In this episode of the Recruitment Hackers Podcast, Adam Chambers, Founder and CEO of Applichat Healthcare, talks about healthcare sourcing, and how Applichat has been able to use technology to connect nurses to jobs in 48 hours. With such high demand for talent in the healthcare industry, it’s a matter of who can make an offer first.
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Max: Hello, welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster and today, on the show, I'm super happy to welcome Adam Chambers who is the founder, CEO of Applichat Healthcare. Applichat is a company I've first found about on another podcast The Chad and Cheese and was one of the first companies, along with mine, to move into the chatbot space and applying chatbot specifically to the challenges of sourcing and sourcing on social media. Since then, Adam has focused his company on the healthcare, on the booming healthcare sector, which has gone through so much changes in the last year and we're here to talk to him about sourcing and how to source for nurses and healthcare professionals and anything else that where the conversation might take us. Welcome to the show, Adam.
Adam: Thank you so much. To everyone listening, I just wanna say Max is amazing. Really helped me with my career. So, you should keep listening to the show and buy his stuff.
Max: Thanks, buy my stuff, yes, and I'm not selling on this show. I'm just using it to remind ourselves that recruitment never stops, that never stops changing and that to stay abreast of what people are doing and maybe get a couple of ideas for my own business, as I hope some of the listeners will. So for the people who are new to Applichat and Applichat Healthcare as newly-rebranded, can you say in your own words what you guys do?
Adam: Yeah, so, we really specialize in connecting nurses, employers in under 48 hours. So sort of means you guys pay, because whenever it comes to job search as a nurse you have four or five different options and the one that's gonna give you an offer quickest is usually the one that you're gonna take. Like they don't have a time to mess about. So what we do is we make tough application process, like you do with your chatbots, simple as possible, 60 seconds, five to ten questions. And then we immediately get them in front of a recruiter, at one of our clients. So, it's an instantaneous process.
Max: Front of the panel, before it hits the ATS?
Adam: Yeah pretty much, like before even they send their resume. We try and call them within one hour, get them booked in. And one we sent one on Friday, so today's Monday, we sent one on Friday and she just got made a job offer today plus two working days, we can say to the nurses that we're the best cause we have these relationships with our clients where we can move you quickly and then to the clients we say, nurses want to be moved quickly so when can I do that for them?
Max: Mhm. The time element with nurses, is it more acute than you know I guess other jobs? I guess the time elements become more pressing the lower the salaries are, it seems like you know. The people who are less paid on the great you know pyramid of things, are the ones who need the money the most, and the highest time pressure, I suppose, to act on things. But generally speaking, I would imagine that healthcare workers, presently, are very well-paid, that they would be in their comfortable category.
Adam: Yeah, I think a nurse could expect to get 70 thousand dollars a year, depending where they are, it's an average. The speed thing is not so much that they need the money, it's more so that the employers need them. So, they'll make four, five applications and then it's a matter of sort of who can get to them first. So, I think there is like—where like the first employee you speak to, the first one you interview to, the first facility you visit, it has an improved impression compared to the other ones. So, that's why it's so important to be the first one to get an active job-seeking nurse because here she already has four or five applications and there'll be a couple offers by the time you speak to them.
Max: Absolutely. So, I think that's true for most jobs and certainly in a hot market like this, it's a race. So, the diss on social media and social media sourcing is that, yeah, you can get leads but they’re not good quality leads. These people don’t even pick up the phone, they're not qualified candidates. How do you work around that objection and what are your thoughts on social media versus job boards?
Adam: I think, if you could get a hundred applicants from Indeed, more would get hired than the hundred that you get from Facebook. So I don't think it's a black and white diss of saying that social media doesn't work for recruiting, it's a spectrum. Social media works for recruiting, you just need to get more candidates and that's actually a good match because 70, 75 percent of nurses, at least, will go on Facebook or Instagram every single month compared to five, ten percent go on Indeed. So, you've got a bigger market of candidates, but less competition when it comes to employers. So, I love the spectrum ranges, from just looking to ready-to-apply on social media. The fact that there is that portion of ready-to-apply, means you can still make placements and just as many placements as from job board seem to get more people. And at the same time, that perception of rubbish leads who don’t pick up the phone. I think it is ingrained in the people because they're so used to getting their candidates from Indeed or through this career site. Like people who take loose steps to find a job and they don't know how to treat a lead, like they don't even call a lead, in our space at least, they just say, as a nurse, he isn’t interested. Whereas, we know, like you have to market to those people and you have to send them emails and a text every so often and like build the candidate pool and then you can use those. So...
Max: So you're building the talent pool by getting their attention, but once you’ve got them looking, it may take a few ads, a few messages before you can activate them into a job-seeker.
Adam: Yeah. It's more like a few months, and sometimes none of them will, but you have to do something.
Max: You know. That's how to make the economics work is to have that re-engagement strategy. So, maybe from practically speaking, what are the initial steps if somebody says you know, well, I don't wanna create competitors for Applichat, but if somebody says, I'm a healthcare provider, I wanna hire some nurses and I haven't tried, I don't know, Facebook or Instagram, is that where you're advertising?
Adam: So, we don't really talk about so much like in those presentations whenever we're selling to someone because if we say the word Facebook, like, that has so many connotations to them that it sort of distracts them away from the point, yeah. But if we are advertising there, like, we use the traffic that go onto that site, advertise to them. That's how you utilize it.
Max: Okay, yeah. I think most marketplaces are the same way. Everybody goes to the same places to get traffic, which is you know you go where the people are, which is TikTok or Facebook or Instagram, and then you drive people to a website. And so, you've stopped maybe doing the whole native lead capturing where you do everything on Facebook, and now you drive them to a more, let's say, traditional website?
