Inside the creation of Seattle Children’s Hospital’s mission-forward recruitment video series
With sharp usage of visuals, the award-winning campaign found success.
Ensuring your company’s culture remains vibrant requires an active and attentive approach to recruiting. And in a world that moves faster than ever, utilizing the power of multimedia to let potential new hires know about all the great things you’re doing at work can provide a big competitive advantage.
That’s why we’re taking a closer look at Seattle Children’s Hospital’s winning campaign from Ragan’s 2023 Employee Communications Awards: Seattle Children’s Hospital. Seattle Children’s won the award for Best Recruitment Video with its “Connecting to Mission” series, setting an example of how comms can conceptualize, execute, and measure the success of recruitment videos.
Connecting your employer brand back to culture
When the comms team came up with the idea for the video series, its focus centered on showcasing the organization’s culture for both current and future employees.
Alison Zurcher, director of internal communications at Seattle Children’s Hospital, recalled how her team sought to showcase the videos as a connector that employees all across the organization could see themselves in and relate to, ultimately promoting Seattle Children’s as a positive next step in an outside employee’s career.
“What better way to connect people to an organization’s mission than to have employees serve as ambassadors and tell their own authentic stories?” Zurcher said.
The hospital created the videos as part of a larger brand refresh that included changes to the careers site, social media efforts around jobs at Seattle Children’s, and an overhaul of recruitment strategy.
“We are fortunate that our marketing and communications team functions like an internal creative agency,” she added.
Crowdsourcing lived experiences
One of the best ways to show off your workplace to future employees is by showcasing the great work that current employees are already doing. To this end, the Seattle Children’s comms team set out to find employees who highlighted the company’s vibrant culture and shadow them as subjects for the series.
“Our team ran announcements in standard communication channels inviting employees to share their stories to help showcase what makes our organization and workforce unique as well as united,” Zurcher said. “The goal was to feature workforce members with different lived experiences, roles, abilities, time at Children’s, and more.”
Once they had their video subjects, the comms team partnered with Fluency Films to begin production. The initial six-episode series featured both clinical and non-clinical staff to give a sense of the wide range of roles people can play at the hospital.
Celebrating quantitative and qualitative wins
The communications department also set goalposts to measure series successes against.
The goal was to share the video series with 1,000 new employees during their onboarding processes, and the team beat this goal by reaching 1,191 new hires. The campaign hit each of the metrics set by the comms team, and as is often the case with great films, a sequel was put into motion.
“Based on the positive results, four more videos are now in the works featuring critical roles for healthcare delivery —- acute care nurses and medical assistants,” Zurcher said.
But there were more wins than just those found on the goal sheet — the unquantifiable impacts on the people affected by the videos matter too.
“The highlight of sharing this content was employee reactions,” Zurcher said. “Any time videos were shared in town halls or other meetings, people were moved to tears. After the first video was shared at a leadership meeting, more than 30 leaders took time to send an appreciation message to the employees featured in the video.”
In so many instances, a communicator knows they’ve done a good job simply by the reactions of their audiences. In the case of Seattle Children’s, that’s the case for both their current and potential employees.
“If job seekers’ reactions are anything close to employees,” Zurcher surmised, “then we have done our job!”
Remember to apply for this year’s edition of the Ragan Employee Communication Awards by the September 20 deadline.
Sean Devlin is an editor at Ragan Communications. In his spare time he enjoys Philly sports and hosting trivia.
