As a medical staff leader or MSP, if you had to sum up your duties in three sentences, could you do
it? Could you also make it sound appealing enough to convince a stranger to move 1,000 miles to
take over your position? Most MSPs and medical staff leaders have not been formally trained to
create and disseminate attention grabbing messages to recruit physicians. However, many are being
asked by hospital administrators to do just that.
“A number of the MSPs throughout the country also do recruiting. In fact, a large number of them are
getting certified as recruiters, largely due to cutbacks at hospitals,” says Richard Baker, CPMSM,
CPCS, director of medical staff services at Gulf Coast Medical Center in Panama City, FL.
Although medical staff leaders are already somewhat involved in recruiting, hospital cutbacks are
forcing them to hone their marketing skills as well. MSPs and medical staff leaders with newfound
recruiting responsibilities should first familiarize themselves with social networking sites, such as
Facebook (www.facebook.com), Twitter (www.twitter.com), and LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com), because
physicians are increasingly turning to these sites to help them find new career opportunities.
If you’ve never heard of these social media sites, here’s a quick rundown. Twitter allows users to
send 140 character updates (i.e., “tweets”) in real time. Facebook allows users to create personal
profiles filled with photos, messages, and links. LinkedIn is a professional networking site for
people who want to keep in touch with industry peers or move up the career ladder. All three sites
are free, although LinkedIn charges a fee for some of its premium features.
Create the right message
Writing tweets is a far cry from writing lengthy advertisements for specialty or association journals.
So how do you boil down your messages and ake them appealing to physicians using social
networking media? Get started with the following tips:
➤➤Know your audience.
If you are untrained in recruiting and marketing practices, you may fall into the trap of describing
career opportunities for physicians in a way that appeals to you, and not necessarily the physician.
"Usually, people write about what they like about the community or what they think is great about
the hospital,” says Shannon Penney, director of recruiting at Delta Physician Placement in Dallas.
But to appeal to physicians through marketing, you should put yourself in the physicians’ shoes.
To do that, you must consider that different age groups look for different perks. For example,
physicians who are fresh out of training place great emphasis on work-life balance, so your
marketing should describe how many days per week they are expected to work (for an employed
position) or how many nights they are expected to be on call (for independent physicians), says
Allan Cacanindin, director of interactive marketing at Cejka Search in St. Louis.
Mid-career physicians are also seeking work-life balance and expanding their practices, so be sure
to mention the referral base, facilities, and equipment that will be available to them, Cacanindin
suggests. Pre-retirees may not be as interested in growing their practices as much as their
younger counterparts, so market your community as a great place for them to spend their golden
years. You may also want to highlight leadership opportunities for these veteran physicians.
➤➤ Elicit an emotional response.
Any physician who is looking for a new career opportunity is dissatisfied with something,
says Penney. They may not be making enough money, feel trapped by a bureaucratic hospital
administration, or want to exchange the buzz of the city for the slower pace of a rural community.
Highlight facts about your community and organization that speak to the physicians’ pain points.
(See the sidebar on p. 7 for sample language.)
“The facts that you want to represent are the facts that support the emotional appeal—not just that
you’re a 230-bed hospital,” says Penney.
➤➤ Play up location.
Physicians oftentimes look for certain things when considering a career move: location and
compensation. “You can offer all the money in the world, but if you’re in a bad location, you’re
not going to get physicians to bite,” says Cacanindin. If you’re in a rural community, Cacanindin
suggests highlighting nearby features, such as mountains, a lake, or even the nearest city if it
is less than a one-hour drive away. Describe the proximity of these features in time, rather than
mileage, which can seem high. For example, write “Less than a one-hour drive from pristine
beaches” rather than “Fifty-five miles from pristine beaches.” You may also want to include
pictures of points of interest on your hospital’s social media pages.
If you’re not in a metropolitan location, Penney suggests using vague terms such as “Southeast”
or “Northwest” to get physicians to bite. “We don’t say Texas unless it is Dallas or Houston, and
we don’t say Georgia unless it is Atlanta,” he says. Why do this? To appeal to a greater pool of
candidates.
“The job of any advertisement is to get as many responses as possible, and someone might look
at Albany, GA, and automatically say ‘I’ve never heard of it—no way.’ They’ve just ruled that out,
but they know nothing else about the opportunity,” Penney says.
Reveal the location of the hospital after the physician has called to inquire about the opportunity
and you’ve described all of the benefits of the hospital and community.
“We hear from physicians all the time, ‘I’m really glad you talked me into going there. I would never
have expected what I saw and I was pleasantly surprised,’ ” says Penney.
➤➤ Accentuate the positive.
When writing a marketing piece, remember that a family physician in rural Iowa performs the same
clinical functions as a family physician in downtown Los Angeles. Focus your social media
marketing less on the clinical responsibilities and more on the unique benefits your specific
organization provides.
“What looks different is their commute to work, their pay structure, administrative duties, and
their lives outside the clinic,” says Penney.
➤➤ Be up front.
Although it’s smart to play up positive attributes and delay disclosing your location if it’s not in a
metropolitan area, be careful not to embellish position descriptions or hide information from
potential candidates.
“Giving physicians all of the information they need will give you a better-qualified candidate because
that candidate is making a more informed decision,” says Cacanindin.
Being honest with physician candidates will not only help with your recruitment efforts, it will also
help with retention. “If you tell candidates up front what is involved, you increase retention because
they know what to expect,” Cacanindin says. “No one wants to be blindsided."
➤➤Ask current physicians what they like about working at your facility.
