DPAS Business Development Manager, Ian Eslick, caught up with coach Chris Barrow, to discuss how you can overcome the current recruitment crisis and find the perfect candidate for their vacant position…
IE: Hi Chris, recruitment is a tough topic for practices at the moment. What would your first piece of advice be to a practice that is looking to recruit?
CB: When it comes to recruiting, a lot of the time practices who are looking for an associate or a nurse or any other member of staff, will put an advert in print in a magazine or in the local newspaper and expect people to come to them.
Unfortunately for them, that type of advertising is dead and in this current situation it really isn’t going to help. What practices need to be doing is thinking outside the box and utilising other avenues, such as social media. The reach you can have on social media is huge compared to print advertising, so that is the only way to go when it comes to getting a job advert out there.
IE: Practices are competing against each other for staff to fill all sorts of vacancies at the moment. How can they go above and beyond what other practices are doing?
CB: One thing they can do is write a letter to their patients explaining that they are looking for a nurse or an associate and in the letter ask them if they know anyone who may be interested in the job. People may be thinking, ‘why should I write to my patients? What will that do?’ Well, the reason for doing it is because of a theory called Dunbar’s Number, which was devised by an Oxford University professor who looked into how we connect with each other.
Through research, the professor, Robin Dunbar, found that on social media every person is connected on average, to around 135 to 150 people. So, let’s take a 4,500 patient practice and look at how many people they can get to. The majority of those patients have up to 150 connections on social media, so by contacting those 4,500 patients, you are able to potentially reach 675,000.
Looking for a new member of staff can be like looking for a needle in a haystack and if you were actually looking for a needle, you wouldn’t take out an advert in a magazine saying, ‘needles wanted’. So, using this method will connect practices with far more people and they’ll have a much better chance of finding the right person. I’ve seen practices that have had zero interest from print adverts, but emails and letters to patients have sometimes led to between 20 to 25 CVs.
IE: You’ve touched on advertising and how social media is the best tool. What platforms are the best to use?
CB: It is about using all the opportunities available to advertise and put job adverts on as many platforms as possible, because of the reach you get. So, practices can use Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn as these are the most useful platforms due to so many people using them.
Again, through the theory of Dunbar’s Number, if you have 5,000 followers on your Facebook page, by putting an advert on that platform you can have a potential reach of around 750,000 people, and that is a huge number.
So ulitising these platforms, as I have said, really is the best strategy to take when searching for an ideal candidate.
About Chris
Chris is a business coach who runs his own business, Extreme Business.
Leave a Reply