Brandthropology: Marketing Firm based in Burlington Vermont (VT)

Online Recruitment Efforts Help Hospital Save $292,667

Situation Analysis

NMC is a modestly sized hospital in Northwestern Vermont (licensed for 70 beds). On its southern border is Vermont's largest hospital, Fletcher Allen Healthcare (FAHC). NMC has a continuing need to ensure that it gets its fair share of qualified staff, who are traditionally attracted to its very large institutional neighbor to the south (or leave the state of Vermont completely in search of higher wages). Due to continuing staffing shortages throughout the fiscal year 2007/2008, NMC spent over a half million dollars in salaries for traveling hospital staff, a rather significant sum for the small hospital. Management identified this as an area of focus in the coming fiscal year.

Strategy/Methodology

Brandthropology identified that the hospital recruitment space was undergoing a huge shift, as the places where recruits were finding their jobs migrated from traditional platforms to new, web-based offerings. After a review of recruitment efforts, the team identified the need to migrate from a marketing platform highly reliant on newspapers and large recruitment sites (Monster.com, CareerBuilder.com & Yahoo Hot Jobs), to a marketing platform that took advantage of highly targeted web-based tools.

Execution

The marketing team worked to develop a multi-channel online presence to target technology-saavy employees. We expanded our recruitment portfolio to include free job sites (like Craigslist.org), free job aggregator sites (like Indeed.com), social media marketing (SMM), and cost-per-click advertisements (Facebook and Indeed).

We began our CPC strategy by listening to our client’s needs and past recruiting successes. From our meetings we found that the most successful recruiting candidates tended to hail from New England and other locations with similar weather. We also identified which of NMC’s attributes differentiated it from its competitors.

Once we had testable propositions established, we created geo-targeted ads that focused on New York, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, Pennsylvania, and Colorado. For each location, we devised multivariate ads to run concurrently throughout the campaign highlighting the advantage of working at Northwestern Medical Center.

During the course of the campaign, we monitored the cost-per-click (CPC) and click-through-rate (CTR) of each Facebook ad and evaluated each weekly. Based on our evaluations, we dropped lower performing ads and increased budget on higher performing ads, ensuring that we responsibly utilized the client’s budget.

We continued our campaign off-line to compliment our online recruitment efforts. The two spaces worked together to produce significant recruiting results for our hospital client.

Results/Evaluation

Online recruitment efforts brought a huge increase in traffic to NMC’s careers page. That traffic, in addition to traditional print recruitment efforts, led to a great reduction in turnover and job vacancies in the new fiscal year. This was credited in large part to the explosion of traffic new online efforts sent to the hospital's recruitment site. The happy result was a 50.69% dramatic reduction in the annual spend on travelers' salaries.