Today I’m sharing an interview I did with the owners of Hospital Careers, a job board for people seeking work in the healthcare industry.
1. How did HospitalCareers.com get started? Why the job industry?
HospitalCareers began as a recruitment advertising agency in 2006. Our main focus was to help hospitals and systems with targeted recruitment advertising to local colleges and universities. After a few years, we were approached by a state Hospital Association who asked us to develop a platform for their hospitals to use to recruit healthcare professionals. After 4 months, we had 85% of all the hospitals in the state using the site. From there, we kept launching in other states.
2. What has it been like competing with larger job platforms such as Monster or Indeed? How do you stand out from these platforms?
A niche oriented career site is much more of a career hub for a partiular industry. HospitalCareers still does partner with sites like Monster and Indeed. However, we use them solely as another outlet for advertising the job openings. Our goal is to attract quality candidates. Sites like Monster, Career Builder, and even Indeed now, are too big and broad. They have positions from all industries and from thousands of corporate websites. With this, comes a lot of spam posts and posts that candidates don’t exactly know who the actual company is that they are applying to. We cut down on this noise by focusing on one specific industry. Our jobs are purely from hospitals throughout the country. We are more of a career hub for healthcare professionals rather than a Jack of All Trades.
3. How have you gone about marketing the platform and what has worked for you so far?
We have marketed the site through colleges, universities, local news outlets, partnerships, press releases, etc. There isn’t really once specific strategy we have used to get to where we are now. Marketing a national site is really a lot of trial and error. Analyzing what works and what doesn’t. However, a huge part of our traffic comes from organic searches. We are #1 in Google for hospital careers and top 5 in Bing/Yahoo for hospital jobs. This goes a long way as 80% of job seekers start their jobs search on a search engine typing in specific phrases that relate to the job or industry they are looking for.
4. There are health and medical jobs all over the country, how do you monetize a platform such as this?
There are many healthcare openings as the industry is poised to grow at a tremendous rate over the next 20 years. Thus, more and more healthcare professionals will be needed for the demand. HospitalCareers monitizes the platform through employers paying to post their job openings. We then allow employers to post their hard to fill positions or scrape their jobs and drive candidates back directly into their applicant tracking systems (ATS).
5. What are your future plans for 2016 and beyond?
We are trying to become more of a unique hybrid of a career site. We would like to be more involved in the education side for healthcare professionals. A place they can come to engage with other healthcare professionals online, look for jobs, and take courses to maintain their educational requirements. A Linkedin of sorts but only for healthcare. We want HospitalCareers.com to be the go-to place for everything related to healthcare and careers.
