Recruitment and Marketing Strategies for Healthcare with Alysha Davis

<p>hello everyone this is Cole from the American Journal of healthcare strategy I'm joined by a special guest from WellSpan Alicia Alicia please introduce yourself and what you do there sure Cole so my name is Alicia Davis and I'm a Communications manager at WellSpan Health I'm a little bit of a hybrid though where I also handle marketing for recruitment strategy system well-being and new team member experience so I'm kind of your person for the first 13 months of your career at WellSpan [Music] thank you so much for coming on we're trying to introduce people to different roles and also provide really important advice for some of these hospitals especially you know these safety net hospitals or these standing uh you know Standalone facilities um in regards to how to get that marketing and growth so really appreciate you coming on how did you get interested in PR marketing Communications where did that start for you uh really it started when I was five and my neighbor handed me a tape recorder and I interviewed everyone so that that led to me just having a Natural Curiosity all through my life and uh I ended up in journalism so I went to Temple for my bachelor's in journalism in minor in political science and I was in the newspaper business for a good nine years I worked at different papers along the east coast and when I graduated college it was 2006 and I was dumped directly into the recession and so I had to move a lot to kind of run from that uh layoff tsunami that happened everywhere it was at the uh Philly Daily News where I was first then uh Richmond Times Dispatch uh Virginia pilot so I just bopped all around uh reluctantly I came back home which I sore I'd never do to northeast Pennsylvania and it it's been such a blessing because everything just fell into place I worked at the local newspaper for uh about seven years in different roles and that was an incredible experience so I got to hone my storytelling and be an editor be a reporter work late cover corruption scandals ask the tough questions work late on Deadline and that was an incredible experience when I had our first child I went how am I going to how am I going to do this working all these hours and um you know it was a tough industry heart was in journalism but I had to make a change and a wonderful wonderful lady at uh guising your health plan reached out and gave me a shot so I was a marketing uh marketing coordinator there and I helped talk about the ACA the Affordable Care Act and ObamaCare better known as and so I would work with businesses consumers uh to educate them on changes to the law that opened a ton of doors where I got to do some really creative things with designs and I would send tissue boxes to people who were historically non-compliant with their flu shots because they cost the the plan a lot of money and we don't want them to get sick so it was it was cool I got to be very creative met a core group of friends uh then just kind of worked up and around the ranks at Ginger uh left there as the media Rel manager that was right after Co and I think like a lot of other people I was burnt out and needed a change so we moved from the city and built a home we have a farm I have the chickens I am I'm that lady on the homestead and but it's all good because it's a fun fun dream awesome wow yes so now uh now I am at I worked for a boutique agency in Nashville and that was really cool because I got to kind of get out of the weeds of local healthc care and the people on the street and and knowing everything like inside baseball it gave me this incredible view of healthc Care at the national stage all of the opportunity out there the competition and it really made me think wow Healthcare is not just all local I mean there is competition at the national level especially with digital healthc care uh getting tele medicine it's a whole new ball game ironically WellSpan Health recruited me into a brand new role as a recruitment uh communicator and I was like I don't know I'm I was pretty cool I got to go to Nashville I worked with all these amazing women the name of that company's level Communications and they are just Best in Class with what they do and I learned every ounce that I could there but I took this incredible opportunity with WellSpan Health and it's been a couple of years and we're doing some really really amazing things why did you decide to go with WellSpan because you said you were doing you know this incredible work in Nashville that must have been a tough decision so what kind of swayed you in the direction that's an excellent question because I really I really lost sleep over it and I thought okay what do I really want at the end of the day what what makes sense and there were there were a few things that stood out to me when I built my Excel sheet and did my pros and cons and you know the money and how how does it all work so okay money is great right you could buy things so it was a significant raise that was one thing but would it fill my cup would it fill my spirit would I be emotionally involved when I get joy out of what I do and postco I think that's really where a lot of people look now is that sense of fulfillment and that you have a place and I I found that there I met the team the interviews went so quickly and I got the offer so fast it kind of knocked me over but at the end of the day I decided to join because the culture was very aligned with my own um sense of what's the word values with how people treat each other and I can say from many places that I've worked that I found people to be kind and that is what that's what made me make that decision so you it's good that you say that because a lot of employers sometimes they keep you know putting more and more money into the role and they're like people are you know so expensive right but it wasn't just the salary that really convinced you a lot of it was you like you said that mission and that that feeling exactly and and having too they they let me take chances I will