With the completion of the Recruiting Insights Project at the end of 2016, the Executive team decided to take the next steps and figure out how we might better attract and recruit qualified, experienced medics into EMS.
Working alongside the Office of Innovation, I began a four month project to solve this key challenge of recruitment. My role initially focused on user research and advising the team, but as the project progressed, I took on a project management role as well.
Phase One: Discovery
During this phase, we focused on user research and content discovery. This involved interviewing and shadowing our Field and Communications medics, a review of all current messaging used for recruiting, previous research, and an analysis of competitive and analogous organizations and their messaging.
Total interviews: 22 Communications and Field medics and 4 subject matter experts.
After each interview, the team debriefed to put each data point onto a post-it note.
Once all interviews were completed, the team began synthesizing the data collected.
At the end of synthesis, we came up with several themes to target Communications medics, Field medics, and overall themes for both. With this in mind, our next step was to begin concepting & prototyping.
Phase Two: Concepting & Prototyping
During this phase we focused on developing personas, creative briefs, campaign development, specific messages to use, and testing and refining those messages. We began our second brainstorming session, using personas and a creative brief to begin concepting campaign ideas. We also sent out a survey with 477 respondents asking “How do you hear about or look for job opportunities”.
We synthesized all the ideas and grouped them by common themes, made a list of common themes for each brief, and listed what proof points were used to back up the themes. The next step was to send a survey out to our identified targets to narrow down the ideas, validate our assumptions, and fill in the gaps.
We received 245 responses to our survey and were able to narrow down to our top themes.
With this completed, we referred back to our brainstorming to pull in the ideas that fell into the top themes, while also coming up with new ones.
We then took stock of all the campaign lines we had generated, looked at them in context of the survey findings, narrowed them down to the ones that best captured what mattered to our targets, and brought in some fresh minds to help us refine our words and select winners.
We determined that we needed two campaigns. One that focused on the extensive organizational support provided by the organization, and one that targeted our Communications medics.
“You care for the community. We care for you”
“Heroes Behind the Headsets”
Final Deliverables
Our final steps to the project involved prototyping ideas for how the campaigns could come to life and creating assets for the Recruiting team to use and build upon. In addition to this, our final deliverable to the Recruiting team was a detailed Marketing Plan for them to turn to as they moved forward using the new campaign.
Hillary Ann Berquist 