Nurse Recruiting from Nurses Week to Memorial Day and Beyond, It’s Mind-numbing

• Author: Amitai Givertz
• Posted: May 8, 2007
• Category: Recruitment Communications, Sourcing Strategies
• Tags: No Tags
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I read an article that lamented the media coverage and universal outrage surrounding the recent murder of 32 students at Virginia Tech compared to the passing interest that the daily killings of American servicemen and women now generate in the press and consciousness of the American public. I guess asking why flags are flown at half-mast for slain students and not for fallen heroes is a perfectly legitimate question although the answer is never easy to tease out in any forum, let alone in a post like this one, already on a slippery slope.
 
It seems to me that the incessant reporting, discussion and introspection about the U.S. nursing shortage has caused a similar lack of public — and sometimes professional — acuity until of course, the problem gets shoved right up in your face.
 
For example, for critical care nursing it came in the form of a recent Journal of Advanced Nursing paper titled, Impact of Hospital Nursing Care on 30-day Mortality for Acute Medical Patients. The research examined structures and processes of hospital care influencing 30-day mortality for acute medical patients, proposing the structures and processes of nursing care have an impact on patient death or survival. Among the mind-numbing facts and figures mentioned:

A ten per cent increase in the proportion of Registered Nurses employed was associated with six fewer deaths per 1000 discharged patients.

The death rate also went down by nine per 1000 discharged patients when the number of Baccalaureate-prepared (university graduate rather than diploma qualified) nurses went up by ten per cent.

A ten per cent increase in adequate staffing and resources (as reported by nurses) were associated with 17 fewer deaths per 1,000 discharged patients.

Hmmm. For some unfortunate family the nursing shortage came into sharp focus when a sole nurse assigned to monitor 10 patients said she did not hear her patient’s heart attack alarm sounding because she was attending to another patient in distress. It happens.

In the same way as we might turn off the droning about the casualties of roadside bombings, the talent wars and nursing shortages so too are candidates numbed by the sensory overload that traditional print ads and job postings have created. But just as we become intensely aware to what is going on around us when we are personally affected in some way is true for nursing and other in-demand candidates.If we can engage the right candidate with the right frequency in the right way and at the right time with the right message and so on then the payoff from that will far outweigh the insatiate hiring manager’s near term frustration which cannot be satisfied with the traditional advertising anyway.

An example of this is HCA’s use of social media. Shannon Seery Gude who writes about recruitment advertising and social media on EXCELER8ion gives a good account of what HCA are up to citing them as on the cutting edge of nurse recruiting. She points to a number of things like their recruiting blog  CareerAtHCA  to illustrate HCA’s approach. And in increasing numbers, recruiters are finding that low cost/no cost strategies that include this type of approach can pay huge dividends over time. After all, if recruiting is indeed a conversation  as industry stalwart John Sumser asserts  one doesn’t want to end up talking to one’s self, right?

To balance this longer term approach to reputation building with the need to staff-up now nurse recruiters are closing the gap with their counterparts in industry and commerce by learning how to proactively source candidates and connect directly with otherwise “hidden” recruits in the same way as Microsoft, Google, Cisco and other tech-savvy recruiters do.

In fact, many healthcare recruiters are moving away from their total dependence on conventional recruitment media and databases for a test drive at least with vertical search, pay-per-click advertising, googling and other types of whiz-bangery. While some have been turned off by the mind-numbing experience of working out how to leverage all this new stuff others have turned to experts like Shally Steckerl who are the helping them cut through the clutter with surgical precision, source talent.

The type of targeted marketing that we have touched on here is gaining ground for healthcare recruiters for a number of good reasons:

Good reason number one: Traditional recruitment advertising is both expensive and ineffective. Nurses, physicians, pharmacists, therapists and you-know-who know how highly sought after they are. To the extent that the idea of anyone being a “jobseeker” is becoming somewhat of a misnomer so too is traditional recruitment media as a means for finding and attracting talent.

Number two: Social media and advanced internet recruiting has not been widely adopted for sourcing nurses and other healthcare skill sets. This gives web-enabled recruiters a huge competitive advantage. The cost of failure, unlike print and postings, can be measured in time and lessons learned. The payoff for getting it right is, well, mind-numbing.

Number three: Running healthcare facilities is an expensive proposition. Dependency on per diem staffing to bridge staffing shortfalls for example eats into available budgets and creates any number of potential challenges. Outsourcing the recruiting function may be an option worthy of consideration but not for most. For sure, low cost/cost sourcing techniques make most sense when considered as part of a broader recruiter training program.

It would be just as well to remember that print advertising and posting, like career fairs and networking, can still be highly effective if the right choices are made and in the context of some broader strategic objective, employer branding for example.A case in point is this month’s series of healthcare related recruitment focuses nationwide and in targeted advertising print markets in USA TODAY where specific nursing and allied health skill sets can be targeted.

And of course, there is always the annual highlight in print for healthcare recruiting: the USNews & World Report’s Best Hospital’s Guide and bannered recruitment feature. Now who could miss that, either in their local market or nationwide?

So, with Nursing Week already under way let me close this post where we began it. Whatever one’s political point of view or moral conviction it seems to me that our servicemen and women shouldn’t be so easy to forget until it serves a recruiters’ purpose to remember them. Nor should we overlook the fact that Florence Nightingale carried her lamp on the battlefields of the Crimean, not so far from the God-forsaken places our military nurses are operating in today.

With Memorial Day coming up, and RCI Recruitment Solutions’ own salute to healthcare in the Memorial Day Weekend Edition of USA TODAY, consider what the nursing shortage means to you near-term and what you might do while you get your other plans together.