The Nursing Shortage Crisis: A Recruitment Wake-Up Call

The company was not effectively reaching and engaging skilled nurses in a competitive healthcare labor market. To address this issue, the organization needed to overhaul its entire recruitment process across various platforms, including its recruitment messaging, fragmented online presence, and inconvenient applicant experience.

Highwire Health developed and executed a strategic marketing campaign to attract and retain top nursing talent for the organization. Placing nursing applicants at the center of every interaction, we used data-driven audience insights to guide the company’s recruitment journey and content strategy, reaching candidates at the right place, platform, and time.

Our audience analysis revealed the most active social media platforms for nurses, as well as the top conversation themes about their careers. Leveraging these insights, we identified key areas to highlight in the company’s cultural messaging — purpose, nurse-patient relationships, a supportive work environment, work-life balance, and compensation and benefits — to then promote across all paid, earned, shared, and owned channels. Highwire Health also spotlighted the company’s top employee testimonials, success stories, and career milestones.

The program included:

• Leveraging social listening tools to gather digital insights on target audiences and develop marketing personas to ensure messaging reached target audiences across all PESO platforms
• Employing Facebook and LinkedIn ads, paid content boosts, targeted Google ads, and LinkedIn Recruiter to amplify job visibility and attract top talent
• Overhauling the contents and design of the company’s careers page, as well as introduced Live Chat to enhance the applicant experience
• Launching an always-on content campaign and focused capsule campaigns around key health professional recognition events
• Localizing recruitment efforts targeting key locations with open positions

The nurse recruitment campaign significantly increased lead volume, brand awareness, and employee engagement. It garnered 619 live chat inquiries related to careers in just six months. With a 1.02% click-through rate, the program surpassed industry benchmarks, reduced ad spend by 43%, and lowered the cost per hire by 27%. Bliss also leveraged LinkedIn Promoted Jobs to push the company’s open roles in front of targeted, nursing-oriented audiences, resulting in over 240K views and over 1.8K clicks. Meanwhile, localized campaigns helped to grow the number of job applications, and some buildings were able to fill open positions within a month.