Talent Acquisition in Healthcare with Outbound Marketing

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Navigating the labyrinth of talent acquisition in the vigorously competitive healthcare sector poses a great challenge, especially for privately owned practices. The acute shortage of suitably skilled professionals, high turnover rates, and the attractive sign-up bonuses offered by private equity and venture capital-backed healthcare providers further complicate the recruitment landscape. This dynamic environment underscores the need for innovative recruitment strategies to attract and retain top-tier talent amid increasing market pressures.

Discover how Skief has empowered a healthcare services provider to surmount these recruitment obstacles by implementing customized outbound marketing strategies specifically designed for talent acquisition.

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Context and challenges

Our client, a healthcare services provider with a small network of privately owned facilities, needed to implement a robust and scalable process to hire new employees for a few of their practices.

Existing talent acquisition channels were not delivering enough qualified candidates, especially in areas with lower population density. Recruitment marketing mainly consisted of inbound channels, with job offers published on popular boards such as Indeed, Glassdoor, LinkedIn, etc. The talent team also performed manual outreach and connected with potential candidates on social network platforms, specifically LinkedIn.

The company’s heavy dependence on inbound leads, manual research, and outreach processes, and lack of understanding of the size of the immediately addressable market of talents for each practice, caused a significant backlog of new hires resulting in revenue losses. 

Having a scalable and predictable stream of newly qualified candidates (right experience, specialty, geographical location, salary expectations, etc.) quickly became a strategic project requiring support from outbound marketing experts.

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Solution

Skief was approached to help provider talent acquisition teams implement data-driven multi-channel outbound marketing campaigns to increase the number of qualified candidates interested in available open positions. Combining both inbound and outbound channels at scale should maximize the hiring potential and drive rapidly expected results.

The outbound strategy suggested by Skief consisted of the following phases:

1. Defining the ICP (in this case, Ideal Candidate Profile), possible sub-segments
2. Defining suitable outbound channels
3. Creating an internal database of all licensed professionals 
4. Scoring of leads (potential candidates) to estimate the size of the addressable market based on the mapping and scoring of all qualified healthcare professionals.
5. Enriching data to find possible contact points for each engagement channel
6. Configuring and executing the campaign

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Project execution

Defining the Ideal Candidate Profile

The following targeting criteria were used to define the ICP:

• Candidates living within a certain distance radius from each practice location OR candidates willing to relocate
• Candidates with less than 25 years of experience
• Candidates with the right specialty and experience

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Defining suitable outbound channels

The following engagement channels have been identified by order of priority.

1. Email, preferably personal
2. Address, preferably residential, for direct mail
3. Personal LinkedIn
4. Phone number, preferably personal (mobile or landline)

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Creation of an internal database of all licensed professionals

Step 1 - Data Acquisition and Scoring

Data acquisition and scoring processes were by far the most challenging and vital parts of the project. The first part involved identifying all possible data sources: professional directories of licensed professionals, professional associations, LinkedIn, professional events participants, and various internal historical lists and databases.

Step 2 - Data Extraction

Once all sources were identified, the second step consisted of extracting data with custom scrapers or existing market tools for each depending on the nature of the source. More on how to scale data acquisition (i.e., lead generation) can be found in our detailed technical guide here. In total, over 100k professionals were consolidated in one database.

Step 3 - Data Consolidation

Data consolidation and standardization of fields was another critical step of the process. By applying fuzzy matching technics, we matched professionals from different lists. We avoided data duplication (ex., matching Jon Doe with Jon P Doe, etc.) before moving to data enrichment processes to find missing contact points (email, phone, LinkedIn, etc.).

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Leads scoring of licensed professionals

Different data sets coming from official databases providing licensing data allowed us to get addresses reported by each healthcare professional (either work or home). Using Google Maps APIs and other online mapping tools, we matched the location of each address and calculated the straight distance from each practice location (100k times the number of sites). Only candidates living or working within a specific threshold were considered as qualified for outbound campaigns, in addition to the usual experience-related criteria. The geo-segmentation was not applied to candidates willing to relocate.

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Multi-channel campaign execution

Once the candidates were pre-scored and enriched with available contact details, we started working on implementing the multi-channel campaigns. 

1. Direct mailers: we used tools like Melissa to segment residential addresses from business locations and standardize the addresses according to USPS standards to increase the delivery rate. We used handwritten letter providers, similar to Handwrytten and Thanks, to send personalized letters and postcards at scale.
2. Email + SMS campaigns: we configured our campaigns on Quickmail to manage both email and SMS steps. You can read more about implementing the right tech stack to scale your cold emails here.
3. Social outreach: LinkedIn outreach was managed with tools similar to Expandi. With the performance of our email campaigns, this channel was put on hold for later stages.

Outcomes

After only three months of campaigns, our client has seen exceptional results in the generated pipeline of qualified candidates interested in learning more about the company and open positions. 

Key Performance Indicators:

• Over 100k professionals analyzed and scored across the US
• Identification of 6k “pre-qualified candidates” fitting both experience and location requirements
• Email campaigns with 85% of open rates and nearly 20% of reply rates out of 1700 candidates engaged during the first three months
• Over 200 qualified leads were generated (with the first pre-screening call scheduled)
• one hire resulting in 100x projected ROI

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The US healthcare sector faces significant talent acquisition challenges due to a scarcity of qualified professionals and a highly competitive landscape. Traditional recruitment strategies are proving inadequate, escalating the need for proactive measures like outbound marketing.  

By taking the company's message directly to potential candidates and leveraging data-driven insights for personalized outreach, outbound marketing can help overcome these challenges, providing a competitive edge in the fierce race for top-tier talent in healthcare.

‍Contact us to learn how Skief can help you scale your talent acquisition efforts.