By: Tony Barlow | tbarlow@barlowmccarthy.com
Here’s hoping you had a wonderful holiday season! As we enter a new year many of us think about setting resolutions and trying to make changes to improve our life and our habits. If you are like me, those goals center around your personal life and may or may not translate to your professional life. Keep focusing on those personal goals but for a brief moment, let’s consider a few recruitment resolutions for the new year.
- Communicate better – At Barlow/McCarthy, as we support in-house recruiters, we get a glimpse into many in-house programs all across the country. One consistent trouble spot for teams is communication. Specifically, communication with candidates. It includes things like day-to-day communication with leads, job postings and bulk emails. Everyone is well-intended but the pace often means the details fall off. I suggest a refocus on how you communicate to your prospects. Here are a few ideas:
- ALWAYS address the physician in an appropriate way at the top of your email. Dear Dr. ___ or Hello Dr. ___ are good standards. If it is slightly more casual you might say, “Thank you for your reply Dr. ___.”
- Don’t rush through your responses. Give yourself ample time to craft a good reply to emails.
- Double check your spelling and grammar. You need to be writing in a professional manner when representing your organization.
- Find the right cadence. Communicate frequently with leads. When you get a warm lead you need to connect with that lead on a consistent and regular basis. Within our sourcing work, we have found it often takes 5-7 emails and/or text messages for a reply and that is with a warm lead who has expressed interest. Be consistent and persistent to encourage that prospect to move to the next level.
- Stay consistent with email blasts – Email blast frequency is often a topic of conversation. For our email messaging clients, we focus on at least one message per month. If it is a licensed list or warm prospects that might go to two messages per month. We never know when a practicing or resident physician is going to decide it is the right time to start their job search. We want to make sure we are in their inbox when they are ready to look.
- Differentiate job postings – This is one area where we need to throw away the cookie cutters and templates. Learn the nuances of the different specialties you are searching for and get busy crafting something different for your job postings. Yes, it is OK to look at your competition but only to figure out how best to differentiate from them. You might have one chance for a physician to read your posting. Make it count!
If you are going to set one professional goal for yourself in 2024, make it related to your candidate communication. It is the foundation of what we do in physician recruitment! Get into the trenches and do some education on the topic. At Barlow/McCarthy we are always here to help, we offer customized training on these topics as well as doing the actual work of sending bulk emails, communicating with leads and writing job postings for you. If you have specific questions or think you will need some help in the next few months don’t hesitate to reach out to info@barlowmccarty.com we would love to help.