Building an irresistible employer brand: how online reputation attracts top healthcare talent

Stewart Gandolf

Hi everyone, Stewart Gandolf, welcome back to our podcast today I have my new best friend, Cynthia Newton, which I can’t believe. Cynthia, we haven’t met before recently. So, I’m so glad to have you on our podcast today. Hey, Cynthia, I would love you to start off by telling our audience a little bit about your background. You know the short version as well as like what you’re specializing in today, just to give some context for everything we’re about to talk about. I think that’s really going to be helpful in this case.

Cynthia Newton

Absolutely thanks for having me. And yeah, I knew of you. I knew the name. I know the face, but we’ve never really had a conversation until recently. So, I always say we’re in a small industry, and we should know everybody, especially I’m going to date myself. Now. I’m I think, in my 25th year in healthcare marketing. So, you know, I in my little mind, I think everybody knows who I am right.

Well, it’s funny I got anybody who’s been around as much as me as long as I. Right. So, let’s qualify that some of the Newbies under 10 years might not know who we are.

Stewart Gandolf

Yeah, well, it’s I got to before I get into your background. Just fun. Fact. Just got off the phone with Chris Baird and we were talking. She’s oh, tell Cynthia, I said, Hi! And I just said to Chris, I am a terrible networker. I’ve been so busy focusing on our own company. So anyway, I’m super excited. Go ahead and tell people about what you do.

Cynthia Newton

Sure. I’ve been in around for a long time. Initially started off in the Yellow Page world.

Which is a strange thing to mention nowadays. But think of search as like the largest yellow pages. Right when you’re ready to either go to a hospital, call a doctor, you’re going online and searching and you’re searching for that information. So, Google My Business, Google Business Profile became the biggest Yellow Page directory there was. Now add to it the new LLMs. And people search and ChatGPT, and you know we’re in a whole new Wild West right now.

So, my role now. And what I focused on for the last, I’d say 15 years since Google’s reared its little head up is basically helping healthcare systems be found in search and be chosen, right? So that just doesn’t entail just listings management, which I kind of was at the forefront of initially but that includes today, you know, reputation management, brand management, and I’ve dealt delved deeper into brand management and separated—there’s Consumer Brand, and then there’s Employer Brand. And so, I’ve really been focused, I would say in the last couple of years, on Employer Brand and Healthcare.

Stewart Gandolf

Perfect. And so that’s really what we’re going to talk mostly about today. And you also had some time, I think, with Doctor.com and I think reputation as well. So, you’ve had some experience with some.

Cynthia Newton

On the SaaS side of the world.

Stewart Gandolf

Yeah, so great. So, let’s talk about employer branding online today. And you know, 1st of all, you know, just to maybe expand upon. What does that actually mean in terms of the work you’re doing? And why is that so important today?

Cynthia Newton

Yeah, you know, there’s definite. There are things I do. And there’s things I don’t do. Just like on the consumer side with patient experience. So, it’s really, what can the average candidate on the employer side see about your organization? Right? And how do they form an opinion about what it’s like for people to be an employee at your organization. That’s only the only thing that influences that is really the 3rd party information that they can see on search. So, whether that’s in Glassdoor, Indeed, in Google, in Reddit? And LinkedIn, you know, I kind of sit on that side most frequently. So, it’s how. What’s what is that information that’s out there? How is that influencing a candidate’s decision to take the next step and apply to your organization what I don’t address, I can help shine a light on it. Is your actual employer brand, internally right. I can’t see your 1st party results when I’m looking from the outside. So, as a consultant, I get into that with the client to take a look at what is your 1st party survey, saying, You know what your engagement surveys are, saying with your employees, that’s the Litmus Test. So just like the consumer side where we looked at what are our caps saying compared to what Google says, I do the same thing. I’m comparing. What does your engagement survey? Whether that’s Glenn, whether it’s PG, what does it say when I compare it to your 3rd party of one another. Right? And if it’s supportive in the sense that we have a poor brand online, and it mirrors that internally on your 1st party surveys that deeper work of brand work, of looking at your EVP and really working on identifying the cultural issues that you have within your organization. I don’t do that. That’s a Chris Baird, right? That’s a Gene Hitchcock. There’s lots of consultants that dig deep on that side. But what I do is bring to life, and make sure that your internal is represented properly, externally, to candidates to help them make that journey. So, you’re competing fairly in a in a very competitive marketplace.

