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The S.T.A.B.L.E. Program Online Course

Improve quality of care for well and sick infants. Learn how it can transform your ability to accurately monitor and care for infants, improving their quality of life.

AACN ECCO Essentials of Critical Care Orientation

Essentials of Critical Care Orientation (ECCO), from the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN), is an interactive, case-based course designed to orient nurses on critical care basics.

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These courses are designed to educate staff on current guidelines for infection control across various care settings and precautions for airborne pathogens.

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Healthcare Recruitment Strategy: Build Your Employer Brand

April 1, 2021
April 1, 2021

This blog post is part of our ongoing TALENT TUESDAYS weekly series focused on how to improve talent management at healthcare organizations. In coming weeks we’ll feature excerpts from our Industry Perspective paper, 7 WAYS TO EASE THE PAIN OF HEALTHCARE HIRING.

Employer branding has become more of a priority in recent years, but you might be wondering how it can actually help lower your recruiting costs. The secret of employer branding is that it creates a powerful self-selection tool for your candidates. This eliminates a large portion of unqualified candidates, or those who are not a good organizational fit, from even applying in the first place. The result is a tremendous amount of saved processing time and the attraction of better quality candidates.

Most healthcare organizations miss the mark on employer branding because it is not viewed as important or pressing enough to be prioritized or it is considered a role of the marketing department and thus overlooked. Any of those reasons may be valid, but they are costing your recruiting department valuable opportunities every day. A recent study by TalentPuzzle discovered that 1 in 3 applications submitted by college graduates are motivated by employer branding.

How to Improve Your Branding as an Employer

The good news is that there are some simple steps that you can take to make an immediate impact. Here are a few to consider:

Evaluate Your Current Employer Branding – This could include something as simple as looking up your organization on Google, reviewing your career site design, or even pulling up your hiring documents. What could your candidates read on Google about working for you? Is your career site up-to-date with a clean and easy to navigate design or was it a basic template thrown up years ago? Is it optimized for mobile use (which is on average half of your traffic)? Are your hiring documents clean and consistent or do they have various versions of your logo and color scheme? These are all part of employer branding and they are the first things your candidates see. Essentially, this is how they evaluate you. Do an honest assessment of your organization, make an action list, and start on the basics.

Do Your Own Market Research – Sometimes the best data is right in front of us. Ask your candidates, employees, and executives what they think about your employer branding. What do they like? What do they connect with? What suggestions do they have? Elicit input from your marketing department on how to integrate these suggestions into your employer branding.

Develop Your Employer Messaging – In no way are you trying to rework the corporate messaging, as that is a truly a function of the marketing department. It is important, however, that you have messaging as an employer that speaks to your target candidates. In molding this message you might consider some of the following questions:

»» What makes your organization special?

»» What does your organization stand for?

»» Why would someone want to work there?

Answers to these questions can be a great start in building your employer brand. You’ll soon find your best candidates coming to you not just because they know you are hiring, but because they know why you are hiring.