Mission Impossible? Five ways your marketing can help (but not solve) the health and social care recruitment crisis

Be realistic in your targeting

Be aware of the potential market that’s out there and look at your past activity to help contextualise expectations. However fabulous your campaign creative is (and we like to think ours is pretty fabulous) it can’t conjure up an audience that simply isn’t there. Better to work with the numbers up front and set realistic targets than condemn your campaign to failure from the start.

Understand the issues and challenges

Marketing cannot change fundamentals such as the pay on offer. And where pay rates are an issue, it’s tempting to simply ignore the elephant in the room – we’ve seen countless examples of recruitment websites where it simply isn’t mentioned. But we believe that it’s better to treat your audience as grown-ups and recognise that pay is a huge factor in the decision to take a new job for most of us. Considering pay against other career benefits is something we all do in this situation, so help your audience with that process by being as transparent as you can upfront (pay bands are fine btw).

Broaden your prospect pool

When you recruit regularly, it’s natural to assume that your prospect pool is pretty much the same as your employee profile. But the context is changing all the time, and it may be that what you have to offer is newly attractive to a whole new cohort of career changers. It’s therefore useful at the outset to consider if this is the case for you: can additional training help facilitate those with less experience? What other careers are out there that require similar skills to the ones you need? And if you have identified a new audience, tailor your messaging – they won’t be as au fait with the language and culture you are familiar with.

Your audience won’t necessarily think like you

We’re seeing a big generational shift in recruitment patterns over recent years and one of the major themes is around career expectations. A lot of the senior level people responsible for recruitment in third sector organisations have been in the organisation for a long time. But Gen Z are coming into work with very different expectations. They see work as a means to an end that has to fit within their lifestyle rather than the work is everything mantra of the likes of your Gen X blog author. They are more interested in flexibility, the ability to be exposed to different experiences in work and benefits around wellbeing. These may well be aspects of your offering that you are underselling. (For more on Gen Z, you may find our recent segments webinar helpful).

It takes more than a good ad

Yes, you need to be able to cut through the noise and attract your prospects in the first place. But you need to pay at least as much attention to the journey your potential candidate has to take to get to that job offer. Every step of your process has to be tailored to make it as easy as possible for your ideal recruit to remain enthused. Think about the content of your landing page as an extension of the ad: it has to keep selling, not simply act as an information repository.

And it doesn’t stop there. We’ve often seen high initial response rates suddenly fall away when faced with a 17-page application form or an uncooperative job portal. It’s therefore crucial to work with your HR colleagues to smooth out any bumps in the road that may lose you that ideal candidate.

So, we’re not saying it’s easy out there. But it is possible to make a success of your recruitment campaign. It’s something we’re currently working on for clients in areas including foster care and mental health nursing. So, if you’re facing mission impossible this year, give us a call.