Count On Coffey

By Sherilee Coffey, VP of Business Development and Marketing

In their efforts to combat staff shortages, healthcare organizations are dealing with a perfect storm: burnout, an aging workforce and a growing demand for care.

The storm isn’t going to settle down soon, according to the American Hospital Association, which predicts that the industry will see a shortage of about 100,000 critical healthcare workers by 2028.

In response, many healthcare organizations are rethinking recruitment and retention. One powerful but often overlooked approach is to encourage marketing and human resources (HR) departments to collaborate on attracting top talent, retaining valuable staff and building a positive workplace culture.

Why marketing and HR make perfect partners

With the growing need for healthcare organizations to be more strategic in their recruitment efforts, it makes perfect sense for these two departments to collaborate. The role of HR is to identify workforce needs, recruit candidates and enhance staff retention, while the role of marketing is to create compelling messages, build brand awareness and develop strategies for reaching the right audiences. Working together, they can serve as a force multiplier within the organization, ensuring consistent messaging that supports the organization’s brand as an employer of choice.

Projecting a unified message can help the entire organization by:

Promoting its image as a solid employer. With marketing crafting meaningful stories and HR providing insights into what employees care about, you’ll be deploying a message about what a great place to work your organization is.

Reaching the right candidates. Your marketing team knows how to get the message out by using strategic marketing tools—such as digital ads, social media and content marketing—to help optimize results and ensure truly targeted recruitment campaigns.

Improving staff retention. Marketing can help drive internal communication strategies that cultivate a sense of community and engagement within the workforce, showcase opportunities for advancement, and help keep employees motivated.

Fostering a strong partnership between HR and marketing can help your healthcare organization develop unified recruitment and retention strategies to overcome staffing challenges and build a thriving workforce.

Actionable steps for collaboration

Now is the time to develop a well-rounded strategy that enables marketing and HR to use all the tools of their trades to help your hospital attract and retain top talent. Here are just a few proven approaches:

1. Have HR and marketing build a joint branding strategy to deliver coherent and consistent messaging across the careers pages and job postings on your website and social media platforms.

2. Employ targeted digital advertising to help reach the right candidates.

3. Use data from employee surveys and other feedback sources about what employees value, craft storytelling that will attract quality candidates.

4. Include actual employee experiences in your recruitment materials and social media posts to make your content more compelling.

5. Develop targeted social media ads that reach specific job seekers.

6. Use video content featuring actual staff to showcase your workplace culture.

7. Include relevant keywords in your job postings to improve your search rankings.

8. Encourage employee advocacy. Staff can add credibility to recruitment efforts by sharing positive experiences on job sites and other platforms, participating in referral programs to help bring in new talent, and contributing blog posts or videos about their roles.

Categories: Marketing