Nurse Recruiting 101 - Part Two

By: Elease Caracci
Date: 10/1/2008

In Part One of this article, we took a close and careful look at nurses and tried to define a "typical" nurse in order to be better able to create a marketing message that will be meaningful and result in more effective recruiting efforts. In today's media-rich environment, it can be very difficult to make an impression when our target audience is being constantly bombarded with stimuli. How then do we create a message that will cut through the media clutter and leave a lasting impression? Gannett says that the top four qualities that RN's are looking for in an employer are: 1) appealing work hours 2) higher pay 3) respect for their profession 4) flexible schedule. Staffing agencies can be competitive on all of these fronts and as a general rule, offer their employees many of the benefits that a traditional hospital employer just cannot or will not provide.

So how do we get our message in front of these passive candidates? According to the Gannett survey, 55% of all surveyed said that they access the internet every single day to check email, keep up with clinical skills for continuing education, and to stay current with healthcare related news and features. Consequently, it's no surprise that internet based marketing and recruiting tools are on the rise in popularity. Many large job boards like CareerBuilder, are very proud of their ability to reach the passive candidate by posting their ads on hundreds of content related sites that appeal to healthcare professionals. In fact, the approach must be a multi-layered one if it's to be effective. In addition to job boards like Career Builder, many staffing firms have good ROI with banner ads on nurse-themed websites like www.nurse.com, www.rn.com, www.allnurses.com, ultimatenurse.com, nursefriendly.com, and mobilern.com. In addition to online efforts, it's important to maintain the "old school" methods as well, such as local classified ads, career fairs, and postcard mailings.

Once you've managed to attract a candidate's attention, it's important to be able to turn that interest into action. An organized, purposeful online presence is mandatory when you have the bulk of your target audience looking to complete job searches and fact finding from home at all hours of the day and night. A good, easy to navigate website can increase your actual hires and decrease the time to hire as well by streamlining the hiring process and making it as quick and straightforward as possible for your candidates. If your process is too long and complex, candidates will lose interest and you'll lose valuable candidates to companies that are better at simplifying the hiring process without compromising industry standards for employee verification and competency.

Hiring clinical staff can be an arduous process both for candidates and for admin staff, but having a truly interactive website that will allow employees to apply online and complete the hiring process on their own terms is a must. In order to ensure that candidates can find your website online, it's important to invest in some sort of pay per click advertising program such as Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Advertising. Many companies also employ additional search engine optimization techniques as well to move their sites higher up in the search engine rankings. Once you've managed to attract and hire good people, the rest is up to you. In spite of massive recruiting efforts, the key is to be able to retain staff once they're on board. It's one thing to say you respect your staff and another thing altogether to live that every single day. A truly successful healthcare staffing firm stays that way because they value their employees. And a happy employee is worth their weight in gold because a happy employee will spread the word about a good employer. "Word of mouth" is one of the most powerful tools at your disposal and without that, all of the recruiting savvy in the world will not be enough.

By Elease Caracci

Vice president of NursingCorp 888-607-1492 ecaracci@nursingcorp.com