JobOptions.com Smooths Hiring at Memorial Health

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emorial Health System of Springfield, Illinois, was facing a shortage of new blood, and not just the kind that comes in chilled plastic containers. The diverse and wide-ranging integrated health system needed new people, the best it could find, to staff the 562-bed Memorial Medical Center as well as the system’s broad range of specialty services, from regional cancer and burn centers to sports medicine and home care.

“There were several human resources issues we had to deal with,” said R. Keith Allen, Memorial’s vice president of human resources. “First, the labor shortage in health care is acute and we needed a medium that would give us a longer shelf life than the traditional newspaper advertising and job fairs. We also needed something that could be easily accessed and that applicants could come back to time and time again.”

The solution: a comprehensive system-wide Web site, including a specific recruitment area of the site devoted to job postings and hiring. And when Memorial Health System was ready to take the plunge into cyberspace, one HR Web site provider stood out from the rest: JobOptions.com.

The Memorial Health System HR team learned of JobOptions through their advertising vendor, said Allen. “They said, “If you’re going to do Internet, we’ve got the company for you.” he said.

The Internet presence was a natural idea, said Allen, “because the organization has gone to e-commerce as one of its major strategies. And because the recruitment issue is one of our top priorities, it just made good sense.”

With its customized Private Label product, JobOptions tailored Memorial’s recruitment site to serve the many physical locations that are part of the Memorial Health System organization, providing a central resource for both job seekers and job posters while reducing paperwork. Now candidates go to one place to search jobs by custom category, learn about Memorial locations, research available employee benefits, and explore resources about Springfield.

“The implementation was very easy,” said Sally Hamilton, Memorial Health System’s human resources manager. “As far as being about to serve that site and edit or post new positions on it, it’s very user friendly.”

And, said Allen, JobOptions Private Label provides far more bang for the buck. “We paid $32,000 to bring the site up, and that’s equal to only about three months of print advertising in this market.”

The collaboration with JobOptions was “very successful,” said Allen. “They provided a regional account manager that we can contact at any time, they return calls and e-mails within the hour if you have questions, and they provide ongoing on-site training. They’ve been very responsive.”

JobOptions Private Label is designed to make a company’s Web site its most effective recruiting tool. By mid-October, the Memorial Health System site had received more than 3,000 hits from potential employees, “and the type of jobs that are hit most often are the shortage jobs,” said Allen.

“It was a very seamless process. And JobOptions brought a lot of credibility and energy to the task. To me, if you don’t have (a Web presence) as part of your total recruitment strategy, you’re missing something, and definitely missing a portion of your audience.”