sometimes come up with a a wacky idea where I'll be like this is going to work trust me and they do and and that is something that uh you don't find everywhere where people trust you to do your work and it has opened so many doors that when I first started was Recruitment and now I'm helping out the the well-being Mission across WellSpan and making sure that we're doing intentional efforts to reduce truly reduce burnout and not only Empower people to take it upon themselves to enact certain well-being efforts or Wellness but also as a system to to live and breathe that mission and what we're saying so when you talk about the recruitment part that you were doing at the like the very beginning when you first started what exactly is that because I'm familiar with people who do recruitment as like recruiters but you were in a a very different position right very different yeah and it was it was the first of its kind and so I think they saw me with some transferable skills because I hadn't done recruitment before it's a whole new world right and I was like okay this is going to be something and where it kind of started was the talent acquisition team it was postco there wasn't a lot of collateral uh photos that they could use for Flyers to be at events I mean it was a laundry it was 182 items in an Excel sheet of requests that I took within the first four months and I went how in the heck are we going to do this and so I started to think about um you know what does this truly mean so we started to to say okay what are the goals for talent acquisition what are you trying to accomplish who are you trying to reach and we put it on paper then we started to think about our objectives okay why are we doing this how much money do we have let's build the strategy and then let's go through the Tactical grid and then how are we going to measure all this so what I did was uh for example a good one nursing is a tough nut to crack everywhere nationally and so uh looking at the nurses it was hey we need experienced nurses to fill to fill out some of these brand new expansions or new sites and how can we get more experienced RNs and I said okay do you have a list of people who termed maybe within the last three years let's take a look at that list and we'll do something special to reach them so I sent them all postcards that said greetings from WellSpan we miss you so when I went through that that long laundry list in the in the Excel sheet and I said okay let's prior ize these what has to happen first will the site close will we lose a ton of money which ones let's set priorities on these and we're just going to chip away at this list together so the first the first uh hot item was nursing and well spin is always like building sites or creating a new one or expanding something so there's always a need for nurses and we know that's not a local issue that's a that's a national issue so I said well you know who have you reached out to so far are you using job boards where are you posting what audiences are you trying to reach age groups recent grads and so I took a look at the list of those nurses who termed within the last three years because many left from because of covid you know burnout or yeah for different reasons so I thought maybe they'd want to come back let's do some Outreach like soft skill Outreach pick up the phone have your hiring manager and not the recruiter make the phone call hey Joe haven't talked to you in a while wanted to let you know we're expanding and we're doing some really great things with our benefits why don't you come on back oh let me think about it okay great a week later they get a postcard in the mail that says greetings from WellSpan we miss you around here and it's photos of where they used to work at the the past locations and on the back is a QR code they could scan connect immediately with a recruiter and a phone number directly to the recruiter so that worked quite well and then we also did not cards so we did handwritten note cards from previous hiring managers the hiring managers yeah and then we mailed them and so they actually hand wrote each one yeah I had like a pre-loaded message on there and then they were able to freewrite whatever they wanted to and sign their name and give me a call hey great opportunities here do you know you can work weekends Now give me a buzz Janet and her phone number so it was a small very very uh gorilla style small campaign but what that did is it demonstrated some creativity and it gained buyin and consensus right in the beginning of time when I first started in this brand new role and I think once people started to see that you take a Communications approach to your planning strategy which is like multi-level in Communications and when you implement that in a recruitment strategy it works so oh yeah absolutely it definitely works so I would say don't go into anything big or small without a really good plan how did you learn was it past experience because this sounds really good to me right that that you put this all together and I'm like this if I was in that position the call the postcard and then the handwritten note too I mean you're you're not just doing something on a computer you're you you're having to get different stakeholders involved right I mean this is challenging how did you learn how to do that from your past jobs what enables you to do this kind of thing yeah that's that's a great question because I think everyone kind of friends into that challenge where they are especially when they're the new person on the Block so the way that I was able to engage stakeholders was to keep them a prized of all of the developments very early on um almost overc communicating and it would start out with an initial call hey I'm so and so I'm new here can you help me figure this out then I would start to make my old school pick up the phone phone calls U schedule some time in a teams meeting and then I was say who do I need to talk to to get this done so T I knew it I had a cross functional team in marketing and in Talent acquisition and nursing