September 30th, 2008 by khart
Hodes Health Care Division will be on the road at two national conferences in October. We hope to see many of you at these important industry conferences.
ASHHRA Conference
October 11-14
Austin, TX
We’ll see you at the American Society for Healthcare Human Resources Administration annual conference. Stop by our booth (805) to talk with us about all the ways you can strengthen and shape your Health Care Employer Brand.
Learn about our innovative products and services including RRx, Mystery Shops, Customer Service Shops, Process Improvement consulting and Hodes iQ, our award-winning ATS system. And have a bit of fun at the booth!
Judith Russell, BSN, RN, VP, Hodes Health Care Division, will be presenting a session on October 13, Employer Branding: Does Your Web Site Measure Up? This session is vital for any organization concerned about its image and the impact of its web site on the candidate experience.
American Nurses Credentialing Centers’ (ANCC) National Magnet Conference™
October 15-17
Salt Lake City, UT
Join us in Salt Lake City and stop by our booths (139 & 141) to chat with our nurse team members about your challenges and opportunities as a Magnet facility or on your Magnet journey. We can help you with employer branding, employee engagement and retention, recruitment process, and customer experience, to name just a few services.
Learn about our primary research projects, including our second survey of critical care nurses’ environments recently concluded in partnership with AACN and Gannett. Results will be published soon in Critical Care Nurse.
We’ll also be discussing the concept of Employer Branding and how it relates to Health Care at both of these meetings. The Employer Brand is what employees inside – and candidates outside – think about your company. It’s what draws professionals in, and keeps them once they’re there. If you want improve upon the results seen in many of our research studies, understanding your Employer Brand is the first step.
Posted in On the Road | To leave a comment, click here »
September 19th, 2008 by jrussell
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 »
September 4th, 2008 by jrussell
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
|
Websites |
Monthly Visitors |
Monthly Visits |
Change in Total Visits from February 2008 |
| 1 |
myspace.com |
65,744,241 |
955,057,928 |
-1% |
| 2 |
facebook.com |
28,563,983 |
326,418,930 |
77% |
| 3 |
classmates.com |
11,978,068 |
22,488,912 |
11% |
| 4 |
myyearbook.com |
3,019,762 |
20,022,490 |
284% |
| 5 |
bebo.com |
3,540,465 |
19,282,335 |
3% |
| 6 |
blackplanet.com |
2,109,069 |
13,746,246 |
9% |
| 7 |
hi5.com |
2,424,699 |
11,828,458 |
1% |
| 8 |
linkedin.com |
3,828,407 |
11,155,614 |
729% |
| 9 |
tagged.com |
2,376,671 |
10,599,014 |
11% |
| 10 |
reunion.com |
6,741,879 |
10,109,933 |
28% |
| 11 |
friendster.com |
1,867423 |
8,625,522 |
25% |
| 12 |
orkut.com |
469,664 |
7,093,888 |
74% |
| 13 |
flixster.com |
3,311,187 |
6,752,495 |
118% |
| 14 |
fubar.com |
1,667,363 |
6,610,080 |
3272217% |
| 15 |
tickle.com |
2,105,741 |
6,320,987 |
61% |
| 16 |
cafemom.com |
1,572,890 |
6,009,659 |
495% |
| 17 |
xanga.com |
1,897,345 |
5,939,039 |
-66% |
| 18 |
yuku.com |
921,186 |
5,483,587 |
1400% |
| 19 |
twitter.com |
629,531 |
4,166,086 |
4368% |
| 20 |
ning.com |
1,181,109 |
3,816,990 |
4803% |
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 »