Stewart Gandolf

Yep. So, as you know, our audience includes people, of course, from health systems and multilocation providers and different people like that where the competition for employees is fierce. But we also have you know, people from device or pharma health plan SaaS, different kinds of companies as well. So, I think a lot of these concepts will apply for them as well. Right? We’re going to be talking about today. So, we should focus on what you’re doing on a day to day basis. But these concepts are pretty broad spread in many cases, at least. So, there’s, you know, a lot of top employer awards on the healthcare side of the Provider Hospital side. You know. How much weight should we give those?

Cynthia Newton

You know it’s a great question. I think I did a post on it. Honestly, you know. Not much. They are they’re great for press releases in C-suite validation, right? But they really they rarely line up to what employees are actually saying on Glassdoor, Indeed, or Reddit. You know, I’ve tested search results. I’ve tested in Google. I’ve looked at ChatGPT and Perplexity to do searches on finding top employers in healthcare and the list (and depending on where you’re looking) are very inconsistent, right? So, candidates really care about lived experience, not marketing accolades. So those awards are 90%, and it’s a great post. It’s a great press release. But you know it’s 3rd party reviews that really hold the weight. More than that award ever will in the minds of prospective candidates.

Stewart Gandolf

Got it. And so, when you’re seeing or when you’re looking at, you know, for various clients, what are some of the red flags you’re seeing out there that you know the candidates are so much like you’re helping your employer brands find this. But what are employees looking for? What are the red flags there?

Cynthia Newton

So easy. Red flag is the rating right? That’s it. Yeah. You know, Glassdoor likes to say that a 3.5 to around 3.7 is the average for healthcare organizations. They like to say that that’s a satisfied employee, and I’m going to beg to differ. You know, we live in a 5 star world. So, a candidate is no different than a consumer. Right? When we go on to Amazon, and we look at something that we’re going to purchase, you know. Are we racing to the 3.5 rating, you know. Like, no, we want to see a 5 star, or as close to 5 star as we can, and we want to see volume of reviews. So that’s the other red flag right is, even if you have a 5 star. But you have 10 reviews compared to a product that has 2,000 reviews, and it might be a 4.7, you know. So, it’s not just the rating, it’s also the volume of the feedback. And then what people are saying in that feedback. Right? So, if I’m considering the things that I have access to as a candidate. I’m looking at Glassdoor, and Indeed and so yes, the red flag. But even if someone has a better score, so say they’re like a 4.1, but there’s no responses. That’s a red flag. Is the employer care what their employees are saying about them? Are they listening. So, if you’re not seeing responses, your deduction is going to be like, well, they’re not listening. A. And they don’t care because they’re not responding, even if they are listening. B, so those are red flags. So that engaged employer, you know, if you’re not seeing people actually engaged, maybe you have a sponsored profile. So, you’re paying that sponsorship dollars for your ads to run. But you have a 3.2. I mean, these things are very incongruent with one another. So those are all red flags.

Stewart Gandolf

Got it that makes sense. So, you know, you have a lot of experience with this category. What are the mistakes that organizations are making like. Where do things go wrong?

Cynthia Newton

The biggest mistake is not ignoring them right? Pretending like they don’t exist. Put your head in the sand, you know. And you’d be shocked at the number of brands or the brands that you would think because they’re top of mind. Those brands are most often the biggest offenders of that—of I’m not going to pay attention. I’m not listening. I’m pretending like it doesn’t exist. So, I would think that’s like the biggest mistake is pretending like that doesn’t exist. Because it does.

Stewart Gandolf

Yeah, that makes sense. Well, you were talking. We were talking offline. Tell me about your employer index, and is that something people can easily find? Or how does that work.

Cynthia Newton

Yeah. So, the reason why I built it—I’m a friend, right? I’m not your foe. I’m not your enemy. I’ve created a list, and it’s just kind of like to bring awareness. So, I took. I started with everybody who won some type of top employer award. So, whether that’s Forbes. Whether it was, you know, Healthgrades, whether it was Beckers, whether it was whoever was the top employer award winner, and I started with those because I figured top they want a top award. Right? Let’s take a look at what Glassdoor and Indeed say about them. And that’s how I built this roster was. I just ranked them according to their Glassdoor overall rating. We can rank them according to in Indeed, those vary, and we can dig into the differences in scoring mechanisms on another discussion or another question. But I built this to bring awareness, because it’s something that I feel has been very much overlooked for many years. Because and the reason is because it’s kind of sits in No Man’s Land right? HR. Who are is the party that actually is in charge of running ads and doing the recruitment, right? So, they’ll tend to own those profiles on those sites to update and make sure that those posts are listed. But marketing isn’t really involved sometimes in those sites. So marketing is really about controlling what our brand impressions like right. What is our brand voice? So, it sits right now from an employer branding standpoint between these 2 of HR owning the function of hiring, but marketing really owning the function of Brand, and how that acts as a pull to bring our employees in. And so, what’s happened is that no one’s really owned that in a really meaningful way over the years. And now we’re at a point of inflection within our industry that we’re looking at a potential huge shortfall of providers on the NDDO. Side even APPs by year 2034. It’s extremely competitive. And so now this is becoming more and more important, and I think we’re at the point where we need to start paying attention and start managing it, or we’re going to really fall even further behind from our employment needs.