all working together so what I would say is in the past my biggest learning curve was thinking I always had to do everything myself and I would take too much on and it would burn me out or I would not put my hand in there and ask for help that's changed dramatically where I got to get all the right people at the table so the biggest way to make some of those big plans come together even off the ground is to make sure you have the right people in the room how so I guess here's one of the the concerns some organizations people feel like they can't ask for help or they feel like you know asking for these like you said these large kind of more risky projects is is something that they don't want to do what has WellSpan done that's enabled you to do this that other institutions could emulate H I would say it is freedom so there's a lot of hierarchy or red tape at some other places maybe some micromanagement sorry if you're in that um then there uh I would say freedom um and support to take the chance to pick up the phone and to reach out our team too at at WellSpan has gone through a lot of change and reorganization over the last couple of years just since I've been here and I think I think what I like about it to and that Bor say it's constantly evolving to optimize itself so that we're structured and set up in a way that we can more easily cross the Isles and work together without asking for permission and that's something that I I truly enjoy because it allows me to Flat My Wings around and go ask questions and collect the info I need to build yeah I think that's really important and and I've seen organizations who do that organizations who don't and so I definitely think that's something that more places should really try to encourage how successful have these campaigns been well I just got some of the fiscal year data and we had another record year so we had a record year for applica and that's hot off the presses so you're hearing that first uh record applications so number of people who applied through join wellspan.org PS always drive your people to one place so you can you can uh measure that and especially if you have landing pages so we set a goal to increase traffic to join wellspan.org by a certain percentage and the past year we had a ridiculous amount of people who who went to the landing page but it was like this giant net right we were just like scooping up the ocean so in the second year it was like okay let's start to pick we need to really get to the fish we need right we might not need um front office staff at this point in time right so let's we're not going to throw the net on them let's throw the net at nurses AP oncologists like really high priority roles that we need as a system and our uh traffic to join WellSpan it was about the same um year-over-year but in the month of May and I'm so excited about this in the month of May sorry June we had over 99,100 applications it was the highest ever on record and we saw people applying to the roles that we were targeting within those campaigns so it's been an incredibly successful year and uh and that's why I always say have a plan have a strategy get the Buy in and um you'll reap the rewards in the ROI how many employees does well spent have do you know at the top of your head about 23,000 now almost half of the entire company applied in a way right I mean that's a Hu 9,000 is a huge amount of people it is yeah yeah the word's out so just real quick what was what is really the cost of of getting those people to to apply you know are we spending tens of thousands of dollars because a lot of times right you spend more than a dollar per applicant on a lot of services like LinkedIn or indeed some campaigns are very low spend stealthy like your digital advertising say we just want to geofence a conference we we just geofence the heart rhythm conference because we're expanding our Cath Lab at wellb York hospital and I need all those EP TXS and RNs okay so quick and dirty let's find a grand two grand whatever it costs and we're going to geofence that location key audience and then we're going to retarget them for 30 days so they'll keep seeing my cath lab ads until they're sick of it and and then we're going to redo that campaign again with new imagery and put some display ads out into the world that one I think total cost around 4,000 maybe and we've had over 20 higher so far with more in the pipeline so if you think about some of these um if you think about some of the head hunters who are out there the the ones that you would kind of pay to help you fill a role maybe it's an oncologist they might make six figures if they fill that role right I was gonna say you know 4,000 for 20 is is pretty incredible in the large in the bigger scheme of things it is very low spend um and I can get measurement on like cost per clicks for all of our digital campaigns we work with a couple of fantastic fantastic Partners um who helps us with all of our data anal analysis and campaign set and so I could actually look at all my campaigns and look at hey that cost per click on my physician AP campaign was 48 cents per click yeah so I it gets that granular um so really it you know I am very fortunate to work at a at a a company that sees the value in what we're doing uh but also will say okay we need to know the measurement on that so you know my feet are to the fire and saying I know where every single penny was spent and that it was spent wisely so let's say instead of a 20,000 person organization like WellSpan instead I'm you know off in maybe a rural area with maybe a a poor population you know and I only have maybe two or 3 hundred people working for my organization but I'm competing with maybe a health system that's starting to move into my area with a lot more resources than I do um you know we believe that competition is good for healthcare want to provide as much care as possible so how can we do that right how can we you know ethically increase our our market share um you know when we're in those situations yeah especially for recruitment so I