Are you struggling to hire?
If you own or manage a community mental health center or a private practice that employs multiple clinicians, you may have been hit hard in the last few months with the new hire shortage.
The labor shortage in this country is causing all industries to struggle to fill their open positions. Many people may think this is limited to only unskilled workforce or low wage or minimum wage jobs, but we have seen an increasing number of our clients in the mental health field that are simply unable to find new clinicians for their practices.
What does this mean?
Unfortunately the inability to staff your practice can mean you are unable to bring on new clients, which is especially concerning during a time when so many need help.
The alternative is to become more competitive with your pay rates, benefits and other incentives to attract employees, which is causing many private and community practices to lose money.
So, how do you get new hires in the door with all the competition also looking for new people? The first step is making your practice visible and advertise the fact that you are even hiring!
Here are five ways that you can help fill your open jobs online.
1. Utilize your website
Keyword research.
As with any other part of digital marketing, always start with keyword research. Because honestly, if no one is searching for the specific way you say something, no one will find it.
What are people in your area looking for? For example, are people searching for ‘open clinician jobs’ or ‘open therapist jobs’? To get specifics you can use the Google Adwords Keyword Planner tool and narrow this down to your specific area.
Website landing page
Your open job listings should NOT be front and center, instead you should use this page as an opportunity to invite people in and attract the right type of employee. Try telling a story first – one that inspires the right potential applicants and dissuades the wrong ones. Then present them with your list of open roles.
Know who you are. Know your audience. Know what you’re after.
Just like you attract new clients to your practice because of who you are, what you believe and what you offer, you can attract the right new hires based on your brand.
Make sure you have put in the work to know who your ideal clinician is. Beyond just being able to perform the job requirements, will they fit into the culture or your company? Do they hold the same values as you and your business? By talking about the company culture on our career page, we can attract the right fit, right from the start!
Don’t have a website? Click here to learn whether you should hire this task out, or DIY
Features to have on a career landing page:
- Testimonials from past or current employees
- Videos from management, owners or current clinicians can help you connect personally with your potential new hires
- Imaging of you and your team at work and at play
- Before they even apply, tell users what they can expect after hitting “submit.” Save them the anxiety of not knowing what your recruitment process looks like – and save yourself from having to answer the inevitable questions about it, too.
- Clearly list the benefits of working for your company
- Training and advancement opportunities
- The job ‘feed’ – However you end up placing individual open jobs on your site they will need to be listed on the career page. Make sure that they are easily categorized (admin jobs, clinician jobs, etc.) and they link to the actual job description
- Stay Legal – Make sure you have a disclaimer and clear compliance with the EOE on each page
Rich Snippet Markup and individualized Job Listings
Have you ever searched Google for a certain topic and realized that your results are broken up by result ‘types’, such as videos of a certain type, or events or even shopping (e-commerce)?
In order to tell the search engines which type you are trying to rank for you need to make sure you are using the correct structured data (schema) markup. This is just a bit of code that is placed on the header of your page in html that tells the search information like type, location, job title, salary info, etc.
In order to optimize your jobs for search, each job listing needs to have its own ‘page’ that includes job information and qualifications (requirements) in a way that is legal to the state that you live in. The structured data markup should be added to the head of each of these pages. Example of a job listing https://familyguidanceandtherapy.com/job/license-mental-health-provider-lcsw-lmft-lpcc/
How to add the structured data for jobs:
If you use WordPress, this can typically be implemented using a markup plugin specifically for job postings. What this does is it adds the correct schema markup to the page so that Google classifies the post as a Job Opening
If you use a website builder such as Squarespace, Wix or Weebly it can be more complicated because you will have to edit the page code itself. I would recommend reaching out to a web dev for this task as it can break your website if done incorrectly.
For more information on Google schema markups for job postings, go here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/job-posting, validate/testing: https://search.google.com/test/rich-results
Keeping the job listing up to date
The standard job posting will ‘expire’ after 30 active days (according to its markup). This is because the job market is highly competitive and jobs are constantly being filled and new openings are being released.
Your job posts are usually placed in order of time (as to not show outdated information). If you live in a high competition area you will need to make sure that you are ‘refreshing’ your job posts more often. Simply put, this is just copying the old job posts and reposting them with a new publish and expiry date.
Some examples of great career pages
https://careers.airbnb.com/
https://www.spotifyjobs.com
https://careers.footlocker.com/us/en/
https://thriveworks.com/employment/
https://corporate.gapinc.com/en-us/careers/old-navy-careers
2. Utilize Google My Business
Spending hours searching through job board sites like Indeed can be overwhelming for potential new hires. Every time I have ever looked for a job, I went directly to the source and there is a good chance the clinicians in your area are too.
