Five Reasons Healthcare Recruiters Must Engage in Social Media

As physician shortages worsen, one of the most pressing marketing challenges facing many hospitals today is recruiting top talent. To meet this challenge, in-house recruiters routinely deploy an all-too-familiar marketing mix of job board posts and journal ads, while largely ignoring social media.

But why the snub?

Granted, a job tweet on Twitter doesn’t yet have the same reach or cachet as a recruitment ad in the New England Journal of Medicine. But I do believe social media offers immediacy and relevance that may be more effective than traditional means to connect with a growing segment of healthcare job seekers.

Still skeptical? Here are five reasons your recruiters must actively engage in social media.

Your candidates are already there. If you don’t think your next Chief of Surgery or Head Nurse could possibly be on MySpace or Facebook, think again. Social media is fast becoming mainstream media-and clinicians are embracing it. My company recently surveyed physician and RN job seekers and found that 56% are using or interested in social media and 37% use Facebook. And adoption rates will continue to climb with Facebook adding 600,000 new members a day, the fastest growing segment of which is adults 35 and older.

Social media is low cost. Or, even better, no cost. Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts are free. The same is true for most blogging software. Unless you plan to advertise on social media sites, your primary investment in these platforms is the time it takes to set them up and actively participate in them. I don’t minimize that commitment, but it doesn’t show up on your budget and the ROI is significant when you successfully identify and land a candidate through free social networking.

Think mobile. Mobile phone applications that allow users to send and receive content are key components of the Twitter and Facebook user experience. So when you use social media to reach a job candidate, you are often reaching them on their mobile phone. With 64% of doctors now using smartphones, the ‘always-on’ connectivity and immediacy that mobile social media provides is a profound trend for the future of recruiting.

Social media is, well, social. You can learn a lot about a physician by reading his or her blog or Twitter page-and job candidates, in turn, should have the opportunity to learn more about you. This give and take is at the heart of good recruiting and it’s also a fundament of social media, which rewards participation and dialogue. As a relative newcomer to social media, I am constantly discovering new ways to build my network (for example, the Society of Hospital Medicine group on LinkedIn) and new tools for conversing and developing relationships with job seekers.

You can be a leader. Despite the exponential growth of social media and the buzz surrounding it, no one truly understands all the ways that these sites can be harnessed to enhance a traditional hospital recruiting program. In fact, no one has even scratched the surface. You can wait a few years for others to figure it all out, or you can jump in and help pioneer the way. If you start today, you’ll be way ahead of the pack in using social media to expand your recruiting outreach. And in the increasingly competitive marketplace for medical talent, that’s not a bad place to be.