Podcasting

Podcasting is very unique and with the advent of the iPod, it has enjoyed tremendous popularity and growth. ITG Group says almost 60 million people will listen to podcasts by 2010. Three out of every four college students own an iPod. With the evolution of iPhones and other smartphones the use of this media will only become more popular. As you can see from the graph below Podcasting had an audience of over 18 million in 2007 and is projected to have 28 million this year.

You would expect that the demographic reach of people downloading podcasts would tend to be teenagers but as you can see from the information below, the 35-44 year old group is not far behind.

A podcast is a series of audio or video digital-media files which is distributed over the Internet by syndicated download, through Web feeds, to portable media players and personal computers. (Wikipedia) How can this media benefit you in your health care talent needs?

Since this is a relatively new space, there are limited uses at the present time. One site that has been around over a year now is “Jobs in Pods”. This site will help you in the production of any podcasts and also allows you to place the podcast on your career site as well as their site.

One of our clients – Exempla (see screen shot below), has received over 16,000 downloads in less than thirty days. With a cost of less than $1000, their three podcasts resulted in a ROI of 0.16 cents per download.

Mobile advertising is just starting to take off, so we all expect to see an increased use of podcasts via mobile marketing. Oh my goodness, do we really want our phones receiving ads, podcasts and video clips??

As you can see, traditional advertising of print ads has certainly taken a dramatic turn. Today’s media is more interactive with the audience and therefore more engaging to the passive candidate. Best of all, methods such as Podcasting are much less expensive than a traditional print ad.

Posted in Social Media | To leave a comment, click here »

Blogging

A Web Log, or Blog, is an interactive web site created with easy-to-publish software that contains posts written in a conversational but authoritative tone. According to Wikipedia, the short form, “blog,” was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase we blog in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April or May of 1999. The modern blog evolved from the online diary, where people would keep a running account of their personal lives.

“Early blogs were simply manually-updated components of common Web sites. However, the evolution of tools to facilitate the production and maintenance of Web articles posted in reverse chronological order made the publishing process feasible to a much larger, less technical, population. Ultimately, this resulted in the distinct class of online publishing that produces blogs we recognize today. For instance, the use of some sort of browser-based software is now a typical aspect of “blogging”. Blogs can be hosted by dedicated blog hosting services, or they can be run using blog software, such as WordPress, Movable Type, Blogger or LiveJournal, or on regular web hosting services.” (Wikipedia)

How many blogs are there today?? According to an article in the Blog Herald, February of 2008, there were over 112.8 million blogs being tracked, which does not include the 72.82 million Chinese blogs as counted by the China Internet Network Information Center. In health care recruitment we are concerned with how many nursing, allied health and physician blogs there are. At last count there were over 2800 nursing blogs, over 250 pharmacist blogs, over 170 occupational therapy blogs and almost 1000 physician-related blogs.

Some ambitious recruiters are reaching out to these passive job candidates by monitoring some of these health care blogs and posting comments and/or inquires related to job opportunities. This definitely can be time consuming.

However, developing a corporate blog to attract and drive candidates to your career website has proven to be more effective. Keep in mind that keeping your blog fresh and protected takes manpower. You will need someone to monitor and approve comments prior to posting on the Internet (an administrator). Plus, securing a team of individuals who will write posts is essential. To achieve optimum Search Engine optimization, we recommend that you set up a schedule/calendar so all parties will know their responsibility to this project. Fresh relevant content results in higher rankings on Search Engines such as Google and Yahoo. Hence, passive job seekers will more easily find your blog and career website.

Get as many employees as possible involved in promoting the blog. They can add the blog link under each of their email signatures. Place links on any of their LinkedIn profiles, MySpace and/or Facebook profile pages (as long as these are professional). Link to other bloggers and provide “swaps” of content or offer to author posts to other blogs.

The war for health care talent is only going to get more intense with the aging population, the aging health care workforce and the aging of our nursing and other faculty. We all need to get creative and utilize these new forms of Social Media, such as blogs, to help us capture the “A” job candidates.

Posted in Social Media | To leave a comment, click here »

Social Networking Sites

The first social networking site, Classmates.com, formed in 1995. However, websites that actually began using the “circle of friends” form of social networking began in 2001 and became really popular in 2002 through a website called Friendster. Today we have over 850 social networking sites.

Social networking sites are websites used to connect or collaborate with other site community members and form online communities. People share photos, videos and chat with each other. The three most popular social networking sites are MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn.

As you can see by the table below by Compete.com, LinkedIn has experienced a very accelerated growth and now has over 22 million users/profiles.

Top Social Networks, February 2008

Ranked by Total Monthly Visits

As a Recruiter, How Can you Benefit from some of these sites??

A great analogy for social networking sites are the job boards over ten years ago. As you recall, many were springing up and then vying for market share. Back then I can recall only a small number of health care organizations were willing to consider banner advertising on some of these major boards as well as niche sites. But these organizations did an excellent job and were in the forefront of interactive marketing. Currently we are still in the infancy of these social networking sites. Some will survive, just as some of the major job boards (i.e. Monster, Yahoo HotJobs) and niche sites (i.e. major health care association sites) and some will go by the wayside. Because LinkedIn is currently the largest professional social networking site, it appears that it will definitely be around for some time.

These social networking sites house your passive candidates. You can search these sites for actual potential candidates, you can search your competitors for listings of some of their employees (and then reach out to them), you can post job openings via their career section and you can create company profiles on some of these sites. Keep in mind if you and your facility aren’t there, your competitor may be!! Today’s competition for the “A” candidates is especially fierce.

At the very least you should create your own profile on LinkedIn and consider a company profile on Facebook to attract candidates. Check out the Marines company profile on MySpace! They have achieved great success in their recruiting efforts via this vehicle. As you will note, this site has all the “bells and whistles.” Also recommend that you view some of the health care videos on YouTube. University of Alabama has several but their Emergency Department video is outstanding and a very hip recruiting tool. Here is the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bosehn85_0c .

As busy as all of you are, social networking sites will definitely be part of the future in recruiting. Therefore, we recommend that you “dive in” and be one of the first.

The next article will discuss blogging so stay tuned.

Posted in Social Media | To leave a comment, click here »

What is Social Media?

Social Media has become the new buzzword in recruiting, along with Web 2.0. What do these terms mean, what do they incorporate, and how can any of this help you in your recruiting efforts?According to Wikipedia, social media is an umbrella term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio.

(See Attachment A: Darren Barefoot created this starfish based on a video where Robert Scoble explained it. http://conniebensen.com/blog/2007/11/03/scobles-social-media-starfish/ ).

In other words, social media incorporates social networks, blogs, podcasting, user generated videos, chats and mobile media, to name a few.

What’s the difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0?

The term Web 1.0 actually came out after the introduction of Web 2.0 and includes the time span 1994-2004 which featured the development of the World Wide Web.

Information and career sites that were launched during that time all had static verbiage. There was not any interaction between individuals. (If you recall, many of us actually used dial-up during those years.)

In 2004, the term became notable after the first O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference.

According to Tim O’Reilly:
“ Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.”

Web 2.0 is sharing information and collaborating on the Net. Attachment B demonstrates different media, services and software used in order to enhance interaction between two individuals on the Internet (A Tag cloud constructed by Markus Angermeier presenting some of the themes of Web 2.0.).

In upcoming posts we will talk about some of these tools and how you can utilize them to attract your hard-to-fill health care candidates.

In the next posting, we will first look at Social Networking sites, particularly because there is so much hype over these sites and so much discussion about them these days.

Posted in Social Media | To leave a comment, click here »