KIMS Hospital Recruitment Team win at the Kent CIPD HR Awards

The KIMS Hospital Recruitment Team have won an award for Innovation in Recruitment at the Kent CIPD HR Awards. The Kent branch of CIPD, the professional body for HR and people development, is a not-for-profit organisation that champions better work and working lives and has been setting the benchmark for excellence in people and organisation development for more than 100 years. The Innovation in Recruitment award recognises effective approaches to the targeting, selection and recruitment of talent at all levels from school leavers and graduates to senior positions.

The KIMS Hospital recruitment team had a number of challenges to overcome when recruiting. The national shortage of nurses coupled with more conventional approaches of candidate attraction produced insufficient quality and quantity of candidates needed for the rapid growth at KIMS Hospital.

The team needed to use alternative attraction methods to overcome the challenges they faced. Understanding that a large proportion of their audience used social media platforms, they put in place an innovative social media and digital strategy focused on the hospital’s core values and state-of-the-art facilities.

Suzanne Stevens, Recruitment Manager at KIMS Hospital, comments, “By producing videos of the hospital and the staff, we are able to showcase the facilities as well as the general ethos of working at KIMS Hospital and how the staff really feel about it. A recent staff survey showed 97% loved their role and the team they worked with. In our videos we try to portray the type of organisation we are and how staff feel about working here.”

Since the launch of the KIMS Hospital careers social media page at the end of April 2016, it has helped the team to employ six additional members of staff from direct contact via social media.