always think of it as all right if you're a small business a small organization you feel like you just can't compete with the big dogs you can uh be creative there's something special about these small companies that have the ability to do whatever they want there's not as much of you know leadership levels and approvals and so use that to your advantage and do some of the fun fun things uh for example if you're looking at social media make sure you have social media accounts if you are a small business and your demographic who uses your services is between the ages of 30 and 58 and they're male I know that they are on Facebook or they're on Instagram if you're skewing younger populations maybe it's uh teens teen females they're on Tik Tok so kind of like first identify your audience know who you want to reach and then do a little research where do I find these people.com and and it'll kind of generate some using Google analytics it'll usually generate your audiences based on what they like where they live um what they listen to there's a lot of creepy tracking out there nowadays so uh that's what I'd say know your audience so once you start to build your social media presence make sure it's branded it's clean it's copy edited that's one person can do that on the side put an article up once a week it costs zero dollars and then if you have some piece of fantastic content maybe it's a therapy dog visited all the babies in the nicku and they all wore dog ears right I mean that kind of stuff goes viral with zerar but if you did want to push that message out even farther you could sponsor that post or boost it and put 20 bucks behind it and it might kick you out into different states so I mean there are very very creative ways that you could spend very few dollars uh that would be you know your your social or your shared Communications I'd also recommend developing your owned content so that's content you generate yourself maybe you're a thought leader in fixing pinkies right 10 ways you can fix your pinky at home right and put that on your your website cost zero dollar it's just all in here and you can take that content and it'll boost your SEO so that's your search engine optimization and Google loves that stuff so that'll rank you higher when people are searching for where do I go get my pinky fixed so that's called own content how so we have all these doctors right they're you know in clinicians in general brilliant people they've been through lots of Education they've written lots of papers if I'm in that situation where maybe I'm at a place with a 100 doctors you know and two or 300 people in total how do I go about starting something like this you know let's say I know a Doctor Who's so good at at you know heart surgery or something right and I really want to get his message out there we're recruiting for nurses let's say in the Cardiology department or something like that how do I approach getting that started because have you had success going to some of these doctors and getting them to get involved with social media where they have been in the past oh yeah they love it I mean I think it's flattering when when you approach someone in that way to say hey can you share your expertise with me and and the world nine times out of 10 they're going to be like really okay and you know they they kind of enjoy uh they enjoy that stuff I think it's just teaching them they're smart people so it would just be a matter of uh showing them the ropes maybe helping them ghost ride a little bit till they find their voice and the past I don't I do that sometimes here at WellSpan um and those interactions always go really really well I you know I reached out to gastroenterologists to do a campaign and talked to them on the phone I knew when they had their baby they're on our website wrote the whole thing and and they were just I think honored to be recognized in that way I would say you know just be mindful of you know when you're reaching out they might not check their emails all the time you might need to make the old old school phone call um maybe so just kind of um be polite with with working with them in respect their time they're they're very busy people and be very prepared when you do reach out to them with a with a game plan so be prepar you you've said that a few times that the plan is really important so do that before you know getting all these people involved is have that game plan narrowed down right yeah because you want you want a strategy and you know that's not set in stone th those should be living documents that you can adjust as stuff happens right so you should be able to adjust those plans but everyone knows what the goal is what are we roll toward and what's there when we get there and um so I would just say make sure you are flexible with your plans that you socialize them with the right people so everyone knows what everybody's doing and when you start to look at those plans you might get some really good input brainstorming with colleagues who might not be directly to your your um your program or your campaign and I'm one of the people who think the more brains the better make make this better and everyone share in that Joy of when we launch something into outer space and get 8,000 applications or 9,000 I mean that's a that's a team accomplishment not just one person yeah that is that is incredible it must feel great to see stuff like that happen it does yeah and it's it's not without a lot of hard work and sleepless nights and I'm kidding it's really making sure you have the right people around around you and support the the ideas and and buy into it thank you so much for coming on and sharing this with us you've provided some really important advice that I think a lot of people are probably going to find over the next couple years as they're searching some of these questions I think you you've been very thorough and I mean I certainly have a different perspective on things so I couldn't be more appreciative for you coming on absolutely thanks for for spending some time with me</p>