Same Job. Same Hospital.
Different Story.
A client could not fill night shift roles no matter how many jobs they posted. Then they posted one thing that was not a job post at all.
I was working with a client who could not get applicants for night shift roles. Not a trickle. Almost nothing.
It was not for lack of trying. They were posting constantly. The benefits were genuinely good. The pay was competitive for their market. Everything you would put on a checklist was there.
And the postings just sat.
Then they published something different. Not a job. A story.
A nurse had hit a milestone anniversary with them, and they let her talk about why she had stayed so long. She talked about how her manager had worked with her schedule so she could actually be there for her kids. She talked about how the team had her back on the hardest nights. She talked about the fact that those people had become friends outside of work.
That single post outperformed every job ad they had run.
Same job. Same hospital. Different story.
Nothing about the role changed. The shift was still nights. The pay was identical. The only thing that changed was that somebody finally described what it actually felt like to work there.
Most organisations do not
have a talent problem.
They have a
visibility problem.
The job post is answering the wrong question
A job posting answers what the job is. Candidates already assume they know that. What they cannot work out from your posting is the thing they actually care about, which is what it is like to be there at two in the morning when something goes wrong.
Look at these side by side.
We are hiring RNs. Competitive pay and excellent benefits. Apply today.
Meet Jessica. She came here for a job but stayed because her manager checks in every shift, and her schedule finally lets her be home with her kids.
One of those gets scrolled past. The other gets shared, and more importantly it gets shared by your own staff, which is the only marketing in this category that anyone actually believes.
You are not competing with the hospital down the road
This is the part that catches people out.
Your candidates are not comparing you to the other employer in town. They are comparing you to hospitals in other states, to travel contracts, to outpatient roles, and increasingly to leaving clinical work altogether. That comparison happens on a phone, before anyone in your organisation knows the person exists.
Roughly three quarters of healthcare workers research an employer online before they apply, and about one in three decide not to apply based on what they find. That is from Indeed’s Hiring Lab.
Glassdoor puts the number of healthcare workers who say an employer’s online reputation is a major factor in whether they apply at around half.
Which means a meaningful share of the people you never heard from did find you. They looked, and then they closed the tab.
Your employer brand stopped being what you say it is a long time ago. It is whatever the internet has decided it is, assembled out of your Google listing, your reviews, your last few posts, and the photographs somebody took in 2019.
First impressions are not made in interviews any more. They are made in search results.
Go and look at yourself right now
I do this exercise in every session and it is uncomfortable every time. Take two minutes and actually do it rather than reading past it.
Pull out your phone. Google your organisation. Open your LinkedIn page. Look at the last five things you posted.
Then answer honestly: if you were a candidate, would you apply?
A few things people usually discover. The first image is a stock photo of a building. The most recent review is three years old and nobody replied to it. The last five posts are all announcements about the organisation rather than anything about the people in it.
If your reviews have not been responded to since 2017, a candidate reasonably assumes either the hospital closed or the person who handled that left and was never replaced. Neither is the impression you want going first.
Why this gets more important, not less, as AI improves
Everyone now has the same tools. AI will write your job descriptions. It will generate your social posts. It will optimise your ad spend and respond to candidates faster than a human can.
So if everyone has identical tools, what is left to separate you?
Not better marketing. Everyone is about to have better marketing.
What AI cannot generate is what it actually feels like to work in your building. It cannot invent the nurse who stayed eleven years, or the manager who moved a schedule so somebody could make a school play, or the night the team covered for someone going through something awful.
Those exist in your organisation right now. The problem has never been that you do not have stories. It is that nobody is telling them.
The best organisation
does not always win.
The one that tells the
best story does.
None of this requires a marketing budget
- Audit your own front door. Google yourself, open LinkedIn, read your reviews as a stranger would. Whatever you find is what your next candidate found.
- Reply to every review, including the old ones. Silence reads as abandonment. A reply three years late still says somebody is home.
- Post one person instead of one job. Pick someone with tenure and ask why they stayed. Publish their answer, not your summary of it. The specifics are the whole point.
- Use real photographs of real staff. Stock imagery signals that you either have nothing to show or did not think it was worth showing.
What that night shift post actually proved
The thing I keep coming back to about that client is that nothing improved except the telling.
They did not raise pay. They did not change the shift. They did not add a benefit. Everything a spreadsheet would call a lever stayed exactly where it was.
What changed is that a candidate scrolling at eleven at night saw a person instead of a posting, and recognised something. That is the entire mechanism.
You almost certainly have the story. The question is whether anybody outside the building has ever heard it.
Candidates decide about you online, before anyone in your organisation knows they exist, and a third of them rule you out based on what they find. Job posts describe the role, which they already assume they understand. What they cannot get anywhere else is what it feels like to work there. Publish one person’s real answer to why they stayed, and you will outperform every job ad you have running. Same job, same building, different story.
Keynotes and
workshops.
Chris runs national healthcare staffing organizations and speaks to health systems, associations, and recruitment teams on employer brand, retention, and winning the talent battle.
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