Facebook gets ‘thumbs up’ for nurse recruitment
In the current landscape, few marketing channels are performing as well in terms of cost-effective results as Facebook, with it’s highly refined geo-targeting, audience numbers and flexible budgets.
It’s emerging time and time again as a sucessful platform to focus your recruitment spend for both qualified and non-qualitifed healthcare roles.
Holding a recruitment day is often central to many of our client’s nurse recruitment strategies, but getting the message out and attracting the right attendees can be difficult in such a competetive marketplace.
Facebook allows you to utilise their ‘Event’ function to capture direct responses in the platform, remind people interested in the event and provide them with updates – a great option if you’re lacking a suitable website to signpost interested applicants to. Here’s an example of what Facebook alone can deliver in a recent recruitment drive for nurses, physiotherapists, midwives and occupational therapists:
Client: Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust
Brief and objective: Attract attendance to a recruitment event taking place in February 2017 for Nurses, Midwives, Physiotherapists and Ocupational Therapists.
Strategy: Highly refined audience, targeted to reach the above qualified staff within a 50 mile radius of the trust, for a two week period during the lead up to the event.
Similar Facebook advertising for a nurse and midwife recruitment day in October 16 had reached over 44,000 Nurses and Midwives and generated 206 event responses, 185 registered as interested and 50 confirmed as attending.
Results:
In just 11 days of promotion, the advertising reached 32,635 relevant healthcare professionals, receiving 220 event responses – either interested or confirmed as attending.
On the day, 44 people attended, resulting in 14 job offers, as well as a further four follow-up interviews, potentially filling a total of 18 roles from one single event – the majority of which being nurse positions.
Using the above advertising alone, the average cost equivalent per nurse recruited from this was just £90 + VAT of budget spend, making it a hugely cost-effective recruitment tool to have at your disposal!
Sharon Holt, HR Manager at Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust, said:
“We’ve been very impressed with what relatively small budgets have delivered for us on Facebook, we are a small trust and like many others have difficulties filling vacant nursing positions. Both these events resulted in filling much needed roles and it will definitely play a strong part in our future campaigns”.
Whether you have a specific event to draw people to, signposting to your recruitment website or listings on NHS Jobs, NHS Creative can help guide you through getting the most out of this social media platform.