Cheezhead

Social networking sites have quickly become the latest tool in advertising, or like Maxim Healthcare Services, they are also being used to recruit potential employees.

Maxim Health Services is a leading provider of medical staffing, home healthcare, and wellness across the United States. They are one of the first to step out of the box, by using a MySpace page for their company. To view their site check out Maxim Healthcare.

When asked why they decided to use MySpace, Danielle Swetz, marketing manager had this to say:

We viewed MySpace as an untapped channel through which we could reach nurses and other healthcare professionals to communicate job opportunities, in addition to the other more traditional marketing avenues that we utilize.

Maxim Healthcare receives traffic to their MySpace page by friend requests, memberships in nursing groups, and a weekly blog that lists their “hot jobs” of the week. They also use the bulletin feature to announce to their friend list when new jobs are posted. Maxim Health Services chooses their friends based on common career interests like, nurses, physicians, allied health professionals, medical coders, and so on.

Danielle Swetz, does think MySpace is working in the recruiting effort.

We track traffic to our web sites on a monthly basis, and we have noticed a steady increase in the amount of traffic to our sites…MySpace has proven to be effective in helping people get to our website, as well as increasing brand awareness, which can be difficult to measure.

Unfortunately Maxim Health Services could not provide any success stories as they felt this information was confidential. Danielle does feel that MySpace has been a successful marketing effort and it will continue to be successful as they grow. She was also unable to provide any numbers on how many applicants or hires they received from their MySpace page.

When asked about how much time and money MySpace takes up, Danielle Swetz, claimed there were no hard costs at this time and their marketing team manages the MySpace page on a daily basis to add or accept friend requests, monitor comments, etc.

Maxim Health Services is looking into other social networking sites like, Facebook, as an additional way to reach potential candidates.

Danielle Swetz had this to say for employers thinking of creating their own MySpace page:

Provide valuable information on your page, and update information frequently so that people have a reason to come back to your page. If your MySpace profile is essentially just an “About Us” page, people most likely won’t want to visit it more than once. Through having a Maxim blog where candidates can click on links to view job descriptions and search for more jobs, job-seekers have a reason to check their profile each week to view newly posted jobs. Implementing a blog or something similar will help build brand loyalty and increase visits to your page.

If you are thinking about creating your own MySpace page for recruiting, take it from Maxim Healthcare Services that it does work.