Physician recruiting is becoming increasingly competitive.
This is unfortunate for most healthcare organizations, particularly in the context of the recent rush of health group mergers, which results in a regional standardization in salary and benefits.
In a nutshell, since every healthcare organization offers a solid salary and a solid benefits pack to physicians, this is not an area you will be able to differentiate yourself; i.e. a good salary and benefits package is necessary, but not sufficient.
So what to do?
I suggest that a team composed of HR, Marketing, and providers spend some time considering first, what makes you unique, and second, how to SHOW it online.
For example, if you are healthcare organization with a CEO who was also a surgeon, this is a perfect opportunity video content ( perhaps an interview format?) to place on your recruiting page for surgeons.
Or if your provider pool or your senior management is 50% women, you can show this gender diversity easily on your website with a simple graphic.
Or if you have an active internal physician blog within your organization, you could create a simple, narrated screencast about your ‘Digital Open Door Policy” and make it part of a “What makes us Unique” Short Video Series.
( A good rule of thumb for physician recruiting is this: if you don’t SHOW it, you don’t do it. In practice this means it doesn’t matter if your competition actually does the same thing as you, if they don’t SHOW it on their digital platform then it doesn’t count. This is because on the first – and possibly only – visit to your website and recruiting page by a potential physicians candidate, attention is everything).
They key point is this: Have an honest discussion about what really makes you unique first (hint- it’s not your 401K) , THEN think of the associated creative content and the places and ways to distribute it to potential candidates.