Stewart Gandolf

So, you know, like we talked a little bit offline about sometimes that list that you have goes up and down, and some of the best sort of most respected names in healthcare can be, you know, like surprisingly on by this measure, not quite do as well any other comments on that, particularly?

Cynthia Newton

Yeah, you know, again, I’m not here to call out folks, you know. I’ll be the 1st one to

give kudos where there deserves so like this month in the July release, we had some folks move up in a big way. So Methodist Health in Texas because there’s a couple of Methodist Healths, but the ones in Texas they went from Spot 14 to rank 5^th, so they made a big jump to an overall rating of a 4.3. That’s pretty big, right? So, when we look at our top 10, it’s a close, you know. Pretty close. It ranges from a 4.1 in the top, 10 to a 4.6 St. Jude having that 4.6, and they went up from one month from 4.5 to 4.6, but I will call out that we had some drops which were surprising, and many things can lead into this. So, I’m going to tell you what I think might have happened NYU Langone. So, I had them at Number 2 in June, and they had a 4.4, which is extremely high. They had a volume of ratings of 2,696. Now I did the update. They dropped to a 4.1. Still pretty darn good, right? It’s in our top in our top 20, but their volume dramatically increased to 4373. So that’s, you know, almost doubling their volume. So, a couple of things could have happened. One they could have been listening to me and pushed out a review request all at once to their entire organization, which is not what I recommend you do. So, that’s 1 scenario of what happened. Another scenario is that we’re full of mergers and acquisitions in our industry. So, if they merged with an organization, acquired an organization and absorbed that organization’s Glassdoor, and Indeed ratings. And again, I could go off on a tangent on that. That could also be a reason why that dropped, and that happened with one of my clients that I work with closely on this is that we you know, Glassdoor is kind of like Google in the sense that lots of profiles can pop up when people just want to leave a review, and it’s not owned and managed by your organization. If you want to consolidate those so that you have one branded page on Glassdoor. You’re going to end up taking a bunch of loose, goosey profiles bringing them in, and that could really mess with your overall rating. So that’s another reason why that that change might have happened. So again, I’m not pointing them out.

Stewart Gandolf

Obviously, yeah.

Cynthia Newton

Yeah, you know, like, it’s a learning thing for all of us, including Langone, to say, like, Wow, what did happen? Right like? We need to pay attention to those things.

Stewart Gandolf

Well, I think one thing that the theme of the day a couple of conversations I’ve had even prior to speaking with you is, you know, this is the kind of thing that people I don’t think, or people. Some executives probably didn’t put a lot of attention to back in the day when there was a few, you know, like every hospital, had its own. Every town had its own hospital. There was that hospital or not, and then, you know the there was plenty of talent. Now you have very competitive markets, and you’ve got a shortage of talent, so certainly, some people care about these things, for sure, probably more than used to, for the hospital systems that want to sort of authentically, you know, embrace this, take more of a control, and but at the same time be authentic and showcase their employee experience online. What are some quick tips on how to do that.

