Business Situation
Methodist Healthcare System came to esd to create new recruitment strategies to help it stand out in the competitive human capital market for nurses, doctors, and hospital staff. Creating a new face for an established player in the San Antonio healthcare industry required a redesign and optimization of Methodist’s HR portal, using a number of tools, including search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO). The major challenges identified by esd:
- Understanding this audience’s goals and habits
- Creating the new face of Methodist’s HR department
- Identifying answers to key questions from job seekers
- Encouraging interactions between recruiters and job seekers
Solution
The solution to improving Methodist Healthcare System’s recruitment began with a better understanding of the needs and wants of its target audiences. Following this qualitative research, esd designed and built an interactive, online portal – JoinMEthodist.com – combining attractive design elements with strong call-to-action branding. To make the Methodist brand come alive to potential job candidates, current employees were featured prominently on the pages of JoinMEthodist.com. To encourage interactions between job seekers and recruiters, the site included several interactive tools, including a “Refer a Job Candidate” contact form and a Taleo-based Hot Jobs Forum.
Even the most attractive, information-laden websites are useless if no one can find them. esd researched, tested, and implemented advanced SEO and SEM techniques that put JoinMEthodist.com on the first page of Google search results. Executing the following strategies helped JoinMEthodist.com achieve terrific results:
- Doing keyword density analysis
- Optimizing individual web pages
- Conducting competitive analysis
- Developing PPC ads chock full of keywords
- Crafting targeted Facebook ads
- Creating a mobile site with enhanced communications features
Nursing applicants grew by 25 percent
