Cover Story

Still relying on newspaper ads and job fairs to recruit nurses? If so, you’re not alone—but you are missing some great opportunities to find and hire the best clinicians in your area.

Talk to experts about the latest recruiting methods, and you’ll hear about everything from Facebook pages to shopping sprees and podcasts. But one thing they agree on is that today’s HR role is no longer an administrative one. Instead, your recruiting group should function like a well-oiled marketing machine.

“Creating brand awareness just like marketing professionals—that’s what recruiting is today. It’s not an administrative, tactical function; it’s a strategic marketing and sales function,” said Jill Schwieters, founder and executive vice president of the healthcare division of recruitment firm Pinstripe, based in Brookfield, Wis.

That’s certainly the case at Denver’s Exempla Healthcare, where Gillian Sloan has been a recruitment manager since 2003. Although a portion of Exempla’s recruitment budget still goes toward traditional advertising, Sloan said the amount has been greatly scaled back. In its place is spending on podcasts, Web site upgrades, educational seminars, and travel vouchers.

In many instances, Sloan’s efforts are aimed at building a pipeline of nurses and other clinicians she and the team can “mine,” rather than each dollar amount having to result in a certain number of new hires. “It’s a long-term sales cycle,” she said.

This is precisely where many healthcare organizations miss the boat, according to Schwieters. “There are only a certain number of nurses looking for a new job—but there are thousands more working in the area,” she said. “As important as it is to attract active job seekers to your organization, it’s even more important to start a relationship with the thousands that are working somewhere else. This is key to the success of nurse recruitment in the future.”

Pod jobs
Exempla’s Sloan said she often looks at recruiting methods used by sectors other than healthcare, which is how she discovered Jobs in Pods (www.jobsinpods.wordpress.com). In 2006, she spoke with founder Chris Russell and purchased an initial package of three podcasts. Sloan, a current Exempla RN, and CEO Jeff Selberg were interviewed by Russell for the first three podcasts, which were posted on the organization’s careers page starting in early 2007. “We wanted to give an overview from varying people’s perspectives on what it’s like to work at Exempla,” Sloan explained.

Not only was the process simple and relatively inexpensive, it worked. “Several nursing director candidates mentioned the podcasts and said they were a factor in helping them decide to investigate Exempla,” said Sloan, noting that more podcasts are planned for this year.

Although many hospitals are conservative about recruiting methods (sometimes due to a religious affiliation), it’s essential to tailor your recruiting activities to a variety of generations, said Dr. John Sullivan, professor of management at San Francisco State University and a proponent of out-of-the-box recruiting.

“To almost anyone under 30, MySpace and its competitors are the hottest thing in networking,” he wrote in a 2006 article for recruiting site ERE.net. Schwieters agrees. “A baby boomer still picks up the Sunday paper and reads it on the couch. A graduate nurse probably never touches a newspaper,” she said.

Schwieters recommends developing different strategies for graduate nurses, two- to five-year nurses, baby boomers, and older baby boomers, both in recruiting strategies and job features. For example, older baby boomers no longer want to work full time and respond well to flexible work schedules. “It’s basic marketing,” she said. “Understand who your target audience is, and work it.”

Sullivan goes a step further, saying that while the goal used to be hiring productive people who came to work on time and didn’t cause problems, hospitals today need innovators. “We need people who are thinking of new processes like ‘Let’s send our X-rays to India to have them read,’” he said.

To find those innovators, you must consult your own innovators and turn them into marketers. “You might go to one of your innovators and say, ‘Do you have a MySpace page?’ And they might say, ‘That’s so passé; I have an XYZ page.’ You ask your own innovators where you’d look for someone like them, and then say, ‘Well, you’re there anyway; why don’t you look for other innovators?’ The game is changing from simply finding nurses to fill a slot to looking at what would be different if a great nurse came along.”

Sullivan offers two more examples of leading-edge recruiting: Second Life and an emphasis on environmentalism. “You’re not going to recruit hundreds of nurses by having a presence on Second Life [the online world created by Linden Labs]. But it’s about branding—you’re saying: we’re cool; we’re up on technology; you’re going to like it here.”

Similarly, Sullivan advocates what he calls green recruiting. “It turns out the most advanced people in the world are environmentally sensitive,” he said. “You need to say: we recycle; we’re aware of our carbon footprint. Probably 90% of the people aren’t going to take a job based on whether or not you’re green, but the innovators care about this.”

A day off
At Exempla, Sloan and her team have successfully used a number of tactics to build a database of potential job candidates, including educational events and direct mail campaigns. Another is in the works: a Web site addition will allow current employees to send an e-card advising a friend or acquaintance of a job opening, turning a once-casual correspondence into a more formal, tracked occurrence.

Last fall, Sloan’s team marketed and hosted a critical care nursing symposium, inviting both Exempla employees and clinicians from the community. Two nationally known critical care nursing experts were brought in to speak at the event, with the rest of day filled out with subject matter experts from Exempla.

“Our objective was a relationship-building event that would show Exempla is focused on the things that are important to nurses. We priced it inexpensively so it would not be a hardship for a nurse to take one day off work and come,” she said.

Because it was the first such event, Sloan anticipated 80 to 100 attendees. Instead, 180 people signed up, about a 50-50 split between employees and non-employees—an overwhelming response, said Sloan. Employees received a discount for bringing a friend who didn’t work for Exempla, and groups of three or more nurses from another hospital received special group rates.

“Having all those Exempla employees in the audience and Exempla presenters really helped people who don’t work here see what we’re about,” Sloan said. “We understood that it would be more of a PR/community-building tool and didn’t expect to make any direct hires immediately. We captured their contact information and have a nice calling and mailing list that we have been mining since then.”

Two recent direct mail campaigns developed by Sloan and her team were also highly effective. One targeted local nurses with a hotel stay and shopping spree at Cherry Creek, an upscale shopping and dining district in Denver. Sloan said more than 200 nurses (from a list of several thousand) called the RSVP line, which is staffed by Exempla recruiters.

Another targeted out-of-state nurses, inviting them to stay at the Ritz Carlton at Beaver Creek during ski season (their names were purchased from state boards of nursing). Pre-screened candidates agreed to an onsite interview with a manager and received airfare, rental car, one-night hotel stay, and meals. “We got a large number of responses and five hires out of that campaign,” said Sloan.

Still, Sloan is aware that the main thrust of her team’s marketing efforts must be more about relationship building than direct hires. Sullivan sums it up this way, “It’s about the phrase, ‘Someday you’re going to work here.’ It may not be this year, it may be five years from now, but if I’m a nurse, I’m going to pick the hospital that has made an effort to get to know me.”