Healthcare Marketing’s Role in Recruitment [Silo Wreckers Series, Part II]

Are candidates getting the right message from your health system?

Marketers are the keepers of brand trust, but we don’t own all the messaging that can help build or erode it. The employer brand plays a key role in how your community — including patients — perceives your health system.

Recruitment, retention, and trust are strongest when the story you’re telling candidates aligns with the one patients hear. This begs the question: How familiar are you with your health system’s recruitment marketing strategy? Do you know what your content is saying to candidates and whether it reinforces your overall brand messaging?

If fear of “stepping on HR’s toes” has prevented your team from supporting recruitment efforts, learn why this falls in your role as a marketer and how you can help without overstepping.

How does employer branding impact recruitment in healthcare?

A weak or inconsistent healthcare employer brand makes it harder to attract top talent and fill open roles. That stunted recruitment fuels a vicious cycle that ultimately affects marketing KPIs.

Here’s how: With fewer qualified candidates applying, staffing gaps persist, and employee burnout affects patient care. Wait times lengthen, and patients notice that staff seems overwhelmed. The patient experience suffers. Trust breaks down.

This is why healthcare recruitment marketing shouldn’t fall solely on HR’s shoulders. Instead, marketing and HR should partner on a healthcare talent marketing strategy that supports recruitment and elevates brand trust.

Marketing’s and HR’s respective roles in recruitment

HR naturally owns recruitment. The HR team:

• Knows the candidates (the way marketers know patients)
• Understands the org’s workforce needs
• Coordinates with legal, benefits, and compensation
• Leads candidate screening and selection

Often, HR is also responsible for the careers site, Glassdoor, Indeed, and careers-focused social profiles. These channels focus on candidates but still impact brand perception.

Marketing — that’s you — holds the expertise in brand messaging and storytelling. Internal storytelling plays a key role in recruitment by showing what it’s like to work at your health system. Video highlights of staff bring credibility to claims about a positive culture, showing how your org supports and celebrates its people.

Who owns the employer brand in healthcare?

This is a disputed question. But as Ahava, our founder and CEO, says about the brand in general, “When everyone owns it, no one owns it.”

Many teams can support the employer brand, but only one should sit in the driver’s seat and steward the direction. It should be the department that most deeply understands the candidate audience: HR.

As marketers, we should lend our storytelling and brand messaging know-how to help shape the employer brand strategy — not own it ourselves.

How can marketing support healthcare recruitment and retention?

How should marketing do that, exactly? Read 4 things your team can do to help.

1. Audit your healthcare employer brand

Evaluate your candidate-facing channels and content assets, including your careers sites, job descriptions, LinkedIn, and recruitment ads.

Questions to consider:

• Does candidate messaging align with patient messaging? Consistency yields trust. Mismatched messaging affects both candidate and patient perception.
• Is the applicant experience seamless? See what it’s like navigating the careers site and filling out a demo application. Ensure that communication across the hiring process sets clear expectations for candidates.
• How healthy is the employer brand reputation? It’s not just about what you say; your employees also shape the narrative. Check your reviews on sites like Glassdoor to understand your reputation and ensure your org is responding to reviewers (like you do with patient reviews).
• Is the employee value proposition (EVP) clear and compelling? Can candidates see your culture reflected in real stories, and can they easily find and understand benefits? (Even if they’re similar to competitors’, showing them upfront gives you the advantage.)

Renown Health makes it easy to find the benefits with a CTA at the top of its careers landing page. And the benefits themselves are written in plain language — not legalese.

2. Enhance candidate-facing content

This is your team’s time to shine. You can help HR:

• Define the EVP (aligning it with the greater brand messaging strategy)
• Identify gaps in healthcare recruitment marketing collateral
• Build channel strategies for the careers site and social media
• Develop a recruitment editorial calendar

3. Support recruitment campaigns

As a healthcare marketer, you’re the resident expert on campaign strategy at your org. You can help HR design strategic campaigns, plan the content, and produce written, visual, and video assets that follow best practices.

Want to see an example of an award-winning healthcare recruitment campaign? Watch a clip from UMass Memorial’s “We Hire You” campaign.

4. Stay involved during (and after) onboarding

HR’s work doesn’t end when the candidate accepts the offer — and neither does ours.

How healthcare marketing can support HR through onboarding and beyond:

• Welcome new hires: Share new employee intros and welcome announcements internally and on social media. (Coordinate with internal communications.)
• Get their info: Capture headshots, bios, and specialty info to update your staff directory and physician profiles.
• Refine onboarding content: See if your onboarding program involves video content or assets about the brand story. (Many do.) That content might need some love.
• Send monthly newsletters: Use these to spotlight internal stories, events, research, innovations, and anything else shaping a positive staff culture — ultimately supporting retention.
• Communicate key messages: Help HR or internal comms share information about upcoming initiatives or changes in a way that aligns with greater brand messaging.

What does effective collaboration between marketing and HR look like?

Solid teamwork doesn’t happen overnight — it takes some groundwork. You need to align your goals, workflows, and strategy with HR’s.

Before you can work together to develop an EVP, plan campaigns, or build a shared editorial calendar, start with:

• Shared goals: Tie your work to enterprise goals like increasing applicant volume, expanding access, improving retention, and strengthening community trust.
• Leadership visibility: Bring this upstream. Coordinate your teams and present a united front to leadership if you need support merging strategies.
• Clear responsibilities: Determine who owns what — in terms of channels, tasks, and assets — and exactly how each team supports the other.
• Recurring syncs: Standing meetings are meetings that actually happen. Create a consistent time for marketing and HR to collaborate.

Want help on any of the above?

Our content strategists can help you align patient and candidate messaging, audit your employer brand, and design effective workflows with HR.

See how we can help