Cynthia Newton

So, you know you bring about some really good points there. Right? One thing is that you know this is not HR’s responsibility alone. You know, people want to point fingers and say, Well, whose job is it? You know it really is, employer branding is a leadership issue because it touches recruitment, retention, morale, even patient experience. So, you know, we’ve spent the last, you know, 15 years easily, really focused on patient experience from the rating side, from the review side, from transparency. And if you think about patient experience, we can’t deliver a great positive, patient experience. We can’t deliver that 5 star patient experience, if the experience on our employee side is bad, right? So unhappy employees do not make for positive, patient experiences. So, you know those things go hand in hand so ,most often, what’s out there is not representative of your organization if it’s left to organic results. So, we’ve spent 10 years plus review requesting on the patient side. But we’ve not done it internally. So, you know I would say that some of the things that you’d want to do is to embrace that transparency piece. So, not just from the patient side, but also the employee side. So, look at your Glint scores, or PG, or whoever you’re doing your engagement surveys. Convert that to a 5 star scale, just like you do on your Caps, right where you might take that overall rating of how likely are you to recommend us as an employer, or overall happiness, satisfaction, score, and change that to a 5 star scale and publish it on your own site along with some comments. That’s that transparency piece that that candidate’s going to land on your website and be able to see that feedback from verified employees. Ask employees to leave a review for you, you know that’s a great way to have more engagement. Whether that’s on a regularly like. So, I would recommend not doing it all at one time. So typically, when we do our engagement surveys, we do it all at once. Right? Everybody knows it’s coming. We open up that survey. For 6 weeks we gather the results we analyze, and then we share it. I would not recommend that you ask for a review on a 3rd party all at once. We want to spread it out for various reasons, one, for not to have dramatic rating score, you know, ratings happening drops and increases, but also just to have that recency factor, all algorithms, whether that’s in LLM. So, whether that’s in search from an SEO standpoint, recency, relevancy. Those things are important. So, you want that that ongoing feedback to be pushed out there. So, you might tie a review request to someone’s anniversary date. Right? Send it out. They’re celebrating their anniversary of how you know, however, many years they’ve been with your organization, hey? Great! Thank you, you know, Stewart, for being part of our team. We, you know, we want to celebrate you. Would you share your experience online, you know, for others?

Stewart Gandolf

Love that. That’s a great idea.

Cynthia Newton

That I highly encourage.

Stewart Gandolf

That’s a great nugget. I love that one. So, let’s talk about AI, AI, AI, AI! We’re all talking about AI a lot. How does that impact in the employer brand reputation?

Cynthia Newton

It’s really interesting. Because, again, you know, this is somewhat of a newer viewpoint and newer focus for me and for everybody. I’m probably one of the few that’s actually talking about it from a 3rd party standpoint. And I think that it should mirror just like consumer, you know, start doing the searches the problem with LLMs, the AI type of searches and ChatGPT, Claude. The problem with those is that so many other factors just like search, like search history, kind of come into play whatever you’ve been talking about or searching on previously you know, sometimes ways in. But do some searches on your own brand, you know. Give it some good prompts. You know I’m a gastroenterologist with 15 years’ experience. I’m looking for you know, acute care, facility to be on staff in a smaller, you know city in the Midwest you know, like tell me who a top employer is that I should consider who has job openings. Those are the type of searches very long tail detailed searches and start seeing what comes up and you’ll be probably not happy with the results a lot of the times. But you need to understand those results, and I would mirror them in all of these places that candidates could be searching

and really understanding what leads into those. So again, it’s that fresh, relevant, frequent feedback that’s rich in details and tells stories. So, when you’re requesting those feedback from your employees, I’ve been amazed at the feedback that we’ve been receiving from my clients that are requesting as a marketer I could not write the content that I’m getting in these responses from a creative writing standpoint. It blows me away. Some of the reviews, the comments that we get, and we share those internally with management and leadership. So, it’s not just about recruitment. It’s not just about like what you’re looking like online to hear this feedback up through leadership really kind of brings them back down from a from a macro view, to like looking inside their organization at like, Hey, this is what it’s like to work on 4B in XYZ hospital within our system, right? And looking at it a very micro level, to make change.

Stewart Gandolf

You mentioned marketing a couple of times and employers, and like the gap between this category like, who’s in charge like? So, what’s the disconnect between internal culture and the messaging like, what is the gap, and who’s in charge, or tell us just a little bit about that.

Cynthia Newton

You know, it’s we’re all really in charge of it, and it needs to be a leadership down. Push. I believe. You know, I think patient experience is even part of the equation where I have had a patient experience leader that I’ve worked with previously at other organizations. Bring me into the HR team into the marketing team and say, hey, this is something as a patient as the person you know responsible for patient experience delivery. I have concerns about our internal, you know our employee experience, because it directly impacts my ability to move the needle which I’m being charged with, you know. So, sometimes it might not be marketing, leading that that charge. It might not be HR. Leading that charge. It might be PX. It could be someone in operations, but we all own that responsibility of what does that employee experience? What is it like, and how does it drive our overall growth for the organization, our retention for our employees, and then also our attraction and retention for our patients as well and delivering that patient experience. So, it’s really very integral into the overall function of the organization.

Stewart Gandolf

So, you know, we talked about metrics about like, for example, just, you know, sort of averaging the scores. But are there any additional metrics they should be tracking that we’re not seeing people track.

