Last year, we spoke at the HPMA conference in Glasgow, attended by a number of NHS recruitment specialists. After listening to what we had to say about how social media could be used for recruitment, we were asked to spearhead a groundbreaking new technique to fill two senior positions within NHS Western Isles. Despite having only a week to have the website, graphics, and social media campaign set up, we were happy to help.

It was clear that the location would play a central focus our campaign to attract candidates, based in arguably the most beautiful area of the UK with its Caribbean-esque scenery, the successful candidate would likely be undertaking a considerable change in lifestyle from a city to island life. We profiled the potential candidates and created personas that we based our ad campaign visuals and messaging on.

Next, our team needed to design and test two websites, one for each role, that we would direct potential candidates too. The content on each site was a balance between informative and effective copy alongside captivating visuals. These lead-generating sites were designed to easily convert traffic into ’applicants’ by making the process of applying as simple and straightforward as possible.

We used a combination of Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn paid advertising to deliver tailored ads that appealed to our personas. Via a strategic plan of testing upwards of thirty-two ad sets, we honed our campaign, switching budget from lesser performing ads to those that were performing well. We only had two weeks to try and find a selection of suitable candidates, which meant we had to adapt our traditional testing method and condense it down significantly to ensure we were not only getting results, but at a reasonable cost.

By being diligent, aggressive, and pragmatic in our social marketing campaign, we were able to pick off under performing ad elements. We started with graphics, as visual elements are usually the most significant factor in social media marketing. By checking results every day, we were able to quickly narrow our original eight visuals down to just two.

After the best performing ad visuals were picked, we experimented increasingly with captions, narrowing 16 down to just three and eventually two in a matter of days. Finally, we came up with numerous demographics and groups to target and made continuous tweaks until our cost per impression was as low as possible.

As you can see from the above statistics, we were able to not only reach 70,000 people, but also generated 2200 unique visits to our landing page.

Developing a cutting-edge method of recruitment that has no set conventions or guidelines is tricky enough on its own, but doing it in a week added an extra layer of difficulty. Using our experience, creativity, and ongoing cooperation with the client we were able to deliver a number of potential candidates of “the highest quality”.

Despite the NHS running simultaneous campaigns across a number of platforms, including medical journals and job websites, Red Media’s social campaign delivered over half of the interviewees as well as the successful candidate. We are excited to be working with them now on further social media recruitment projects.