the right recruitment materials, it can also be beneficial to seek an employer branding and recruitment marketing strategist that can unify all the players on your team, hone your recruitment strategies, and elevate your brand messaging to help you attract and retain top-level talent.
But, is an outside strategic partner right for you? Here are a few questions to ask yourself before making that decision.
Have your recruitment efforts been stalled lately? Do you find yourself re-upping vacancies in your ATS because the jobs have been open too long?
Sometimes, no matter what you try, it seems like nothing is working. Key positions aren’t being filled. You’re spending too much money with nothing to show for it. Your strategy binder is sitting on the shelf, collecting dust. And every week, you’re chasing down a different squeaky wheel request from one department to the next.
If you’re struggling to gain traction with recruitment, it could be time to engage a recruitment marketing and employer brand strategist to help simplify your efforts, decrease your cost and time per hire, and dramatically increase your impact.
Have you identified your key differentiators? Are you communicating all the ways your organization meets employees’ personal, professional, family, and financial goals?
If you’re only posting standard job listings and salary, you’re not doing enough to attract the best candidates. Top-tier prospects want to know how your organization will help them thrive—in all facets of their life. Compensation, benefits, work-life balance, career opportunities, culture, and location should all be a part of your Employee Value Proposition, the unique array of benefits an employee receives by working for your organization.
The most successful recruitment marketing materials have dialed in messaging that clearly communicates your differentiators—attracting ideal cultural fits who will thrive at your organization, while discouraging those who won’t fit from applying.
Does your organization have a strong employer brand that is communicated in all recruitment messaging?
To break through the clutter and maximize your recruitment dollar, every healthcare system needs a compelling employer brand story—a consistent message that spells out your organization’s unique identity, Employee Value Proposition, and workplace culture. Your employer brand story should be threaded through all job postings, ads, and internal communications. If you’re not sharing your employer brand story, you could be attracting candidates who are incompatible with your culture, causing an increase in turnover and a constant need to manage, rehire, and retrain bad recruits.
Unhappy hires can also create a ripple effect of problems within your organization. Dissatisfied new employees can promote bad habits among your existing staff and quickly pollute the workplace culture. And, when unsuitable hires do quit, the revolving door of staff can cause your current employees to bear the burden of unfilled positions, making your good employees more likely to quit as well.
What’s the most common reason people leave your organization?
If you don’t know, maybe it’s time to find out. The answer could be a lack of competitive pay, insufficient benefits, frustration with leadership, lack of professional growth opportunities, or something else entirely. Working together, HR, marketing personnel, and your recruitment marketing and employer brand strategists can use proven techniques like employee surveys, focus groups, and culture-building events to strengthen employee loyalty and help retain your best talent.
Do you have a talent acquisition strategy?
Churning out one-off ads and caving to the squeaky wheel to fill immediate job openings is not a strategy. You need a long-term plan (i.e., 1 to 3 years) that details each stage of a candidate’s journey, masterfully conveys your differentiators and employer brand message, and allows for short-term adjustments based on talent availability and demand. It also should lay the foundation for long-term BERG strategies to:
- Build brand awareness
- Improve engagement
- Enhance reputation, and
- Drive strategic growth.
Are you currently monitoring key recruitment analytics?
Vacancy rate, turnover rate, cost per hire, time per hire—these important metrics can help you improve your hiring processes and eliminate any missteps that are costing you good talent (and money). If you’re not already, it may be time to start tracking some simple analytics to help maximize your recruitment dollar.
A seasoned employer branding and recruitment marketing strategist can help you elevate and refine your approach to improve your metrics and accelerate your results.
Building Your Recruitment Machine
Winning the recruitment and retention game in today’s marketplace requires that you level up your approach, build out a compelling employer brand, and develop a long-term strategic recruitment marketing plan.
If your team is still struggling with recruitment and working way too hard for every lead, adopting a few of these strategies should give your efforts a big boost.
If you’ve tried implementing these strategies and are still struggling to gain traction, an employer brand and recruitment marketing strategist can help! Together, in partnership they can unify your HR and marketing teams, elevate your brand messaging, and streamline your entire process—turning those stalled recruiting efforts into a high-functioning recruitment machine.
It all starts with a simple assessment, with your HR and marketing teams on hand, to uncover your most urgent strategic priorities and begin building the foundation for your employer brand.
Ready to step up your recruiting efforts? Ten Adams can help. Let’s talk.