Attracting and Retaining Staff in a Competitive Job Market
It’s been over 50 years since the labor shortage has been this acute. Standard recruitment practices aren’t as effective as we need them to be in this highly competitive market. Competing against other recruiters means developing different strategies to attract talent. One such strategy incorporates using social media for recruiting purposes.
Ask Fuel First answers a question: How can we leverage marketing tools, such as LinkedIn, to help us attract and retain staff?
The HR Evolution
Historically, HR departments maintained personnel by record keeping, ensuring compliance and managing benefits packages. Over the years, HR departments have changed their strategies to focus on employee engagement and cultivating the company’s culture, encouraging employees to stay longer (Gulati, 2020). In the past five years, we’ve seen even more changes as HR departments have begun to embrace technology. More specifically, HR leaders are using social media as a marketing tool to attract new talent and keep employees engaged in their jobs and the company.
Social Marketing
Social media has changed how people find work. Gone are the days when people searched through a newspaper’s classified ads for a job. Today, they’re searching online. According to Brian Halligan, Founder of Hubspot, a leading customer relationship and marketing software platform, to grow your business, you need to match how you market your products with how customers learn about and shop for products (Wayshak, 2014).
For those of us looking for new talent, that means we need to market our jobs in places where job seekers frequent. And right now, that means LinkedIn, the most commonly used professional networking tool. This is what we call social marketing.
Why LinkedIn?
Recruiting is a numbers game, so the more people who see your job opening, the better the chances that they will tell a friend, who tells another friend, etc., about that job. LinkedIn is all about numbers. Well, the number of connections and followers, to be precise.
If you write a post about a job opening on LinkedIn, all your connections will see that opening. Realistically, that could be anywhere from a few dozen to a thousand people (we’re not talking about the Simon Sinek’s of the world who have over 2 million followers).
If you ask every employee in your practice to like or share that post, then the number of people who see that post grows exponentially. The chances that the right candidate will see your job posting increases.
As more people realize the importance of career networking, you’ll eventually have even more reach when searching for new talent. Career counselors from high schools to universities regularly recommend that students create a LinkedIn profile to access professionals who may be instrumental in their career development. We know this trend is continuing to grow.
Even though we believe that LinkedIn is a critical part of the recruitment process, Fuel Medical also uses other recruiting strategies.
Other Ways We Find Talent
At Fuel Medical, we utilize six recruiting pathways. They include the following:
- Database: Build a database of candidates by looking at the list of licensed professionals in your state. Those lists are often free or are available for a nominal fee.
- Internal Marketing: List your open positions on the Careers page of your website.
- External Marketing: Check if your job advertisement is compelling. Does it mirror your practice’s energy, or is it just a list of tasks? This is your opportunity to showcase all the practice has to offer.
- Referrals: Establish an Employee Referral program to encourage employees to refer their friends for open positions.
- Outreach: Send holiday cards to individuals in other medical offices to build relationships among the audiology and ENT communities. Those individuals may contact you if they seek a new job.
- Digital/Social: Create Facebook and LinkedIn pages for your practice. And then post relevant and exciting information to build a following.
In general, implementing multiple strategies to attract new talent works best. We hope that by using our suggested mix of digital and traditional marketing, including LinkedIn, you’ll be able to reach more people, build a strong pool of candidates and more easily fill critical positions at your practice.
References
Gulati, R. (14 July 2020). How HR has changed over the last 5 years. LinkedIn Pulse. Retrieved 5 May 2023 online at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-hr-has-changed-over-last-5-years-rajan-gulati?trk=public_profile_article_view
Wayshak, M. (2014). The new approach to get customers banging on your door. Entrepreneur. Retrieved 5 May 2023 online at https://www.entrepreneur.com/growing-a-business/the-new-approach-to-get-customers-banging-on-your-door/233562