The healthcare industry is now the largest employer in the United States, surpassing manufacturing and retail, according to The Atlantic. As Director of Talent Acquisition at Sharp HealthCare, this industry growth has kept Elmerissa Sheets and her team quite busy as they work to implement a variety of strategies that attract and engage top health care professionals.
But despite this significant growth over the past few years, healthcare is facing the same issue as most other industries — a talent shortage. And it’s only expected to grow within the sector. Take nursing, for example. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that between now and 2026, there will be a need for an additional 203,700 nurses each year to replace retiring nurses and meet the need for new positions.
As challenging as it sounds (and is), attracting health care talent amid a severe shortage can be done with the right strategic Recruitment Marketing approach.
The team at Sharp HealthCare has been working diligently to implement new tactics to draw in candidates and engage with them on a different level than before. One of the most important aspects they have focused on is their careers site. Through their work, Elmerissa and her team turned their careers site into a top tool for not only attracting talent but also engaging them and giving them a more in-depth look into what it’s like to be a part of the Sharp team.
I spoke with Elmerissa to get her insight into how healthcare companies can better optimize their careers sites to attract and engage with talent. Here are some of the ways she and her team redesigned their site for better talent attraction and significantly improved how talent finds, interacts and experiences the Sharp employer brand through it.
The initial challenge
The driver for reassessing the Sharp careers site began when the team received negative feedback from candidates about how they weren’t able to find jobs on the page. The search functionality the company had at the time made it very difficult to locate open roles, and visitors were not able to filter by location, keywords or other categories to find right-fit positions.
As they dug deeper into the site and their strategy for how it was being used to engage talent, they also discovered that they needed to have more meaningful content to provide to candidates. Talent was no longer coming to the site just to find jobs — they also wanted to know what it was like to work at Sharp and why they would want to work at the company.
Armed with this insight, Elmerissa and her team set to work creating new strategies to redesign the careers site and ensure they were providing talent with the right content and experience.
Robust site functionality
If candidates can’t find the job they’re looking for on a website, they’re going to leave. How user-friendly a careers page is has a significant impact on how long talent will spend on it searching for open roles.
To bring better functionality to their careers site, Sharp partnered with TMP Worldwide to implement the TalentBrew platform on their careers site. This more robust functionality now allows candidates to see the latest job openings by providing faceted search technology to select filters and search terms to find the options they are looking for. After updating their careers site with improved functionality, the Sharp team found that they no longer received the negative candidate feedback they were once getting about how difficult it was to search for open positions.
Advanced job descriptions
Even if candidates are able to find jobs easily on a careers site, a lackluster description can leave them frustrated if they can’t find the details they need to know about the position. Elmerissa and her team implemented advanced job descriptions that provide all of the necessary details — and then some — that better engage candidates and help them continue on in their journey with Sharp.
These job descriptions feature what’s known as a “Success Profile” that lists the qualities and traits that the ideal candidate for the role possesses. With these profiles, Sharp wants talent to think “Oh, that’s me!” when they read the description.
Sharp’s descriptions also include the responsibilities, qualifications and preferred skills along with the perks and details about the company culture and values that can help candidates make the decision of whether or not to apply. At the bottom of each description page, similar open jobs are listed so that if a particular role isn’t what a candidate is looking for, they have a chance to look at other options that allow them to pursue a career at Sharp.
Meaningful content
But Elmerissa and her team knew it was about more than finding the right jobs with great descriptions. It was also about finding that valuable information that helps candidates make the decision to apply for those jobs. Their next step in updating their careers site was to create and share impactful content that gives an inside look into what it’s like to be an employee at Sharp.
The goal of their careers site redesign — and especially the content they provide — is to share “The Sharp Experience.” After all, Elmerissa explained that it’s their biggest differentiator and is all about how everyone in the company, from execs down to individual contributors in all departments, are working to produce quality outcomes and excellent patient care. One content type that has allowed Sharp to successfully get this message across to candidates is employee and team stories.
They feature blogs, videos and other employee-centric content where current team members talk about why they came to Sharp, the difference they felt in the way they were treated once they came on board and why they are proud to work at the company. These stories help demonstrate to candidates that they can work at a large, stable organization where they will feel this same pride in the work they do and the patients they help.
As health care companies continue to combat the talent shortage, your careers site will be one of the top tools you can use to draw in candidates and keep them engaged with your employer brand. Optimizing your careers site gives you the ability to provide talent with the right information and experience they need to potentially become a valuable employee.
Note: TMP Worldwide is a sponsor of Rally and supports our efforts to provide educational content and events on Recruitment Marketing.