Hiring in today’s market can feel frustrating and unpredictable for private practice owners. You may be posting jobs consistently, interviewing candidates, and still struggling to attract the right people—or enough people—to grow your practice.
That’s where recruitment marketing comes in. Instead of reacting to staffing shortages, recruitment marketing helps you proactively position your practice as an attractive place to work and stay visible to potential candidates over time.
Recruitment marketing as a standalone campaign can be invaluable to help your practice stand out from the competition, attract candidates, and (all things being equal) make somebody reach out to you and decide to go with your offer instead of somebody else’s.
Let’s talk a little bit about what a basic recruitment marketing campaign looks like.
Recruitment Marketing Starts with General Marketing
The first step of recruitment marketing is the same as marketing in general:
- Do you have a great website?
- Do you have good search engine optimization?
- Are you communicating to your list and building relationships with the people on your list?
This is critical because the first steps of recruitment marketing are being visible and doing marketing in general.
The Steps of a Great Recruitment Marketing Campaign
Now, assuming you’ve got your marketing machine in place, people are able to find you, and you’re in communication with the community around you, what are the steps of a recruitment marketing campaign?
Step #1: Create a Stunning Website to Showcase Your Practice
Make sure that your website showcases your practice and its culture well. This means featuring videos, authentic pictures (not just stock photography), and making your website an excellent representation of your practice.
The question is this: if someone is looking at three different offers, how do they know which is the right offer to choose? All they have to compare is what’s on the website. They’re going to look at your website, and they’re going to look at the other websites.
You want your website to really show the inside of your practice and demonstrate your culture so they can see it and feel it.
Step #2: Build a Comprehensive “Now Hiring” Page Which Highlights Your Culture
Next, you want a great hiring page, and it needs to be prominently featured so that somebody right on the homepage can see it, click on it, and go, “Good. Yes, they’re hiring. Let me check this out.”
The overall big picture of having this careers page is to provide a central place that really (for lack of a better word) sells the opportunity to a candidate who happens to be checking out your practice.
What Should You Have on Your Practice’s Hiring Page?
On your hiring page, you want more than just whatever jobs are available. What you want is:
- A video from the practice owner talking directly to potential candidates. Right there on the hiring page, that video has to explain the practice’s unique selling proposition, the unique opportunity to work in the practice. It has to make a connection instantly so that people can go, “Wow, that’d be a cool person to work for.”
- Testimonials from clinical staff that have worked there. You want to give people who are checking out the practice a sense of what it’s like. You want people to share their own experiences in short videos as social proof so that other people who are checking out the practice can go, “Hey, this is actually a cool opportunity for me as well.”
- Information about the benefits of the practice, tangible and intangible. Why would somebody want to work there? What do they get out of it? How does that speak to their needs, their work-life balance, their mentorship opportunities, et cetera?
- Content that showcases the culture of the practice. You want to show the staff interacting. You want to show different opportunities for the staff to have friends and like the place where they’re working.
- The jobs that are available, both administrative and clinical. But you want to do this in a way that actually presents a career path to somebody, where they can experience growth and they could achieve their goals by working for the practice.
Step #3: Put a Brand Story Video on Your Website
You should have a brand story video or a practice welcome video somewhere on the website. This showcases the practice staff interacting with patients and shows the inside of the practice. It has testimonials of people talking about how great the practice is.
This is something that patients or families would see and they’d go, “Hey, this is a really great video,” and they get a sense of who the practice is.
It also helps when therapists or clinical staff are checking out the practice because it makes them go, “Oh, okay, I see this practice.” They can instantly get a sense of it in a few minutes.
Step #4: Post Regularly on Online Job Boards
The next piece of a private practice recruit marketing campaign will be regular posts on Indeed, Glassdoor, and other job sites. This goes without saying, but you definitely want to make sure that you’re putting your opportunities out there so that people can see the opportunities that are there and take advantage of them.
Obviously, if you don’t post your jobs, no one will know that you’re hiring. That’s an obvious one, but it does have to be done regularly, and it has to be kept up.
