Nurse recruiting is a different challenge altogether. Especially in recent times. Nurses have had to deal with burnout, aging working population, staff shortages, increased travel, increased risk, and the recent pandemic that shook things up. So how do you build nurse recruiting strategies to tackle this market?
To keep it short, the most common nurse recruiting strategies are:
While strategies like career advancement, compensation, and work-life balance are critical to attract nurses, we believe it’s just as important to communicate these benefits to your larger database.
It almost feels like at this point, there’s no need to explain why you should be leveraging text messages to communicate with talent. The data is compelling: over 4 million new candidates opted in to texting in 2021. Texts typically outperform email. And it really makes sense, doesn’t it? Just think about how often you’re on your phone. Why wouldn’t busy healthcare professionals be on theirs all day too? Since candidates prefer texts, though, something’s off if your recruiting text messages aren’t performing well with nurses.
The good news is that fixing poor recruiting text message performance is usually pretty easy. In our experience, poor response rates with nurses are often attributed to some form of these four (4) common texting mistakes:
While there are obvious benefits to sending mass text messages to nurse talent, they should be used carefully and strategically. If you’re constantly blasting the nurses in your database with generic job postings that aren’t relevant to their specific needs, they’re going to – at best – tune you out. At worst, they’re going to opt out of all messages and tell their friends or colleagues about their negative experience with your brand.
The most powerful healthcare candidate engagement technology today leverages all the information in your ATS to help you craft personalized, relevant texts (even broadcasts) that are actually interesting to nursing professionals.
Hey, we all love a fun text (and who doesn’t love a good emoji? 🤷♀️). But in addition to the “happy birthday” and other fun text messages you can send to nurses to stay top of mind and build rapport, remember to focus on value more than anything.
Nurses are beyond busy. Imagine how busy you are working, running your kids to school and soccer practice, and balancing the rest of life. Now imagine how much busier it is for nurses. They don’t want anyone to waste their time. So when it comes to healthcare recruiting text messages, you’re going to want to keep them short, sweet, and full of details. Remote/on site, salary, etc – not just in your text messages, but in your job postings. Get to the point. Busy nurses are more likely to trust you if you respect their time and attention.
You know what happens when a text comes through and you’re busy…you see it. If you have an Apple Watch, you may even read it quickly. You mean to respond, but if you’re busy (especially if you’re a nurse working in the ER, driving from house to house to practice home healthcare, etcetera) it is way too easy to forget about poorly-timed texts.
It can be even worse if those texts aren’t from someone nurses know well. I mean, how many of us have meant to text back our friend or loved one. Now imagine how likely it is we’ll respond to a recruiter….four hours after a text comes through.
That’s why timing is important. With today’s most powerful healthcare talent engagement platforms (like - yes - Sense!), you’ll have access to insights and data to help you determine the best dates and times to send text messages and get a response. You can test different dates, times, and messages to see what gets the best ROI, helping your recruiting team run more successfully and efficiently.
There’s one important thing about texts that many recruiters forget – they’re extremely fast and personal. Your text messages arrive alongside texts from someone’s husband, child, or mother. And recruiters love texts because they’re more likely to get a response – and a quick one.
So what happens when a nurse responds to one of your text messages? Well in an ideal world, they get a response. But what happens when you’re leveraging your text recruiting platform to text at, say, 10pm on a Friday? Your recruiters probably aren’t working…
Well, we can only speak for ourselves, but if Sense is your healthcare recruiting tech partner, our solutions work together to create a seamless experience for both your nursing candidates and your recruiters.
So for example, our Engage and Messaging solutions work together to create candidate journeys that automatically send personalized texts to nurses at the most relevant times. Let’s say that after a particular text message with a link to apply to open jobs, a nurse clicks through and wants to apply on your website, but has a question. Our Chatbot steps in to leverage AI and natural language processing to naturally answer questions so that the nurse applies for a job with your company.
After applying, Chatbot sends text messages to prescreen and even schedule that nurse with an interview on the calendar of one of your recruiters. At 10pm on a Friday!
Want to see how our Smart FAQs work? Check out this post from our blog. And if you’d like to see our healthcare talent engagement platform in action, feel free to schedule a demo with our team. Sometimes seeing technology at work can help crystallize the potential impact on your organization.
