How to elevate your next physician recruitment campaign

Advertising jobs in healthcare? Find out what factors the medical community consider when deciding to advertise a career opportunity and what recruiters can do to overcome challenges.

What factors does the medical community consider when deciding whether to advertise a career opportunity? What challenges do physician recruiters face when designing a campaign to attract top talent? Wolters Kluwer recently surveyed recruitment professionals concerning various issues and obstacles in physician recruitment and found that, to our surprise, cost is but one factor in the calculus of recruitment, and not always the dominant concern.

1. Factors weighed when advertising a career opportunity

When asked what factors are considered when determining whether to promote an open position through an advertising campaign, we heard everything from:

• Cost
• Maximizing resources
• Urgency of need
• Targeting qualified candidates effectively

While cost is a factor, when electing whether to advertise a job opportunity, more are influenced by the ability to reach a desired market than actual pricing. Why? Because beyond running a cost-effective campaign, physician recruiter’s customers share a common challenge—effectively targeting highly-specialized professionals to promote and fill highly-specialized positions. Our research indicates that economy and results, rather than flat cost, are of greater concern when seeking to attract top talent.

2. You’ve decided to advertise, how do you maximize your investment?

When advertising elite, specialty positions, customers want to maximize their budget and run a tailored, targeted campaign. It is highly inefficient to sift through hundreds of applications, most of which do not meet the base eligibility requirements. Our survey revealed that the ability to target specific specialties and reach desirable candidates are the top two factors influencing recruitment. Consequently, most health care recruitment professionals utilize online or printed medical journals or specialty healthcare job sites to promote job openings and prefer healthcare-specific mediums to general job sites, such as Monster.

Significantly more physician recruiters find online journals, which are offered by medical publishers, to be a more effective channel for identifying qualified candidates than general job sites or even social networking sites. As one survey respondent put it, the value of employing specialty recruitment tools is gaining “exposure to a specific audience.” In a competitive market, targeting a concentrated pool of potential applicants focuses recruitment efforts and promises broad (but precise) exposure. In what one respondent succinctly dubbed “Direct Targeting,” this strategy places your recruitment campaign squarely in front of the intended audience. In sum, you want to run an economical campaign, but not at the risk of sacrificing the quality of the candidate pool or reducing exposure to the appropriate audience.

3. Evaluating the success of a job campaign: think quality, not quantity

When evaluating a campaign’s success, many assess the number of candidates who applied or ask the candidate how she heard about the opportunity. Aligned with the recruitment goals above, the majority measures success in terms of how many “qualified” or “competitive” applicants made contact. The success of a recruitment campaign is measured in terms of the quality of the candidates, not the quantity. Therefore, a physician recruiter’s goal is to run an economical campaign, but not at the risk of reducing exposure to the appropriate audience or sacrificing the quality of the candidate pool.