Step #5: Build Relationships with Universities for Clinical Rotations
Another key recruitment opportunity, particularly for pediatric private practices, is clinical rotations with universities.
When you have students and they need opportunities for clinical rotations, making sure you have relationships with universities allows you to be the person that is building a relationship with those students. So, when those students graduate, they’re thinking, “Hey, I know I have a job over here.”
Having a robust program of relationships with universities can put a steady flow of potential candidates in front of you. Then every year, you’ve got a whole new crop of therapists that you can grab.
Step #6: Hire or Promote a Dedicated HR Manager.
You need a dedicated HR manager. Whether this is somebody that does it on a part-time basis or a full-time basis doesn’t really matter. It just needs to not be the owner of the practice.
The reason is because the owner is busy. The owner has a lot of things on their plate, and the owner won’t have time to do all the follow-up and outreach that’s necessary.
Someone else in the practice has to have the duty of constantly doing the hiring. And the way you do that is you assign a part-time or full-time HR manager where that is one of their dedicated functions.
Step #7: Focus on Manual Outreach
You also need to focus on manual outreach. Whether you do this on Indeed, on LinkedIn, or through some other list doesn’t really matter. The point is having a method of reaching out to potential candidates directly.
Reaching out to them when they’re not reaching out to you is an important part of the recruitment puzzle. The reason for this is there often aren’t as many candidates as there are job opportunities. So, how do you elevate your opportunity? How do you make sure that you show up for that candidate? You do manual outreach. You source potential candidates who could be a good fit, and then you email or you call and you reach out to them.
One great source for this is Indeed’s candidate outreach service. If you sign up for that, it gives you a bunch of different people who’ve put their resume onto Indeed. Then you can see where they’re located, how long ago they were on Indeed, are they actively looking for a job, and you can reach out to them.
Give Your HR Manager a Quota for Weekly Outreach
No matter how you do it, setting a quota of weekly outreaches will help anybody with their recruitment because that gives the HR manager something they’re doing every single week. They’re constantly communicating, calling, texting, writing, and they’re finding candidates and reaching out to them.
And this is important because this is what actual corporate recruiters are doing, and this is what the recruiters are doing for hospitals. If you have your own office doing that, you’ll instantly have a leg up, giving yourself a competitive edge that other practices don’t have.
Step #8: Nurture Your Leads
You’re going to make a lot of contacts with people. You’re going to connect with people, whether through manual outreach, or them reaching out to you, or clinical rotations, friends, et cetera. You need to make sure that you have people on your mailing list receiving regular communications from the practice so that you’re top of mind.
Why? It encourages referrals to their friends. And if they’re ever looking for a position, even if they decide to go somewhere else, you’re still in their mind.
This can be as simple as sending out blogs or videos to your own mailing list, and you include all of the therapists that you’ve ever been in contact with on the mailing list, along with your families and referral sources. Then those therapists, those candidates, are hearing from you regularly. Now you’re top of mind, and when there is an opportunity and they are looking for work, they think of you.
Step #9: Get Referrals From Your Personal Network
Lastly, there is of course just good old-fashioned personal networking. This is basically just prospecting your own staff, prospecting your own personal network, reaching out to people to find out who they know, who’s looking for a position, and making sure that people know you’re hiring.
That’s very manual. It’s very relationship based, but it’s extremely effective because many of the people that end up working in a practice come from referrals within that practice. So, keep that in mind as well. You want to ask for referrals constantly for people who could work in your practice.
The Result Is a Robust Hiring Campaign That Can Weather Any Job Market
When you follow these steps, you’re doing outreach on as many channels as possible. You provide an incredible impression of the practice when people do look you up to check you out. Then you nurture the leads afterwards and stay in touch with them.
This is the recipe for a robust hiring campaign that will be competitive no matter what the job market is like because it puts you in the driver’s seat.
Reach Out to Uplift Marketing for Expert Advice
I realize there’s a lot to all this. There are a lot of pieces that have to work together when you’re doing a recruitment marketing campaign. If you have any questions at all, don’t hesitate to reach out. We’re here to help.