Potential job hires could be searching for local businesses that fit their requirements, so make sure your practice shows up (and here is where you utilize that great landing page!)
- If you don’t have a GMB page, create one. They are a free way to optimize your practice for local SEO.
- Make sure your page is optimized and the information is up to date
- Add ‘We’re Hiring’ Posts (GMB does not offer an actual job or apply now ‘type’ of post for now, but you can add it as an update)
- Make sure your website is ready for people that come looking by displaying your career page clearly in the main menu and footer.
3. List your jobs on LinkedIn
LinkedIn is the #1 place where people go now to stay connected professionally. You should be set up on LI in two ways, with a personal profile and a business profile for your clinic.
- Make sure you are using LI and keeping your personal profile updated
- From your personal profile, create a business page for your company and optimize
- Free Job Postings – Create job posts and post them directly on your business page. (This should not be the only thing that you post on your page)
- Paid Job Postings – In order for jobs to appear in your business’s ‘Jobs’ tab (left side of page) you have to pay for it. LI jobs run off of a CPC model, meaning that you will pay for each click the job receives. LI is a career board so it may be a good idea if you are needing people fast and they typically work well for professional and highly sought after positions. Overall, advertising with LinkedIn will give you a higher qualified job applicant than advertising with other sources such as Facebook but will cost more money.
Creating Job Posts on Facebook
If you have a business Facebook page you can create job listings for free on the social media platform.
You can utilize posting jobs to Facebook in the following ways:
- Make ‘Posts’ about open jobs that will go to your main business feed.
- Facebook Job posting – You can create ‘Jobs’ to be added to your Facebook feed and the jobs tab on your business page for free. Simply go to your page and fill out the info to add a new job. Like your website, these jobs will have to be refreshed every 30 days (they expire). You can also create an automated response via messenger and an application ‘process’ through Facebook
- Facebook paid advertising – You can post paid job ads in two ways: You can boost a job post that you have already created (simple) or you can create an ad that promotes an open position. In order to run ads to an open job you must verify your identity and set your ads account up to be able to run ads in a special market.
5. Directories, Job Boards and Digital Forums
Job Boards
You can do paid or free listings in many online job boards (national) such as Indeed, Monster, Simply Hired and more (do a quick search, there are a lot). These can help get your name out there quickly if you need to fill a position fast but you will need to pay for most of them to see any movement.
Local Boards
A great idea is to search for local community bulletin boards, local college and university hiring boards, local social media groups, local newspapers, etc. These options can be a little more time consuming because you will have to email a person, rather than submit info, but can reach your more desired applicant.
Online Relationships
Make a list of all the people locally that may be able to send people your way. Other competitors in your field, local college student advisors, local chamber of commerce or cities. Make a list and begin to reach out and see if people would be willing to help. (This is great exposure for your business too!)
Groups and Forums
You can search online for other opportunities to manually place information about your business hiring. For example, on Reddit there are boards for cities, states, job titles, etc. that can be posted on. You can also run ads on this platform.
You also may want to consider groups on platforms such as Facebook and Linkedin. This only works if you put in the time to make yourself a valuable asset to the communities. If not, you just look like a spammer.
What comes next?
Once people come in for the interview and say they are interested, you need a well-thought out process for moving forward. Although we are not covering this process in this blog today, make sure you have your intake process for new hires mapped out. Start by asking yourself the following:
- What happens when someone says they are interested? Who responds, follow up? Interviews?
- How is onboarding processed? Do you have a workflow of new hire paperwork? Adding them to the website? Gathering their contact info and making sure it is in the directory? These may seem like little tasks but you should have them all written out and make sure they are assigned to a team member.
- Solidify and automate your training – If you have a website (or even if you don’t) you can set up a training program online that includes videos, worksheets, etc. and even exams!
- Learn more about perfecting your intake process here!
Remember, when you are looking to attract and retain the right employee it is the same process as attracting and retaining the right client: Know who you are. Know your audience. Know what you’re after.
Need Help Hiring?
Ok, this seems like a lot of work and if you don’t have a helper in your corner, where do you even start?
At Alford Creative, we specialize in helping therapists and mental health clinics grow thriving practices by utilizing our Branding, Websites & Digital Marketing.
Don’t have any of that yet? We can help you too! Schedule a chat with Beth on the calendar below.