Social Media Recruiting for Healthcare | Apploi

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Apploi

5 min readMay 21, 2021

Healthcare workers often work demanding hours with unpredictable schedules and may not have time to research companies or fill out lengthy applications. If anything, they’re more likely to spend their free time scrolling through their phones.

Your organization can narrow the communication gap by reaching out to candidates on the digital channels they’re most active on. Social media’s ease of use and engagement opportunities makes it the perfect platform to showcase your organization as a potential employer and directly support your recruiting efforts.

What Is Social Media Recruiting?

Social media recruiting or social recruiting uses social media platforms to support and enhance the hiring process. Companies can leverage their digital presence to connect with talent, promote open positions, and showcase their company culture.

Social media recruiting strategies generally fall into two categories, organic and paid:

Organic social media recruiting. Sharing job posts or content on social media that highlights your company’s culture and driving traffic to your Careers page. It can also include “social listening,” or tracking and monitoring hashtags and keywords to understand and seek out ideal candidates.
Paid social media recruiting. Social media advertising campaigns, paying for social recruiting services, and promoting posts on social media platform job boards like Facebook Jobs.

According to a recent survey, 86% of job seekers use social media to view, search for, and apply to jobs or engage with recruiters. 61% said they increased their social media usage in the past year.

Why Healthcare Organizations Need Social Media Recruiting

A continued nursing shortage during COVID-19 and a highly competitive market has put healthcare hiring in a difficult spot.

Healthcare workers lost approximately 1.5 million jobs last spring and the industry is still over 540,000 jobs short of pre-pandemic numbers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). COVID-19 also prompted many professionals to retire early , adding to the shortage. A further one million jobs are expected to open up by 2030 as Baby Boomer nurses leave the field, allowing Millennials and Generation Z to take over the majority of new roles.

As the healthcare workforce changes hands, organizations will need to reevaluate their digital recruitment marketing efforts to keep up with more digitally-connected workers.

Due to its popularity and ease of use, social media makes an excellent recruitment marketing strategy tool. Some of its many advantages include:

Accessibility. Healthcare professionals with limited downtime might see a tweet, update, or text before an email . Social media also gives you access to people who may promote your jobs by sharing them with their networks, even if they aren’t currently on the market themselves.
Reach. Social media opens organizations up to a much wider audience, allowing them to tap into the spaces healthcare workers are most likely to spend time in. The more channels you become active on, the better chance you have of connecting with applicants.
Speed. Social media recruiting can get you in front of talent quickly and make your job posts and applications easily accessible to anyone with a smartphone. By speeding up the hiring process, you increase your chances of making an offer ahead of the competition and getting the best candidates in the door.

How Do I Get Started?

Social media recruiting involves a combination of brand strategy, passive marketing, and active research and experimentation. To be successful, you have to approach it from a number of angles while keeping your target audience, potential employees, in mind at all times.

Develop a Voice and Start Talking

Tone of voice communicates a brand’s personality and values, humanizing your organization so you can connect more effectively with your target audience. When it comes to employer branding on social media, tone of voice can also mean the channels you choose and the content you share and post.

Here are a few ways to develop your social media voice:

Choose your channel(s) wisely

Each platform has its own unique voice and tone, from LinkedIn’s professionalism to Twitter’s quick-fire updates. Choose a platform (or several) that fit your employer brand and are popular with healthcare talent.

Capture your audience with interactive content

Social media is meant to be interactive. Create and share a variety of educational and entertaining multimedia posts. Visual content like images, videos, and infographics make a big impact and are easy to share.

Build a reputation for responsiveness

You want your organization to be seen as an approachable, communicative employer. Have someone on your HR or marketing team monitor social media channels and respond to questions and comments promptly.

Show Off Your Culture

Got cutting-edge tech, great employee benefits, or career development opportunities? Your candidates will want to know! Showcasing company culture is a great way to promote your organization as a desirable employer.

Offer inside glimpses of what it’s like to work for you by:

Posting about company events and activities
Asking employees to provide testimonials and quotes of their work experiences
Adding team photos to your social media channels
Appreciating your staff by acknowledging them and their work

Although you don’t need to post about employee benefits directly, make sure any perks you offer are clearly visible on careers pages and in job descriptions. If you provide certification training programs or help your nurses continue their education, mention that as well.

Be Proactive Online

Get ahead of the competition with a proactive strategy for social recruiting that leverages tools built to help you hire successfully.

Track relevant healthcare job or industry keywords and hashtags across social media channels for insights on how competitors are hiring and what job seekers look for. Test different types of posts, formats, keywords, and multimedia with your audience to see how potential candidates respond.

If you don’t have that kind of time, solutions like Apploi’s can optimize your job post distribution for you and simplify the hiring process for your applicants.

Consider investing in some paid social media campaign experiments on different platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. And make use of social media reporting tools that can track your progress and help you determine where to concentrate your efforts.

Interested in learning more about how you can recruit, hire, and on-board healthcare staff quickly? Contact us today for a free demo of our end-to-end solution.

Originally published at https://www.apploi.com on May 21, 2021.