4 Marketing Topics Physician Recruiters Should Pay Attention To

As a staff recruiter, you have to target physicians precisely, and then differentiate yourself from your competition — and do it all on time and on budget. That budget may be tight. You may be a team of one. And the physician shortage sure doesn’t help. But you press on.

Because your bottom line relies on the income physicians bring into your organization.

In AB&C’s 10 + years of helping physician recruiters, we’ve seen the challenges you face. And we’ve helped healthcare organizations find and bring in the physicians they need to keep the bottom line in the black.

But even if you can’t hire an agency just yet, we can still help with your recruitment strategy. Here are four areas you should focus on:

Branding

A brand is much more than a logo or a hospital name. It extends into every single touchpoint you have with physicians: direct mailers, banner ads, your physician portal— even the interviews. Some institutions are academic. Others are rural. Know who you are, know your culture and promote it to candidates. This is the most genuine way to differentiate yourself from your competition.

Sourcing

Let’s say you have a great brand and great marketing materials. Your next challenge is reaching the audience you’re trying to recruit. One tip: Study the physician profile. Face it, pediatricians and surgical specialists are as similar as apples and frogs. It’s important to evaluate the candidates you’re trying to reach. For example, primary care physicians tend to put down deeper roots and are more interested in their quality of life and where they live than most of their surgical and medical specialist colleagues. Pay attention to what they’re looking for and customize your materials to speak to their priorities.

Technology

There’s no escaping the fact that times are changing. Technology plays a huge role in every business, organization and person’s life. Physicians are no different — and they’re on mobile devices. Today, people view more than half of all their email on a mobile device. If your materials aren’t optimized for viewing and interacting with on a mobile device, it’s time to make a change. You need to assume that people will view your materials (emails, web postings and internal recruitment portal) first — and maybe only — on a cell phone. Make the application process as easy as possible. Virginia Commonwealth University did by adding a one-touch Apply Using Doximity button to its physician portal. The easier it is for a physician to apply, the more likely he or she will be to do so.

Organizational value

You have a heavy task on your shoulders. How do you prove your value to the organization? How do you show leadership that you’re an investment, not an expense? By showing them how much revenue you bring into the organization. Get educated and share your findings with everyone who’ll listen. The average revenue lost in one year by a vacant physician position is close to $1 million. Bringing that revenue back into the organization (and doing it in a timely manner) is very important. Find out how much your organization loses when a physician position goes unfilled — by the days, by the number of searches conducted and by annual revenue lost — by visiting missingphysician.com.

Here are 15 tips on these four topics that we’ve gathered while helping other recruiters target and reach their ideal candidates with marketing communication strategies and campaigns.