Enhance Your Recruitment Strategy With Storytelling
Recruiting clinical and nonclinical staff has become increasingly challenging in a competitive healthcare market. Think creatively when it comes to attracting the attention of the most talented candidates to convince them that your hospital or healthcare system is the right fit for their careers. Storytelling could be a game-changer in your recruitment and retention strategy.
WHY STORYTELLING WORKS IN RECRUITING
When it comes to differentiating your hospital or health system in a competitive market, you need to create a connection with a candidate right away. Telling inspiring and intriguing stories about your health system’s mission, culture, people, and impacts on patients and communities helps prospective employees to imagine themselves as part of your story and to believe that joining your team will offer them unique opportunities both to be part of a shared mission and to grow as a professional. These stories forge emotional connections and paint a clear picture of what sets you apart from the other institutions that might be vying for your candidate’s attention.
Here are four ways to make storytelling an effective part of your recruitment marketing efforts.
- Infuse Your Content Marketing With Storytelling: Creating engaging and relevant content is a critical part of your recruitment efforts, and storytelling can make that content even more effective. People inherently retain more from stories than from statistics, no matter how impressive, and incorporating storytelling into a majority of your content will grab candidates’ attention, keep them engaged, begin to build a connection, and inspire them to take the next step. Think articles or videos featuring patient success stories that highlight how staff played an integral part in their recovery. Showcase providers and nonclinical staff making a difference beyond the walls of your hospital, engaging and educating members of the community, or volunteering their skills after natural disasters or in projects abroad. Or use written or video content to show inspiring collaborations between various departments and to introduce programs you have in place for professional development and employee wellness.
- Use Employee Ambassadors: Enlist your current employees to record video testimonials, author blog posts, and speak at career fairs and recruiting events to tell their personal stories of why they chose to come to your health system and what keeps them there. Encourage them to share stories of especially meaningful or life-changing interactions with patients or colleagues, their personal motivations for providing care or fulfilling another role within your organization, and how they have been able to progress in their role within your organization.
- Leverage Your Social Media Accounts Effectively: Use popular social media channels to share your most inspiring stories. Use already successful recruitment hashtags on X (formerly known as Twitter) and Facebook to highlight stories you think might be meaningful to a particular recruitment audience – nurses, surgeons, community primary care providers, care coordinators, and more. Share written and video employee testimonials on your company’s LinkedIn page. Illustrate employee recognitions and awards, professional development, research breakthroughs, employee volunteer efforts, and more through compelling photos and captions or short, punchy videos on Instagram.
- Optimize Your SEO: Include meta titles, descriptions, and tags to help your content reach the right audiences. Use headlines and subheads in blog posts and articles, and create alt text for all your images. Incorporate relevant keywords that prospective employees are likely searching in headlines, in the first third of your articles and blog posts, and in your video and photo captions. Make sure your storytelling content is optimized for mobile search and viewing.
In today’s competitive healthcare market, telling your organization’s most meaningful stories is the way to stand out. If you need help identifying the right stories and storytellers within your hospital, healthcare system, or practice, or you’re not sure where to start, Lightstream is here to help. Contact us today.