Cynthia Newton

Absolutely. And this is where it gets a lot harder. So just like marketing getting that ROI, looking at our KPIs. You know, some of the KPIs is not about how many more impressions we get on the profile. And I look at those. Obviously we doubled our impressions on our profiles for one of my clients, and that’s a great KPI. We’ve doubled the clicks, you know. Another great KPI. But at the end of the day, did it drive more qualified candidates? Did we have faster time to fill the open positions? You know, those are the metrics that we need to be able to dig in to, especially if we’re investing dollars into sponsored profiles on these 3rd party sites. Or if we’re investing in any type of marketing to fill our positions, you know, is understanding where our candidates are coming from, what their pathway is. So, we talk about the patient journey right, the consumer journey to how they discover care. We should be looking at our candidate journeys to how our candidates are coming to us, where they’re coming to us. What’s important, and actually, maybe mapping those out as well. And I don’t think we’ve spent as much time in our industry looking at those things.

Stewart Gandolf

Got it a couple of last questions to wrap up here any big myths about employer branding and healthcare.

Cynthia Newton

Hmm! I don’t know about a myth. I just, you know. I just think that it’s that it’s not important.

you know that it’s just kind of one of those things that oh, it’s Glassdoor! Oh, it’s Indeed! You know, it’s not just those sites. It’s Reddit, you know. What are people talking about. It’s Fishbowl in Glassdoor. People are having real conversations about what it’s like to work in your organization, and they’re not having it with you. So, you know, like it is your problem. It’s leadership. It’s a very much a leadership issue. And it’s not something that can be ignored.

Stewart Gandolf

Great final question, is, so where should you know health system, or any other kind of entity, for that matter, start if they want to improve their employer. Brand reputation.

Cynthia Newton

I would start by pulling together all the folks that I mentioned right, and it needs to be a leadership. It needs to be a C-suite initiative. You know where they’re pulling in, and they’re saying to their head of HR. And their Head of Marketing and their Head of Patient Experience like, here’s what we need to consider, you know, like, I  just talk to an organization the other day. They literally have not done an engagement survey since 2022, you know, and then they’re wanting to know. Well, how do you think we would shake out, you know, if we did one now, and I’m like, well, let’s see, let’s look at 2019, right? You were up. You were down in 22, I mean everybody was. It was after Covid. But we’re 3 years post, Covid, you know, and you really need to be doing this survey every year, and in between doing you know, pulse surveys. So, there’s different issues that occur that you want feedback throughout the years asking those quick SMS questions to get feedback. So, I would say, that’s probably the most important piece is opening up that channel of direct feedback. If you’re not doing engagement surveys, and it doesn’t have to be a big fancy, you know, $5,000-$100,000 survey crying out loud, open up, SurveyMonkey, and do some quick polls right that you want to get a temperature on. But you need to start listening, opening up that other listening post on what’s being said in social? What’s being said in Reddit? What’s being said on Glassdoor. 1st start gathering and getting that assessment of Where are we at before then looking and saying, are we ready to address reputation on the 3rd parties? Or do we have to do some internal work first?

Stewart Gandolf

So, I appreciate your time, Cynthia. This was great. I’ll add a couple of comments to add to that. 1st of all, I love the idea of like don’t get too caught up, you know, in the world of healthcare, whether you’re at a provider, a hospital, or you know device company. There’s a lot of things to worry about, right? There’s compliance. There’re employees, there’re customers, there’s you know, patient experience, like all these things. So, there’s a lot. So, in defense of some of the hospitals or health systems that have had a hard time with this I can see how it’s easy to like to keep your eye off the ball at the same time, though the reminder like, well, you could just do SurveyMonkey. You don’t have to go hire a team of that’s perfect, right? You could do something that’s really important is like not to get lost in the you know, what is the

throughout the good and pursuit of perfection. So, you get nothing started. So, it’s really easy to end up there. So, I think that sort of gorilla attitude is important, when necessary. Number 2, you know, we’re doing a ton of branding in the last couple of years. In addition, all the digital marketing we’re known better known for. But we do a lot in branding as well and you know a lot of people honestly, the clients we have to really bring into thinking about their employees as part of that process. Right? We can’t go create a new brand and not bring the employees along. And so, you know, I think not just on the day-to-day, you know, employee satisfaction. But where are they? You know, especially with large organizations. Your employees are one of your biggest stakeholders. Right? So, if you’re not thinking about them, you’re missing the boat right? So how do we tie this all together? And it’s hard I get it. It’s really hard. I was describing my, our own, our own agency to someone. A couple of times today. Actually, it’s like, it’s really complex. There’s a lot there. But you still got to do it. It’s table stake what you just have to do.

So, Cynthia, I appreciate your time. I look forward to work with you on some more projects here in the future and thank you for attending today.

Cynthia Newton

Thank you. I appreciate it.