In order to build a successful healthcare organization website for recruiting prospective nurses, you not only have to understand your audience, you have to prioritize and showcase certain key areas. Based upon personal experience and best practices, I would like to highlight the following four categories as components to consider as high importance when building an organization’s recruiting website for nurses.
Understand What Nurses Want Out of a Career
There are two main audiences that the website has to appeal to: recent nursing graduates, and experienced nurses.
From my own personal experience as a new nurse out of nursing school back in the day, I only considered applying to hospitals that offered new graduate nursing programs, which meant a longer orientation and extra training and support. It’s scary being a new nurse. You may have heard the phrase, “nurses eat their young” and I can attest that some of them actually do. Novice nurses are sometimes “thrown to the wolves” after only going through a brief two or three week orientation to a nursing unit. When I was a new nurse, I was terrified to literally be in charge of people’s lives without any extra support or extensive hands on training at a hospital. Nursing school prepares nurses with the knowledge to become competent nurses, but it doesn’t provide a lot of clinical experience since that just comes with time and practice. So if an organization offers a new graduate nursing program, this should be made front and center.
Now as a seasoned nurse with over 14 years of experience, I look to organizations that encourage and support higher levels of education, certifications, training, and promotion. Nurses want a place where they can grow and not become stifled in their careers. They want an organization that invests in its nurses through ongoing learning programs and career development, so this is another important feature to make prominent.
Showcase the Organization as Being Technologically Savvy and Ahead of the Game
Healthcare technology has come a long way since I first started my nursing career, but it’s still light years behind when compared to other industries. Nurses, especially new nurses, want to work in settings that offer the latest and greatest technology in order to help them do their jobs safely and more efficiently. Also, working for an organization that is making headlines with new advancements and innovations is very appealing and looks good on a resume. The look and feel of a website should also reflect the institution’s level of cutting-edge technology and should take advantage of any novel designs or components to captivate prospective users. It should also highlight key innovations and research that is currently being conducted at the institution.
Emphasize Important Awards, Recognition, and Rankings
A major attraction that prospective nurses look for in a potential nursing position, is Magnet designation or if a hospital is highly ranked across the nation. Any banners or badges that represent an organization’s national ranking or Magnet designation, should be made high priority and displayed prominently above the fold.
Humanize the Website with Testimonials and Nurse Bios
Nurses want to get a feel for an institution by its current team of nurses. We want to know what types of nurses we’ll be working with and what their backgrounds have been. It’s nice to know if the team that you may potentially be joining is a good fit. Finding nurses with similar backgrounds and career goals is an important feature to display as it allows nurses to relate to the organization’s current nurse population.
Creating a website that captures the attention and answers the needs of the different nurse audiences through its programs, development, rankings, leading technology and research, and providing a view into an organization’s culture through current nurse bios and photos, are all important aspects of successful prospective nurses recruitment.