Need to recruit a gastroenterologist to the community but not sure what to highlight in your
marketing piece? Ask gastroenterologists who currently practice at your facility what attracted them.
“A marketer needs to get it from the horse’s mouth,” says Cacanindin.
➤➤ Remember that less is more.
When writing marketing pieces, skip the long, cumbersome paragraphs. Boil down essential
information into a bulleted list instead.
“Make it five or six bullets that encapsulate what the physician should expect when they walk
in the door on day one,” says Cacanindin.
Penney adds that you defeat the purpose of a bulleted list if each bullet point contains
five sentences. “Less is more,” he says.
Avoid online recruiting pitfalls
Now that you’ve developed concise, catchy marketing messages, it’s time to deliver those
messages to your audience. Hospitals often make three major mistakes when marketing career
opportunities to physicians through social media Web sites.
First, they only use one channel to deliver their message. To reach the maximum number of
potential candidates, hospitals should use several modes of communication, including direct
print mail, e-mail, ads in association or specialty journals, and social networking sites.
(See p. 8 for an in-depth discussion on how hospitals can use social networking Web sites as
recruiting and retention tools.)
Physicians can be found on all three major social networking sites, so it’s a good idea to have a
presence on each of them. Cacanindin suggests starting internally by telling current physicians
about the opportunity and asking them to spread the word through their own social networks.
“Then I’d post it on a Facebook page specific to my organization and a LinkedIn group I belong to
through an association or society,” he says. “Follow up with e-mail and Twitter."
The second mistake that thwarts hospitals’ recruiting efforts is sending marketing to a too-narrow
audience. Market to the masses and let the candidates decide whether they are interested in
following up with you, says Penney. Social networking sites allow you to link your account to others’
accounts, creating a network. When creating a network, don’t discriminate too much. Since social
networking is free, you have nothing to lose if your message gets in front of a few physicians
who don’t match the qualifications you’re looking for.
The third mistake that in-house recruiters often make is failing to consider how much effort it
takes to launch and maintain a social networking campaign. “A lot of organizations are shifting
their marketing toward interactive media, and as they do, they realize they don’t understand the
full impact. It creates more work for them. You need to figure out how you can best support that,”
Cacanindin says. Since MSPs and medical staff leaders who have been handed down recruiting
responsibilities are already pressed for time, they may wish to delegate certain tasks to others
within the hospital who have a strong working knowledge of the Internet.
By following these tips for writing great marketing copy and avoiding these common pitfalls,
MSPs and medical staff leaders will be well on their way to using social media Web sites as
effective recruiting and retention tools.
Use social networking Web sites as physician recruiting and retention tools:
Tips for getting started
Physicians are increasingly using social networking Web sites, such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook,
to find opportunities to advance their careers. As a result, hospitals need to jump on the social networking
bandwagon if they want to recruit competitively. MSB spoke with Jeremy Rodriguez, senior recruiting
consultant at Delta Physician Placement in Dallas, to find out how hospitals can get started using social
networking Web sites as recruiting and retention tools.
MSB: Is it difficult to start using social networking sites if you’ve never used one before?
JR: They are easy to use once the sites are up and running. What better way to enhance employee
relations than to have the CEO sit with someone in HR for 30 minutes to get the process started?
The nice thing is that once you get going, you can delegate someone to put information about the hospital
up on the sites, and you don’t have to worry about it too much.
MSB: Should recruiters create accounts on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn as individuals who represent
the hospital or a global account for the institution?
JR: It is important to reflect on your brand and values through your organization’s page. It is better to
unify your social networking efforts by creating one account per Web site, and that account should be
for the hospital. It would get confusing if you had the HR department on Facebook, the CEO Tweeting,
and the recruiter on LinkedIn, all presenting themselves as individuals. Create one account per site
and give multiple people access to it.
MSB: What tone should hospitals take as they present themselves on social networking Web sites?
JR: The great thing about social networking sites is that it is not nearly as formal as your official Web site.
You can put pictures of staff birthday parties on the hospital’s Facebook page, but you wouldn’t
necessarily want them on your Web site.
MSB: What’s the benefit of putting pictures of staff and events on the hospital’s social networking sites?
JR: Every family likes to take group pictures to remember a special occasion and to share with others.
Exposure on the company’s social networking page is something the healthcare organization and staff
members can be proud of.
MSB: How can social networking sites help hospitals achieve community appeal?
JR: Hospitals need to be a part of the community. The hospitals that are successful with social networking
are the ones that have patients following them online. They are tweeting ER wait times every morning
and afternoon. They offer their followers updates on what’s going on at the hospital. Compare those
hospitals to the ones that don’t share any information, and you tell me which one is more appealing.
Many physicians will have the newspapers from the towns that they are moving to sent to their homes.
Doing so helps them feel like they are already a part of the community, even though they may be three
states away. Social networking sites provide that same feeling. A physician who is thinking of joining your
hospital can subscribe to your tweets to get the most recent news.
MSB: How can social networking Web sites help hospitals retain the physicians they recruit?
JR: Hospitals need to make physicians feel like part of the community, rather than a walking dollar sign.
One neat thing you can do is conduct a brief introductory interview with a new physician and post it on
YouTube. Then, link to the video on your Facebook or LinkedIn page or tweet the link to your followers.
It’s a great way to get a new physician’s face and name out to the community and make the physician
feel like part of the family.
MSB: What are some of the dangers of using social networking sites, and how can hospitals avoid them?
JR: Exposure can be perceived in several ways. At the end of the day, it’s a chance for the organizations
to show its transparency. You will always have negative opinions, but as long as you are doing your job,
the positives will far outweigh the negatives.