How to Attract Millennial Health Providers in 3 Steps + 5 Best Ways to Advertise

Step #1 Improve Your Content (in Job Postings)

After reading about Step #1, Improve Your Content in job postings in my last article, there is one more step to take before spending money on advertising.

Next Steps

This is choosing distribution channels for your job postings in order to reach the most active candidates first. We will also address how to begin your systematic process of advertising your positions on job aggregators, job boards and other advertising mediums after this additional step is complete. The information in this article is applicable to garnering both active and passive candidates.

Job board refers to a website where employers primarily post jobs directly on the site itself whereas a job aggregator primarily compiles and displays employer's jobs without requiring them to be "posted" on the aggregator site. Some listings will immediately redirect to the source site.

Step #2: Job aggregators (Organic unpaid listings)

Indeed.com is the #1 job aggregator in the US and the world with over 270 million visits per month as of June 2017 (according to SimilarWeb.com). It controls about 70% of active job seeker web traffic. Glassdoor is #2 in the US with almost 55 million views. Typically, medical providers actively in a job search will see several of their listings first if running a Google search. Additionally, many of their website visitors have signed up for job search alerts or have downloaded their mobile app, therefore, they go straight to their job listings before searching Google. If using Indeed and Glassdoor, you are already covering 80% of the active job seeker market. 

Job Posting Landscape is Changing

Leadership of the job aggregator space has changed because Google Jobs started promoting jobs directly by performing the same job aggregation approach that Indeed started out with. They will be the #1 job search engine in a couple of years because they control the platform that all other (70% of search traffic) job boards and aggregators rely on. 

Fortunately for the job aggregators and job boards, Google is playing nice by collaborating with the major job boards for their new platform. Also, companies can automatically post their jobs directly on Google Jobs with a few simple steps by a coder or by using a compliant applicant tracking system.

Glassdoor is the other major aggregator that takes most of the remaining traffic since SimplyHired was quietly acquired by Indeed’s parent company in 2016. This leaves CareerBuilder, Monster, and all the niche boards to pick up the remaining traffic (around 20%).

In the above picture, I ran the search Family Practice Physician Jobs in Chicago IL. There were some paid search firm ads at the top, followed by google jobs, specialty job board, Practicelink, Glassdoor and HealtheCareers at the bottom of the first page.

As a side note, I was recently contacted by a physician job board (will remain anonymous) that didn't show up in these results after searching 5 pages deep. Which virtually no physician will take the time to go that deep when searching.

Bonus tip: Run a Google job search for your specialty in your area and see if the job board you are using comes up on the first page. If they are not coming up on the first page, this is a red flag.

Step #3: Paid Advertising

In addition to being listed on the job aggregators, the next level of job posting for hard-to-fill positions is leveraging advertising campaigns on:

1. Social media ad campaigns using Facebook and LinkedIn
2. Job Aggregator PPC Campaigns on Indeed and Glassdoor
3. Google Adwords coupled with targeted email lists
4. Selected job boards based on specialty
5. Mobile GeoFencing based on target facilities

Leveraging Social Media

Most all of your millennial audience has a smartphone and a social media account. This gives you a great opportunity to market to them.

Take advantage of the opportunity to garner active job seekers who may come across your social media profile by claiming and optimizing your company social media pages. Make sure your jobs are posted here as well. You can also post your job on many groups that will allow it on both Facebook and LinkedIn. On LinkedIn, we manage about 19 healthcare groups where you can post your jobs for free on the groups as well. Please double-check that you are posting in the jobs section and that it is relevant to the group.

First of all, think of social media as your way of reaching your passive audience, not an active audience. For this reason, we rarely invest in the "job posting" option presented by most social media outlets. We typically go the ad route. Create a template audience of the types of candidates you would like to present your ads (job postings) to and ideally create job video catering to your audience.

As stated in my last article under "Added Bonus: Videos", the videos must be short and to the point. Feature this video to your target audience, and include a link to your job posting. Track the results on a weekly basis as well.

We have also leveraged the social media accounts of advertising mediums that have large followings. For example, we ran a couple of social media campaigns through Nurse.com for one of my clients.

Google Adwords

If you have an existing list of physicians or nurses, upload them to Google Adwords and try remarketing to them. You can also create an audience template like I suggested on the social media accounts as well. Google also gives you the option to upload a list of your target market email addresses to have the opportunity to re-market to them when they are on Google's vast ad network.

