
Here’s How to Use Facebook to Recruit Awesome Nurses — Part I
It wouldn’t be an understatement to say that we are going through the worst healthcare recruitment crisis in a generation. The RCN estimates that there are as many as 40,000 nurse vacancies in England alone and by 2020, half of the current nursing population will be eligible for retirement: that’s just three years away!
The good news is that there are almost 50,000 dedicated and professional nurses working within social care.
So how do you attract them? How do you get a few of these dedicated nurses to come and work at your Nursing Home against the backdrop of so much competition from other employers.
Before we get into specifics, let me explain how we at Florence managed to get more than 1,500 nurses to sign up to our website in less than 5 months.
We started back in March 2017 and we started off using traditional methods: job boards/job sites, refer-a-nurse, hanging a “Hiring Now” notice outside our window! But they didn’t work.
Yes of course, we got a few nurses signing up but nothing near the volume of nurses that we have been able to generate when we changed tact.
So this is what we learned when we started recruiting RGNs using Facebook…
Facebook is the most popular social media site on the planet! With more than 1 billion people logging in every day, the chances are that this is where most of your staff (and potential hires) spend a lot of time.
There are 2 ways to use Facebook to recruit new nurses (organic and paid)
In this blog post, I’ll focus on the organic method and in part 2, I’ll show you the paid method.
Create a post. GIFs and video are better and have a much higher engagement rate (likes, comments and shares) than images. But if you don’t have the resources to create animated content, you can still create awesome images using free tools like Canva.
Use visuals that will make your Nursing Home look like a great place to work for new employees. Take a few photos of your staff looking happy and enjoying their work to highlight your culture.

List some of the perks of working in your Nursing Home and link the post directly to the job on your website.
But that’s only the start. Facebook’s organic reach (the number of people that see your post without paying for advertising) has been in decline for years. It is estimated that only 2% of your total Facebook population will see your post. That means if you have 5,000 likes only 100 people will see your content and there’s no guarantee that it will be the right 100 people.
So you’ll need to use the targeting tool within Facebook to get your post in front of the right audience.

As an owner/manager of a nursing home trying to recruit nurses, one of the advantages you have (in trying to reach the right audience on Facebook) is that nurses are a niche community which means your targeting can be quite specific. For example, doing a quick search on the number of people who expressed an interest in nursing brought up more than 82,000,000 people!

Try targeting the following interests as a starting point:
- nursing
- registered nurse
- nursing home care
Once your post goes live — ask your current employees to share, share and share!
Sharing is Caring
Analyse your results; examine how many times your post was shared, liked and commented on. Try creating a new post using different images (same copy) and vice-versa. See what works best.
Give it a try and let us know how you get on. Facebook is a cost-effective way of recruiting and shows your nursing home to be a forward thinking progressive organisation that is capable of thinking outside of the box.
In part 2, I’ll take you through the paid options and show you how to drive at least 10 applicants per post for as little as £25 per day.
If you need any assistance with this, get in contact. We’d love to help!
Author: Bunie Anyaegbunam is Head of User Acquisition at Florence, responsible for driving RGN sign-ups on the Florence website
Florence is a revolutionary new web app that helps Nursing Home owners and managers reduce their RGN recruitment costs by getting rid of the agencies in the process.
If you recruit Registered Nurses and would like to try our service, we are offering one-month’s commission-free recruitment. Sign up here or call us on 020 3907 6842.