Adam: So yeah, well it depends what channel we're advertising on. So, if for example, if we're doing it on Instagram like then, it get real easy for someone to input their information, like natively. But if it's on Youtube, it's better if you send them off Youtube, on the website. So it really depends, I think, on how people are used to using the channel and then what technology the channel provides to enable you to take advantage of the people who are using it. Not on a bad way, that sounded bad. Take advantage of their behaviors.
Max: For example, with the retargeting or being able to, you know, to organize the profiles and categories?
Adam: Yeah, exactly.
Max: So, um.
Adam: Retargeting, it comes back to, like, the spectrum I was talking about. If someone isn't ready to apply, then it would be a good idea to retarget them with an ad which acknowledges that. So, if for example, you have Talkpush as a CRM, for example, and a candidate's been stuck on a stage for a couple of weeks, then I like them to start a campaign which has a message directed to people who are still thinking about it. It's a much smarter way to advertise and just like pushing jobs to like people who aren’t listening.
Max: Mhm. And for example, that kind of content would be a video about, you know, career reconversion. Would you advertise directly some employer branding materials and videos about this is why it's so great to work here. How do you do it in a more subtle way than just push job description?
Adam: Yeah. There's two useful ways. So, the first is what you mentioned, employer branding stuff. Stories of real people really resonate well with nurses because a lot of them have a calling to care for people, so they really value personal connection, and also they value the opinions of other nurses, more than anything. So, personal stories like that, people speaking to the camera. Or, you can just, sort of, call, what's the saying, call a spade a spade, and say like, hey we saw you clicked in our ad recently, still thinking about it, and just sort of call that out and then revisit some of the reasons why they might have clicked the ad in the first place.
Max: Right, reminders and retargeting that way. I agree with you that these personal stories would be great, sort of, bait. And for Applichat, are you bringing stories during marketing, you bring stories from your different customers in the healthcare space, and you go straight to the candidates to share their stories or you have more targeted campaigns that are customer-specific? Is it branded Applichat or is it branded for your customers?
Adam: Yeah, I think of like, you're gonna tell the story of the place of work and the people that they will work with. They don't really care so much about our process and how we help them. They care about what their life will be like in this new job. So, you wanna, like, show them what it could be like, show them that beautiful reflection could be them, if they do it.
Max: That initial lead that you engage with, so if somebody wants to get started on sourcing on social media, they wanna make their own mistakes, and they wanna figure it out without going through your company, how would you advise them to get started? You know, to get more familiar with social media sourcing. What would be step one?
Adam: So, step one, get a hundred dollars from someone.
Max: Their parents?
Adam: Just get, say, cause you always have to think like, of the practicalities first I think. So in the past I've done webinars on using Facebook for jobs, but no one ever does it. You just think about the practicalities and the settings. So, you need to get approval from someone and a hundred dollars, a small budget, from someone who has decision-making authority and say, I wanna try this new thing. And then it's just a case of starting going on Google and Youtube and looking up how to create ads on Instagram or Facebook or Youtube. Follow that through, create an ad, and I think the most important thing is your ad shouldn't be a job description, it should be an offer. Because on these sites, you're not competing with the retirement home next door or the hospital next door, you're competing with Coca-Cola, McDonalds. Everyone trying to sell everyone else’s stuff. So, it's so important that you are able to catch people's eye, awaken something inside them, make them feel a bit of emotion, and you can't do that with a job description which says the working hours and the responsibilities. You have to come in with the PN points and the potential solutions. So for example, one of our ads is for relocation to North Carolina and we're targeting travel nurses. So, we will go wide with a message to those travel nurse that talks about how they might be tired of moving about so much, that talks about how they might be frustrated with the inconsistency of their lives, and then comes in with the opportunity that get like consistency, stop moving about, and still live somewhere which is beautiful.
Max: Put your life in order and go watch the beautiful trees as autumn comes to North Carolina.
Adam: Yeah.
Max: Like a travel ad.
Adam: Yeah, we need to like, recruiters need to go away from like the science of like number, well numbers are important but like, don't just say the facts, you know, tell the story as well. We need to move towards being like poets and artists and writers. I think we need to think of ourselves as higher than recruiters cause we're all doing so far more than just creating jobs and filling jobs. At least that's how I think about it.
Max: Everything that you just said is quite opposite to some of the advice I've been delivering myself, which is
Adam: Oh yeah?
Max: You know in some market, you have very direct advertising, just don't forget to put the salary, you know, don't forget to be very specific because you don't wanna mislead candidates into not knowing what they're looking for. But, I suppose, I'm thinking more about active job-seekers. Even before that you're opening their mind to the possibility of a different career or relocation and still today, I think, Facebook and Instagram, or Youtube, they don't allow you to target specifically job-seekers, right? It's not like you have a cookie on their browser and you know that they were on Indeed and Zip last week.
Adam: Yeah, you need to target them with what you say in the ad. So
Max: Yeah.
Adam: That's what you need, something that's gonna make them click on it.
Max: Yeah. Right. Well, I think we've got some great bits of information and advice here for our audience. So, thanks a lot Adam for sharing, and how can people get ahold of you and Applichat if they're in the healthcare space and looking for help in hiring more nurses?
Adam: Yeah, just add me on LinkedIn. Adam Chambers. C H A M B E R S.
Max: Great.
Adam: That's it.
Max: Thanks a lot. Thanks for joining.
Adam: All right, thank you for inviting me. Cheers.
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