Within VHA, many health care professionals are retiring or approaching retirement age. And like the rest of the nation’s health care system, there is a shortage of personnel entering the workforce. This growing shortage in physician specialties, nursing, pharmacy and facility support — like housekeeping — is particularly pronounced in rural areas.
Tasked with caring for our nation’s Veterans, VHA must attract and retain the highest caliber employees. With Veterans from every walk of life, attracting a diverse candidate pool is essential to providing them with high-quality care. And with recruitment needs that span the nation, effectively marketing VHA careers is challenging.
While salaries may not be as competitive as those in the private sector, particularly in large metropolitan areas, VHA positions offer exceptional benefits and the opportunity to serve those who have served us. VHA needed a broader and more aggressive approach to bolster recruitment and hiring for positions across its health care system. To accomplish this, VHA partnered with Aptive to strategize and implement a public career awareness campaign.
Aptive’s team brought a multitude of experiences and strengths to the project to ensure top results, including talented program management and marketing professionals, data scientists, business analysts, writers and editors, systems engineers, video producers, graphic designers and event planners.
Aptive employs an integrated recruitment marketing approach underpinned by data-driven, innovative media buying. This holistic approach to all recruitment marketing efforts combines media buys with communications strategy, public relations and outreach, social media, creative strategy and content, and event recruitment management. The approach enables VHA to reach and further engage stakeholders along the recruitment marketing funnel.
The first step was to collaborate on a comprehensive strategic plan to identify all involved stakeholders, key messages and tactics to reach multiple target audiences. The strategic plan focused on numerous target audiences and included a diversity of marketing materials, information on best practices to ensure top marketing performance and a fresh look and feel that communicated the many advantages of working for VHA. Aptive analyzed every aspect of recruitment advertising when creating the strategic plan to facilitate a competitive approach.
Multi-Modal Marketing Approach
Generating active leads for the tens of thousands of open VA positions required a multi-modal marketing approach. After designing cohesive themes, creating organic video content and integrating key messaging into a diversity of marketing materials, VHA and Aptive positioned recruitment marketing across recruitment websites, social media, recruitment events and other channels.
Rising Applicant Numbers
VHA set out to market and advertise exciting career options and unique opportunities to serve Veterans through working in VA’s health care system. In the first four years of the project, VHA observed increasing applications and hiring numbers. Aptive’s and VHA’s efforts resulted in:
Impressions and Conversions
Across all marketing platforms, VA had strong engagement with target audiences. Airings and impressions of VA’s English and Spanish career Public Service Announcements (PSAs) rose significantly from FY21 to FY22. In addition, VA Careers’ 110 blog posts received more than 686,000 views and search engine marketing drove nearly 1.5 million clicks to the VA Careers website for an overall click through rate of 7.45% and cost per click of $0.56. Industry averages for employment related search ads are 5.93% and $3.94, respectively.
Hiring Success
In FY22, VA Careers’ combined marketing and advertising strategies and tactics resulted in 1,202,234,567 impressions which led to approximately 53,200 hires. With continued support and award-winning engagement campaigns, VHA can meet its hiring challenges and attract top candidates to serve those who served the United States.
Award-Winning Work
For its successful career outreach efforts, VA Careers won numerous awards from reputable organizations, including:
