When you speak at tradeshows as I often do, there’s a relief in going first.  Our good friend Kevin Robinson from SVHC helped us with our talk yesterday.   What I thought was going to be the more interesting side of the story — all the research and thinking that went into targeting how to whom we designed the website — turned out to be less interesting than the actual campaign and the results. 

The campaign started due to a 25 position shortage on a staff only comprising 140 docs.  SVHC has a great internal recruiter, but they were still shelling out major dollars for outside help as well.  The worst part was they had only 10 viable candidates in their application pool for 25 positions in September – the beginning of recruiting season.  A bad situation for sure.

Well, we were a little more than halfway through the talk and explain our approach and how and why things work and an attendee raised their hand to ask, “Ok, it’s a nice site, but how did you measure results?  Visitors?  Hits?”

Nope.  Docs hired.

Everyone who had been half-paying attention sat up straight. 

The next question: “How many docs did you hire?”

We increased the application pool from 10 to 120, signed 10 doctors in the last 6 months, and are on track to have committments from all 25 open positions this year. 

More stunned silence.

And then I realized, the research was good and all, but the results are what made this a successful project and worthy of talking about.  We probably should have loaded that up front and then gone back over the strategy. 

In chatting about it after with my co-presenters Kevin and Sarah,  I realized my fear was the take away might be “all I need is to put up some videos on a website,” when the actual work was much more sophisticated and focused than that. 

Here’s a link to the Southwestern Vermont Professionals Recruitment Website again for those who haven’t seen it.

We’ll likely re-give the talk as a webinar in May, so keep your eyes peeled.