In my last two blog entries, l've taken you through the various challenges involved in developing a strong EVP to recruit CVICU and CVOR nurses nationally for Memorial Healthcare System's Cardiovascular specialty area. Now let's talk about how our message was used to reach these nurses through an omnichannel strategy that was consistent, relevant, and highly personalized.
We did our due diligence by investing the time to develop a strong EVP and employer brand. Now it was time to bring it to life across the various channels, starting with the new careers website.
A website that's immersive and informative
In the spirit of the #teamMHSflorida hashtag campaign
, https://careers.mhs.net/ is vibrant, colorful, and fully-featured. It personalizes the candidate experience with images, relevant content - including video - and an easy process for applying. And when a nursing candidate performs a search and clicks on a job, the home page content is tailored to them with every subsequent visit.
Headlines are action-driven, reflecting the collaborative, multidisciplinary environment these candidates could find themselves working in every day. Significantly, the new site prominently features real people and their stories. We developed three videos with MHS leaders and six with employees, sharing not only a day in their lives, but also how their roles align with the System's organizational attributes. This gives candidates a taste of MHS's culture, environment and quality standards Ð as well as an opportunity to see themselves as part of the team.
Job descriptions that work harder
Studies have shown that about 40% of candidates bypass the careers site "portal" and go straight to a job description. Therefore, it's important to design enhanced job description pages that can do a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of information and engagement. This way no matter how they "arrived," CV nurses (and others) have all the information they need to make an informed decision.
MHS's enhanced job description pages feature tabs that include unit and/or facility specific information, culture videos, related upcoming events as well as the specific position duties and requirements. In the future, it could also include the opportunity to join various talent community and blogs directly related to a candidate's interests and aspirations.
We focused on the four clinical hiring areas that were both hard-to-fill and expanding their services and teams. We looked at the data of what paths or content candidates were taking when they came to the site and developed a plan to provide relevant content to engage and convert them.
A laser focused strategy
Let me remind you again that MHS was facing two major challenges in the campaign: promoting the organization's best-in-class environment, and selling out-of-market candidates on the Florida lifestyle.
Our campaign needed to include flexible media and multiple touchpoints to reach these candidates. Symphony Talent's Media Cloud platform is capable of pinpointing our pool of candidates very precisely (down to a ZIP Code or even a city block) so we could target nurses with specific and highly relevant messages based on where they live, both geographically and online.
As we dove more deeply into our optimization plan, another factor emerged: we also needed to consider two important subsets of our nurse audience. In the CV specialty, there are two broad areas of concentration: congenital heart disease (the condition presents upon birth within the heart valve, chamber and/or septum); and acquired heart disease (which deals more with problems "outside" of the heart, such as arteries, veins, and the vascular system). Specific messaging that addressed each would need to be developed and managed.
Obviously, it would take more than a couple of banners or one job posting to drive a decision; it would require a holistic and comprehensive approach.
Implementing an omnichannel approach
Right about now, you might be thinking that this sounds like a lot of work for the recruiting team. After all, keeping these different candidates engaged would be time-consuming, to say the least! But with Media Cloud's automated machine learning platform, it was possible to achieve most of this automatically using preloaded templates and a well-timed rollout.
Keeping Memorial top of mind meant driving home the unique selling points of the MHS to our target audience. And once they express interest, we would continue to nurture the relationships through content marketing, a career eNewsletter and eCards.
The fully-integrated campaign launched in October and targeted Florida, Illinois, New York, Texas and Minnesota. It included a microsite for MHS's TotalHeart program, email blasts, specialty/trade journal print ads, SEM/Google AdWords, job postings and Facebook-promoted posts (I'll provide more details in the webinar).
Simplifying the "point of purchase"
After capturing our audience's attention, providing relevant information about the unique opportunities and location, and nurturing them through the decision-making process, MHS didn't want to lose great candidates because of a cumbersome application process. Again, this is where machine learning and AI make all the difference.
Amazon, Expedia and others in the consumer realm do this regularly using what they already know about a consumer and reaching out with recommendations, reviews, and updated information about a product or service that are both timely and relevant. (Expedia, for example, knows you've been planning a vacation and will regularly update airfare and hotel offers based on the departure date you originally entered).
Time is something nurses don't have, so, don't ask for a lot of information upfront (you don't need it). In fact, if you simply allow nurses to have talent community access when they first visit the careers site, that's all the info you need to reach out to them and begin a conversation. Think of the apply stage more like a online "check-out" vs. an in-depth exploration and move things forward as quickly and easily as possible!
"Listening" to the data
Once everything is in place, it's important to continuously analyze and adjust the strategy, keeping a data-driven approach to quality. Since the new campaign and career site launched we've focused on leveraging the analytics we captured to gain an understanding of what's working (and what isn't) and tweaking media and messaging in real time. This data-driven approach helped MHS achieve strong conversion rates for CVICU and CVOR nurses and ultimately made the campaign less dependent on paid sources of traffic.
Some final thoughts
As you think about your own strategy, here are a few top-level thoughts to keep in mind:
- Being authentic! Clearly define, communicate and deliver on your healthcare organization's unique value proposition
- Create an omnichannel strategy that communicates your employer brand and messaging consistently across all touchpoints.
- Make the apply process simple and straightforward (and don't ask for too much information right away)
- Adjust your messaging based on candidate response and leverage automated technology as much as possible
