Lowering Nurse Vacancy Rates
in Rural Markets
With a diversified strategy and agile management, NAS reached both active and passive nursing candidates, substantially lowering vacancy rates for a large, national organization operating in rural markets with limited talent pools.
Challenge
CoreCivic, the nation's largest owner of correctional, detention and residential reentry facilities, has an ongoing need to recruit healthcare professionals across key markets. Challenges include attracting healthcare professionals to work in correctional care and increasing applicant flow across multiple locations. Our goals included increasing RN applies while reducing media spend and, ultimately, overtime spend on nurses.
Solution
With a strong desire to increase applicant flow, we partnered with the CoreCivic recruiting team to identify alternative solutions to expand our reach and diversify our media mix. Working within the framework of an established monthly budget, we established a flexible and strategic approach to reach our goals.
We regularly shifted and added funds based on performance and spend utilization to drive the highest volume of applicants.
We directed resources to drive applications for the facilities with the greatest needs.
We piloted new media tactics for priority roles and markets, including a mix of digital search, display, social (Facebook) and programmatic strategies.
We layered in awareness campaigns via social media to run simultaneously with our other efforts.
Results
Since the start of our partnership in early 2024, we’ve been able to bring nurse vacancies down substantially by implementing and executing more holistic and agile strategies across multiple platforms. CoreCivic also focused on hiring full-time nurses and increasing part-time PRN staff. With a decreased vacancy rate, we are now able to adjust our focus and increase spending for other critical areas of need.
Our partnership with NAS has helped us improve hiring results while increasing efficiencies. The experts on their team understand media and strategy – and how to use analytics to continually enhance our results.
Matt Lowney
Managing Director, Talent Acquisition & HR Compliance