The organization is one of the top 10 hospital groups in America and a 22+ billion dollar, not-for-profit healthcare group. They consist of a network of over 52 hospitals, 1,085 clinics and a comprehensive range of health and social services, care centers, health plans, physicians, clinics, home health care, and affiliated services.
Challenge
A healthcare organization had an enormous undertaking of hiring 35,000 medical professionals annually when they sought OBO’s help in 2019. They found it challenging to achieve this quota as they focused mainly on in-person recruiting events and manual recruiter follow-ups
In early 2020, the healthcare organization had to suddenly reprioritize hiring needs as the nation plunged into the pandemic. The recruiting team was hit with two challenges: They had an urgent, critical need for nurses and other healthcare professionals in response to COVID, and they could no longer rely on in-person events for recruiting.
They did not have the tools to execute email campaigns, and with a short deadline looming over their already demanding requirements, they needed support immediately. That’s where OBO came in.
The healthcare system’s recruiting team needed recommendations for technology solutions and strategies, with the addition of implementation, execution, segmentation, and support in lead scoring tracking engagement, and feedback. And although they had built robust contact lists through their website, social media, and events, they lacked data organization and segmentation resulting in lackluster conversion rates.
OBO recognized the need to develop well-organized email marketing strategies and move forward with targeted email campaigns to drive medical professionals to apply to their programs to boost their recruitment efforts.
Their goal was to engage prospective job candidates by nurturing relationships with critical talent segments so that their brand is top of mind when a prospect decides to start job-hunting.
Solution
Selecting HubSpot to deploy warm email campaigns
OBO analyzed the healthcare group’s current marketing strategies, technology infrastructure, and marketing automation and integration needs through discovery meetings with recruiting team stakeholders. After carefully reviewing their user-requirements, OBO recommended HubSpot to deploy warm email campaigns to optimize recruiting efforts. OBO worked with the organization’s data team to import existing contacts and data and set up all corresponding fields and workflows. During this process, OBO created customized strategies for the healthcare group’s recruiting teams. OBO conducted regular video calls with the teams to determine user requirements and optimize the outreach. Through this work, OBO successfully launched and implemented HubSpot within their system.
Creating the ideal hire
OBO conducted a candidate journey analysis and designed marketing strategies through in-depth interviews with its recruiting leadership and employees. Through these interviews and OBO’s healthcare industry experts, OBO created RN recruiting personas. By doing this, OBO was able to animate the ideal recruitee for the various open RN positions within the healthcare group. OBO based these personas on the organization’s model nurses to illustrate the type of talent that would strengthen their mission to deliver excellent care to the organization’s patients.
OBO created six personas for the types of nurses and CNA’s that the organization needed to hire: critical care nurses, labor and delivery nurses, emergency nurses, intraoperative nurses, medical surgery nurses, and home and community care nurses. These personas included profiles, top behaviors, complexities, job values, influences, and communication channels. On top of creating these personas, OBO customized strategies on how to attract each type of nurse to develop personalized content directly addressing the values that motivate each persona.
Personalizing content around brand personas
Creating RN personas helped OBO personalize the email content and landing pages to target each persona type. The healthcare group received an open rate of 35% and 15,309 conversions out of 155,998 emails deployed within six months by creating customized content and propositions centered around each persona type’s core values.
Email segmentation
OBO acquired the email contact lists from existing acquisition applications that the organization had in place, Avature, and Taleo. They also had multiple external contact lists from career centers and top universities. OBO segmented these contact lists by location and profession and targeted each list with personalized email campaigns based on personas. Out of all the contact lists they had, the list that performed the best was a career center contact list that the organization had not utilized in recruiting outreach. The email campaign had an open rate of 45% and a click-through rate of 40.85% wherein their target prospects filled job applications through the call-to-action buttons.
Testing email campaign variations
OBO set up A/B testing for each of the 60+ email campaigns to analyze which emails procured the best results. OBO also tested whether text emails or HTML emails worked better for the organization’s target recruits. From trying whether three-part sequence emails worked better than monthly emails to whether personalized emails from recruiters would fair better than generic emails, OBO left no stone unturned. The findings from these A/B tests continued to shape strategy and ultimately led to substantial conversion rates.
Response management
OBO managed all the responses from 60+ email campaigns to over 40k contacts and redirected the conversations to the healthcare system’s appropriate stakeholders. This strategy resulted in high conversion rates for various healthcare positions and resulted in secondary conversions when contacts began to refer friends for jobs.
Data, reports, metrics, and campaign analytics
OBO set up tracking metrics in the organization’s new HubSpot instance so they could see data coming in real-time. OBO provided regular reporting and analytics on campaign performance and regularly reviewed and discussed results from testing to inform future efforts. After completing the project, OBO provided a summary of all data, reporting, metrics, and analytics to share the campaigns that performed best in subject lines, content, location, time, cadence, and audience.
Providing evidence-based best practices and recommendations
By the end of the project, OBO had provided data-driven best practices to support the healthcare system’s ongoing recruiting efforts. OBO provided documents and reviewed critical data points on each email campaign in detail. These best practices included: contact source, brand specificity, number of emails, sending cadence, sending day/time, subject lines, plain text vs. HTML, messaging style, CTA language, CTA location, landing pages, and sender information.
Conclusion
Overall, OBO’s work with this healthcare organization has shown that email marketing is an effective recruitment strategy that the recruiting team had primarily underutilized. The testing OBO was able to give the healthcare organization detailed information to guide future email recruiting efforts. It also opened the door for many future campaign testing opportunities for various positions and roles within the organization. Ultimately, leveraging this organization’s data and launching an email marketing campaign was a cost-efficient and effective way to bring in leads and potential hires when the organization needed it the most.
