Rx for Social Media Success: A Prescription for Healthcare Recruiters

At this year’s AAPPR Annual Conference, I spoke, along with Christy Bray Ricks, VP of Provider Talent at Ardent Health Systems, about leveraging social media to attract clinicians.

Starting off, we need to dispel an important misconception. Clinicians are on social media. 87.9% of healthcare workers use social media, according to NCBI. Many of them use it to inform their career and find new opportunities. That means social media is another communication channel available to healthcare recruiters to engage with clinicians.

When done well, social media can greatly enhance an employer’s brand, improve the attractiveness of open roles, and expand visibility to new prospective providers. With that said, social media cannot be the equivalent of blindly throwing darts at a board. There should be a customized and comprehensive strategy behind it.

We need to start with our audience and where they are. When we look at the data, we see that ResearchGate is the most common platform for clinicians, but many are also on LinkedIn and Facebook.

So how do we reach clinicians on social media?

It takes a blending of employer and personal branding. From a corporate standpoint, we need to communicate our mission and core values while highlighting differentiators. Ideally, the corporate channel will maintain visual consistency through posts to create a standard and recognizable look.

From a personal branding perspective, recruiters need to distinguish themselves on each platform by fostering conversation and encouraging engagement. It takes a cohesive strategy to break through the online clutter.

There is a lot that goes into building that strategy, but for the sake of brevity, here are best practices that need to be the cornerstone of an organization’s social media recruitment strategy:

• Optimizing the recruiter’s social media profile
• Networking with professionals on the specific social media channel
• Sharing content regularly
• Incorporating the “Easy Apply” option on LinkedIn
• Getting current employees involved on social media efforts to amplify messages and showcase the workplace
• Including links to all relevant information in posts, so it is easy for clinicians to get additional information

These techniques will allow us to reach new audiences and attract passive candidates, who may be interested in a new position but are not actively seeking one out.

As with any initiative, it is important to measure our success. KPIs that should be tracked: reach/impressions, engagement rate, click-through rate and conversion rate. These data points can be valuable to refine your strategy and improve your social media recruitment efforts.

Healthcare recruiting with social media has become a necessity for organizations as the competition for talent increases. It does not take a major financial investment, but it requires a strategic approach to boost your corporate and personal brand.

If you’re interested in other recruitment and retention topics, check out the resource page we put together for AAPPR Conference attendees. You’ll find great articles looking at recruitment strategies and how to build a strategy that works for your organization.