A generation ago, hospitals could count on filling healthcare staffing positions through classified ads in local papers. While newspaper classified ads are still used, healthcare facilities and recruiters in the healthcare industry now employ other techniques as well, such as open houses, job fairs, incentive programs, and online job boards.
Every other sector uses these recruiting techniques too, and it can be difficult to make your ads stand out among the rest. Some healthcare employers choose to advertise jobs on niche job boards, local online job boards, or both. And they may use a certain amount of creativity in crafting these ads.
With healthcare recruiting, however, a certain level of formality may be expected, with care taken to avoid appearing callous or unprofessional. True, you won’t have the leeway you might when recruiting for bartenders, graphic designers, or web developers. But healthcare recruiters can use a number of techniques to make ads stand out while maintaining dignity and professionalism. Here are a few ideas.
Nontraditional Job Titles
It’s not uncommon for healthcare facilities to revamp job titles to reflect new organizational structures. While your healthcare recruiting ads should state qualifications (“RN with five years’ clinical experience”), the job titles themselves offer some leeway. University of Missouri Health Care revamped its job titles recently, eliminating the titles “nurse manager,” “nurse educator,” and “nurse supervisor” and replacing them with “clinical manager,” “service line specialist,” and “performance improvement specialist” to reflect newer roles and responsibilities.
Inspired Ad Designs
Recruitment ad design can be a critical factor in a sector with as much demand as healthcare. An eye-catching, aesthetically pleasing design helps ads stand out from the rest, and many custom job boards offer premium job ads that allow more creative leeway than standard job board listings. When you place beautifully designed healthcare recruitment ads on job boards that make social media sharing easy, people browsing the job board can easily pass on compelling ads on social media, extending your reach. A great creative job ad should include color, symbols, graphics, and brief, powerful descriptions.
Video
Another premium feature offered by some job boards is the inclusion of video in job ads. These allow ample scope for creativity, while providing prospective applicants with a better vision of what they would be doing, and the setting in which they would be working. Typical job seekers devote around two minutes to looking at job listings that include video, while devoting only about a minute to a typical branded job ad. Brief, engaging, professionally composed videos can be a good investment when advertising for healthcare jobs.
The Other Kind of Mobile Ad
While you should seek out job boards with mobile integration to reach the millions of job seekers who browse job listings on their phones and tablets, there’s another kind of “mobile” advertising, and it worked well for San Jose Medical Center. To cope with a hiring crunch prior to a move, the hospital recruited a dozen employees to have their cars wrapped in custom graphic vinyl that boldly advertised career opportunities with catchy slogans like “My other car is an ER gurney.” The toll-free number advertised on the car wraps generated over a dozen calls per week and also earned the facility significant TV and news coverage, allowing the hospital to keep staffing at required levels during a critical time.
If you are a digital news publisher or run a trade publication website, a custom job board that is mobile-integrated and offers premium job listings with powerful extras like video is a smart way to develop website revenue and build traffic while helping local or trade employers fulfill their staffing needs.