How the Employment Brand of Your Healthcare Facility may be Affecting Your Candidate Pool

In today’s tight job market, healthcare organizations face stiff competition when searching for talent.  When candidates are choosing between several healthcare organizations when deciding where to work, your organization’s employment brand may play a vital role in their decision-making process.

What is an employment brand? An organization’s employment brand is the perception of how attractive or unattractive it is to work for that organization. Employment brand can include the culture of an organization, the leaders running the organization, how attractive the facility is to work in, how competitive the benefits package is, and even something like parking availability contributes to an organization’s employment brand.

As the inventory of vacant healthcare jobs continues to rise and the number of qualified applicants continues to dip, organizations will need to budget more time and money to recruit the scarce talent available. A positive employment brand can become a tremendous tool for an organization’s recruiting efforts.

Strong Employment Branding Helps You Compete for Talent

The candidates in your talent pool will be doing their due diligence when researching your organization’s employment brand. Through reviewing employee reviews online, scanning your social media feeds, reading through your website, and talking with people in their network, candidates will have a good idea of what your employment brand is before they interview with your organization.

The findings of their research will greatly inform their decision to apply for a job at your organization. When deciding where to apply for a job, 84% of job seekers say the reputation of a company as an employer is important. When you’re in tight competition for talent, you simply can’t afford to neglect your employment brand.

To compete with other healthcare organizations, you’ll want to highlight employee experiences on your website, so applicants enter the hiring process with a keen interest in joining your organization.

Negative Employment Branding Shrinks Your Candidate Pool

If you consistently are noticing that your candidate pools are shallow, you will want to review how your employment brand is perceived online. If there are a few negative reviews on employment rating sites like Glassdoor from former employees, your organization may be scaring away applicants.

Much like customer reviews, when it comes to employee reviews, a negative review holds more weight than a positive counterpart. Just think about the last time you checked reviews before trying out a new restaurant. Where did your eyes go, to the four positive reviews or towards the one nasty review? By cultivating a positive candidate experience, and the employee experience for your current staff, you greatly avoid the chances of getting branded with a negative online review.

Unfortunately, once a negative review is posted, there isn’t much that a healthcare organization can do to rectify the employee experience. However, you can take steps to encourage existing employees to post reviews, so your organization’s positive reviews dilute the impact of the negative one.

Positive Employment Brand Drives Employee Retention

What’s the best way to avoid the difficulty of hiring? By driving employee retention and limiting the number of open positions you need to hire. When you have a positive employment brand, your organization can do just that.

Your employees know better than anyone how appealing it is to work for your organization. They also hear what others in their network are saying about the employment brand of your competitors. By crafting a positive employment brand at your organization, your employees will be less likely to explore different opportunities.

A great tip for improving your employment brand by driving retention is to involve your current staff in your employment branding efforts. Conduct blind surveys to discover which elements of your employment brand are doing well, and which areas could use improvement. Make sure that your employees know that you’re invested in cultivating a positive employment brand and value their input and welcome their opinions.

Boost Your Talent Pool with HCRI

By placing a priority on your healthcare organization’s employment brand, you will make the task of recruiting talent easier, mitigate the chances of receiving a negative review online, and increase your employee retention.

Need help finding talent? Learn how partnering with HRCI can deliver your organization with talented healthcare candidates.

Hire Talent