Recruiting physicians-in-training is just as important as recruiting physicians as residents are on the front lines of patient care interfacing with more patients than any other provider in the hospital. It’s worth your time to make sure you’re recruiting the highest quality candidates.
Residency programs are beginning to use social media sites, such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter to reach tech-savvy, generation Y, recruits.
There’s no well-defined recipe for social networking success. “[Social networking] is unorganized and you don’t know what you’re going to get,” says Kathy Corey, former administrative director for the internal medicine residency program at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
Make the most out of your resident recruitment efforts with the following tips.
Professionalism first
Draw a sharp line between your personal profiles and the ones you manage for the program. The best way to do this is by creating program-specific accounts.
On Facebook, a company or organization doesn’t use a personal profile. Instead, it can have a public page that allows the organization to engage with customers, employees, or other interested parties on the site. These types of pages are sometimes referred to as fan pages.
Rather than adding friends like on a personal page, people become fans of the site. Residents, potential candidates, alumni, or faculty can become “fans” of the page and will receive your updates whenever something new is posted.
On sites like Twitter or YouTube, you do not need to set up a special type of account. The username for the program’s account should relate to your hospital, area, or training program. Twitter status updates or YouTube video posts should also be solely program or training related.
Don’t dive in without a plan
Don’t simply join every social networking site without first giving your strategy thoughtful consideration. Determining how you want to use the social media will help you tailor communication to your audience, Corey explains.
What are your goals—communicating with residents and alumni, attracting new applicants, or both?
“Our goal was to get information about our program out there for applicants,” says Bjorn Peterson, MD, second-year resident at Regions Hospital.
By posting pictures from graduation events, pearls from interesting case conferences, information about the area, and unique experiences that residents have had on certain rotations, Peterson says an applicant can get a sense of the program, the residents, and the quality of training.
Keep your goals in mind when deciding which sites to join and spend time building up a presence. Twitter offers the ability to send real-time updates to residents, so it is a great way to quickly disseminate information to large groups of people, Corey says.
However, if your goal is to get potential candidates interested in your program, consider posting a video about your program on YouTube. It can include a virtual tour of the department, feature interviews with residents and key faculty members, and showcase your facility.
Privacy and other legal concerns
You’ve probably heard horror stories of residents posting inappropriate comments or less-than-professional photos on social networking sites. This may make you apprehensive about putting your program out in the Web world, but the risks are smaller than you might think, say Peterson and Corey.
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and most blogs allow you to assign administrators to the profile. Only these people can post communications coming from the program. As long as you chose trustworthy individuals to administer the site, you don’t have much to worry about.
On Facebook, any of your fans can comment on your page, so there is a risk that someone will post something inappropriate, but it’s not likely, Peterson says. Most fans are residents, alumni, or candidates, and they are smart enough not to jeopardize their position within the program by posting something unprofessional. Additionally, administrators typically have the ability to delete comments if necessary.
Keep it fresh; keep it real
One of the rules for attaining success in social networking is to ensure that the content on your site is always current. Develop a plan for updating the page. Reach out to residents and faculty members to add content.
“Try to get several different people involved. Create ownership with residents and senior staff. It will create less work for the coordinator in the long run and it makes your page more dynamic because more people are involved,” Peterson says.
Identify residents or other staff members who are avid social networking users in their personal lives and ask them to contribute to the program’s site.
“We have several staff members who have come on board who are willing to post updates periodically,” says Peterson, adding that many attending physicians in his program use Twitter. They have linked their Twitter posts to the program’s Facebook page so their tweets appear on both Twitter and Facebook.
Margaret Dick Tocknell is a reporter/editor with HealthLeaders Media.
