Best Practices for Recruiting on BluePipes
Recruiting travel healthcare professionals is a really difficult task. Given the ratio of healthcare professionals to travel healthcare professionals, simply finding a traveler is like finding a needle in a haystack. Once you’ve found them, you still have the difficult task of convincing them you’re the perfect recruiter.
With hundreds of travelers joining BluePipes monthly, we certainly help you find them. But convincing them to work with you is still largely up to you. That said, there are many actions you can take on BluePipes that will improve your results. Let’s take a look at the best practices for recruiting on BluePipes.
Complete Your Personal Profile
Over 70% of BluePipes members view recruiter profiles before responding to a message or connection request. Be sure to upload a profile image. Also, complete your Summary and Job Description to let candidates know why you and your company are the best in the business.
Complete Your Company Profile
A high percentage of candidates review Company Pages before responding to a message or connection request. Page Administrators can edit company pages. To edit your Company Page, click the link to your Company Page on your personal profile and select “Edit Profile”.
Use the “Recent Members” Page Daily
The Recent Members page displays the last 100 members to have joined BluePipes. They’ve just joined a site that provides tools for their job search, so it’s fresh in their head. Plus, there is a good chance that they’re engaged in the job search process. These are hot candidates!
To use the feature, select “Network” and then “Recent Members” from the main menu. Send a connection request and/or message to every single one of them. The page updates in real time so be sure to check in at least once per day to contact the new candidates.
Respond to Availability Notifications Quickly
When a member publicly updates their job availability on BluePipes, we send an email notification to all the employers on our site. Follow the link in the notification to view the member’s profile and send a connection request or message.
You should receive an average of 2 notifications per day. If you’re not receiving the notifications, then please check the following:
- Check your spam folder and put BluePipes on your Safe List if the emails are routed their.
- Check your notification settings on BluePipes. To do so, select the Gear Icon on the right side of the main menu. Then select “My Account”. Make sure that your notifications are enabled.
Use the Advanced Search Feature to Find Ideal Candidates
On the main navigation menu, select Network and then Advanced Search. We have over 12,000 members on the site. I recommend searching the Work History field for terms like ‘Travel’ or ‘American Mobile’ or ‘AMN’ to find potential travelers.
Personalize Your Connection Request Messages
We have a canned connection request message for your convenience. However, we recommend creating your own personalized message, saving it in a text file, and copying/pasting when you send a connection request.
Try to Connect With Every Candidate!!!
We recommend sending connection requests to every candidate for several reasons. First, once you’re connected with a member, the connection persists until you or the candidate removes it. This means your connection will remain intact if you unwisely choose to cancel your subscription ( see what we did there? 🙂 ).
Second, BluePipes will eventually have social sharing features like status updates. Having a large number of connections will become very valuable at that time. Of course, early adopters will reap the biggest rewards.
Why Connecting is SO Important!
Finally, healthcare professionals are more likely to use BluePipes to land their jobs when they connect with recruiters on BluePipes early. It behooves every company to have one of their recruiters send a connection request to new candidates within one day of the candidate joining. Doing so increases the likelihood the candidate will find their job on BluePipes instead of some other platform where your company is most likely not engaged.
This last point is extremely important to your recruiting success on BluePipes. Did you know that one of Facebook’s key metrics is the number of connections a user has in their first 10 days of joining the service? That’s right, Facebook found early on that getting users to make 7 connections within the first 10 days of joining was their single most important metric.
We are finding a similar situation on BluePipes. Candidates who receive connection requests early after joining are more likely to respond. And candidates with more connections are more likely to return to BluePipes and engage in the job search process by contacting their connections and updating their job availability.
The results might not be immediate for the recruiter. Many candidates who join BluePipes are not looking for a job immediately. However, candidates often return weeks or months later when they are ready to find a job. They are much more likely to do this if they made connections when they originally joined.
Remember, Recruiting is Hard Work
I developed a set of personal metrics when I was recruiting travel nurses. I had to make 100 telephone calls to have 3 high quality conversations. I needed 10 high quality conversations to submit 1 candidate for a job. It took 7 submissions to get 1 placement.
The metrics varied for email campaigns, social media, and job boards. But the bottom line was that a lot of effort went into every placement. So, time to get recruiting!
