When you think of hard-to-fill roles, Nursing is at the top of the list. Add to that pediatric nurses, and you’ve got one of the toughest recruiting challenges: health care. But if your entire hospital is a children’s hospital, everyone who works with you must be skilled in caring for children – from the medical staff to the nutrition staff to the environmental services team to hospital administrators.
This is a challenge that the Talent Acquisition team of Seattle Children’s Hospital understands well. Named one of the top children’s hospitals by U.S. News & World Report for 25 years straight, Seattle Children’s is one of just six hospitals nationwide to have all 10 pediatric programs ranked in the top 20.
For Seattle Children’s to fulfill its mission, it must build an organization of professionals who are not only the best at what they do, but who share in the hospital’s purpose: “To provide hope, care and cures to help every child live the healthiest and most fulfilling life possible.”
To attract this kind of talent, a regular job description and traditional job advertising won’t cut it. So the hospital’s Recruitment Marketing strategy is to leverage its employees to tell the story of its mission and how employees connect with that purpose, in order to attract other professionals seeking the kind of fulfilling work that Seattle Children’s provides.
Purpose-Driven Recruiting Through Employee Stories
The hospital first began using videos to tell employee stories three years ago, when it was opening a new building and needed more critical care staff. At that time, Cat Almanzor was new in her Recruitment Marketing role at Seattle Children’s. She started out managing the hospital’s social recruiting channels. But like many in Recruitment Marketing, her role quickly expanded to support various recruiting initiatives, including lending her hand to the employee video project.
To create the videos, the Talent Acquisition team partnered with the Marketing team and used a creative agency that the Marketing team worked with. The initial set of four videos were featured on the Seattle Children’s career site to help recruit for key health care roles needed in the hospital’s new building.
Seattle Children’s Hospital employee stories featured on The Muse
With the initial employee stories project completed and well received, Seattle Children’s decided to create more employee stories featuring more roles. This time, they also wanted to expand how and where those stories were told, and expand the candidate audiences they could reach.
So, Seattle Children’s partnered with The Muse to create employee videos and other employee profile content to feature on The Muse’s website and for use in the hospital’s Recruitment Marketing campaigns. (Note: The Muse is a Rally sponsor)
The stories, like this video, feature Seattle Children’s employees speaking about their role, what a typical day is like and what they enjoy and respect about the hospital’s culture. Employees are also interviewed to describe their relationship with their manager, and what skills and experience they had before landing their current job.
Sharing Employee Stories Through Social Media
The employee stories created by The Muse has provided Cat with a lot of recruiting content. Cat spends 1-2 days each week creating, curating and repurposing content. She collaborates closely with the Marketing and Communications team to leverage the material they’re creating, and ensures that she stays close to what’s happening around the hospital so she can share the impact that the hospital is having.
All social links drive traffic to featured content on the hospital’s career site. Here’s what works for Seattle Children’s:
- Twitter—Using a quote from an employee video and pairing it with a photo of the employee or a still image from the video. Uploading the video in the tweet gets more clicks than linking to the video, although embedding a link to the video is the next best thing.
- LinkedIn—Posting a one-sentence employee quote gets more clicks than a longer quote. Even though LinkedIn doesn’t have a character restriction like Twitter, shorter content accompanied by an image has proven to get better engagement.
- Facebook—Highlighting staff members by creating a short profile about them, or featuring teams of people attending a company event.
- Company Benefits—Sharing stories about the hospital’s employee benefits helps fill out the editorial calendar.
- Employee Shares—Asking employees for permission to share their social posts. It helps reach the employee’s social networks as well.
- Social Monitoring—Following keywords like “Washington state awards” to share why Seattle and Washington State are a great place to live.
What’s Next?
- More employee stories! The Talent Acquisition team plans to recognize employees who’ve won Seattle Children’s Making Values a Priority (MVP) awards, as well as expand the roles it features in employee videos to include hospital support staff.
- Expanding social reach! Launching an Instagram channel for careers, promoting job-specific hashtags: #JoinTeamSC and #WorkatSC, and activating employees to share social content using the hashtags too.
Want to share your employee stories? Download our Ideabook: 18 Ways to Share Employee Stories!
