St. Vincent Medical Center Success Story

Background

St. Vincent Medical Center was established in 1856 by the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul as the first hospital in Los Angeles. It has a long and extensive history of providing its patients with quality healthcare from experienced professionals and specializes in cardiac care, multi-organ transplantation, hearing disorders and progressive cancer treatments. St. Vincent’s wanted to invite recent nursing school graduates to its graduate training program open house but was unsure of the most effective way to reach its targeted audience. With a limited amount of time until the open house and the recent shortage of nurses in the industry, St. Vincent’s faced a considerable challenge in not only needing to inform people about the event but also ensuring the applicants were both relevant and qualified for the nursing positions they were hiring for. They were also hoping to recruit experienced nurses to join the St. Vincent’s team.

AfterCollege Solution

AfterCollege proposed using its unique patented system to target a specific audience of recent nursing school graduates to ensure that only candidates with pertinent qualifications were receiving information about the open house. The open house was posted online on nursing department job boards at 18 Southern California colleges and universities. AfterCollege also employed an email blast strategy to communicate with both recent nursing school graduates and more experienced alumni to create another channel through which St. Vincent could distribute information.

By targeting specific schools, St. Vincent Medical Center was able to drastically cut down its informational distribution costs and could instead offer greater incentives to attend to the better fitted candidates. These included free movie passes for the first 25 people to attend the open house as well as on-site interviews and hires. Open house attendees were also given a tour of the facilities and could learn more about the New Grad program, which was particularly appealing to recently graduated nursing students: the 18 week program offers one-to-one preceptors and mentors, and continued education in the classroom and a clinical setting, as well as competitive salary and benefits.

Results

The key to making the St. Vincent Medical Center open house a success was to target information to a relevant group of qualified candidates, allowing St. Vincent to concentrate on recruiting talented nurses rather than spreading the word about the event. Using the AfterCollege approach to job recruitment and sending information to specific schools and departments allowed St. Vincent to increase event attendance and resulted in several on-site hires.

“Of all the online and print resources we have used to recruit, AfterCollege has consistently proven to be the most effective, far exceeding our expectations – at our most recent open house, AfterCollege was responsible for 80% of attendance” says Suzanne Silk, Nurse Recruiter. “I would highly recommend AfterCollege to anyone wanting to attract and hire nursing students.” Nursing students were also grateful to having AfterCollege for being able to have such convenient access to the event information. Diane P., a recent graduate who attended the event said, “I received an email from aftercollege.com about an Open House for RNs at St. Vincent Medical Center. I attended and was hired on the spot! I let the Nurse Recruiter know how I found the information on the open house and I'd like to thank aftercollege.com for the email.”