You are able to control the budget of the campaign as well as the daily budget in order to control costs. Normally you will just sponsor the things you have already posted. However in some cases, you will want to create new ads. You may want to run A/B market tests on 2 or more ads to see which ads perform best before going all the way with your campaign.

Job Aggregator PPC Campaigns

It is important that you first claim your profile and add things like your logo, company benefits, pictures, etc to make it look as good as possible. Also ask your star nurses and physicians to write honest reviews (Glassdoor prohibits soliciting positive reviews) to help your ratings to increase. Over 80% of applicants look at the reviews, so this is important.

Then try the self-serve Indeed postings and choose your budget per position and only on select, hard-to-fill positions. This is separate from your organic (unpaid) listings. Run campaigns for 2 weeks or 1 month at a time. Try this same option on Glassdoor if it is available.

Using job boards beyond the aggregators

As far as clinical positions go, Monster and CareerBuilder have been lagging the aggregators for quite some time. So compared to the other general job boards, not including the aggregators, healthcare specialty job boards have proven to be much better than, let's say Monster (22 million visits / #10) or CareerBuilder (16 million visits / #21). 

We have had mixed results with the specialty boards; however, these are the ones we look to first when the organic results aren’t getting it done. For example, the AANP (71k visits / #18,782) and the ANA (nursingworld.org with 423k visits / #7023) career sites have been helpful on certain positions. 

According to the 2016 ASPR Benchmarking report, family practice, urgent care and pediatrics make up almost 30% of physician searches. Nurse practitioner searches make up 11% of all searches combined. So inquiring about the amount of active visitors to these types of job postings would be a good question to ask the representative of the respective job board.

The physician/NP job board that we have historically used the most consistently, outside of the medical specialty association websites, is HealtheCareers (371k visits / #1,155). We have also used PracticeLink (131k visits / #1,673) in the past as well. HealtheCareers is one of the organizations that actually runs several of the physician and advanced practice specialty association job boards and they have the largest most relevant databases of providers. Your Membership also runs several of the major specialty associations as well like the AANP.

Changes in job advertising landscape

As of late, we are noticing that some job boards have scaled-back the specialty association part of their business because they found the return on investment isn't what it used to be. Job seekers have been skipping the association boards in favor of Indeed or Glassdoor and signing up for the alerts. Even the specialty healthcare job boards connected to the physician specialties are starting to look to other means when it comes to actual results. 

Although many of the job boards may have higher candidate quality than Indeed, the volume is so low that it is not enough to sufficiently address many of the hard-to-fill positions. In addition, we have observed that healthcare job boards have been sponsoring their job ads on indeed as well in order to capture more traffic.

Mobile geofencing

This helps you to target by location in order to enhance a current campaign that is running above. This option is more complicated to explain than the other options, so I will share more about this in a future article.

Tracking and spending

We are tracking all sources so we know where the applicants are coming from and highly recommend your organization do the same. We have found that less than 5% of our hires have come from the specialty job boards (not referring to job aggregators) over the past few years. There are some exceptions and short blips, but that has been more of the norm.

If we spend money on a job board on behalf of the client, we usually use the specialty associations and HealtheCareers mostly because they are probably the best of the physician and advanced practice nurse job boards. I would only recommend about 5-10% of the total job advertising budget to this type of marketing based on our experience.

According to the 2016 ASPR In-House Physician Recruitment Benchmarking Report each hospital works on about 45 active searches. Based on our percentages, you can expect about 2-5 hires will come from job board advertising, so be careful not to overspend in this area.

Before investing in paid advertising, follow these steps:

1. Work on ad content first
2. Make sure jobs are indexed on the job aggregators
3. Leverage free social media channels (Facebook & Linkedin)
4. Systematically promote on all paid ad channels in the order above

These are steps that we take for our clients every day, however it takes continuous monitoring and a willingness to adapt to changing conditions. In order to see some of the steps we have taken, find out how we partner with clients for amazing results in my next article.

Please let me know if any of these suggestions have worked for you, if you plan to implement one of them, or if you have any to add. I am open for any additional questions in the comments as well.

As always, your feedback and comments are appreciated!

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