Health System Uses Social Media to Recruit Physicians

Geisinger, for example, sent out a direct mail piece to a list of gastroenterologists with a link to a job listing page. Just four people who received the mailing visited to the Web page. When Geisinger posted the same job-page link on their Facebook page, 17 people clicked on it.

The health system has since hired three gastroenterologists, one of which can be directly attributed to the success of the Facebook page.

Seaboard has heard a lot of positive feedback from physicians and clients about their Twitter account, Herrington says.

"People are actually clicking on the information we're putting out and sharing it with the people who follow them," Cole says. "We can track the trend and the effectiveness of what we're putting up and the traffic that we're getting through URL-shorteners. We're sprinkling the business information in right now, and eventually we can make it a 60/40 split [between news and recruitment information]."

Before embarking on a social media recruitment campaign, healthcare organizations must commit resources to update the sites at least daily and decide how to bring useful information to their target audience, Cole says.

"The first thing people need to realize is it's not meant to be a job board," he says. "If you're going to take it on by yourself, you have to make sure you have someone who's going to dedicate time to it daily. You have to make sure your light is always on so people know to stop by."