Over the years, we have perfected our Sustainable Workforce Solution. What would you like to know?
We are specialists. Experts in our niche. We work exclusively with healthcare organisations, and have been doing so for the past 7 years.
Firstly, the Just R team does not include anyone from a communications background. We admire NHS Comms teams and the skills they possess in communicating complex information to multiple stakeholder groups and managing communication with service users.
The Just R team is made up of advertising, design, digital, videography, candidate engagement and project management specialists, working together in project teams with a single objective to deliver sustainable workforce solutions to eradicate the reliance on temporary agency staff in NHS organisations across the UK. We operate in cycles of continuous improvement, evolving our solutions to meet the ever increasing needs of our clients.
We typically bridge the gap between HR / recruitment and clinical teams, and welcome brand feedback and insights from Comms teams but there is little to no crossover in expertise. Comms input should only be required to the extent that they would get involved in jobs listings and Trac posts.
Just R is set up to run as a long term collaborative partner to NHS organisations. Our best relationships are 5+ years standing. We provide recruitment pipelines reducing agency spend and increasing retention, and are a long term, cost saving strategy. In many instances Just R project teams outlast entire NHS in-house teams providing a constant which often does not exist within the organisation.
The most critical metric to us is the number of candidates who register interest in your vacancies as this is your recruitment pipeline. In addition to enquiries we also monitor and report on campaign reach and link clicks on a monthly basis and can provide many other relevant stats on request.
Monday is the best day to launch your campaign as this provides the working week to assess analytics, and make any tweaks or amends in response ensuring we’re getting your campaign off to the best start.
Typically we work alongside either clinical or recruitment teams, if we were to pick a preference we would say that projects mainly involving clinical staff with full recruitment support have the greatest success. Clinical teams are able to most accurately advise us on what they need but they must have recruitment support in order to efficiently convert candidates to appointments.
The NHS is one of the largest employers, particularly within rural areas, with over 350 careers on offer across the NHS there are so many opportunities open to people within every community. The NHS has an incredible opportunity to inspire the young, disengaged and under employed to aspire to a career which will enable them to make a difference.
The NHS as it stands will never not need people, and with growing older populations with increasing chronic conditions, the need for care will continue to grow, local community recruitment just makes sense.
With recruiting from local populations comes the opportunity to create role models, people from disengaged groups who do well and inspire others creating socio economic benefits as well as helping to improve health outcomes of communities.
Conversion of applicants. Candidates generated through Just R campaigns may not fit within usual candidate management processes. We are generating a proactive pipeline as opposed to applicants to live vacancies (enabling the navigation around restrictive processes), this will require someone to own the conversion of these candidates into appointments. This can prove a challenge to some Trusts but is essential in order to move from a reactive to proactive approach and must be considered from the outset.
We calculate the average cost of hiring a band 5 agency nurse by considering the smallest possible hourly agency rate cap, multiplied by the average workweek (37.5 hours), resulting in a weekly cost. This weekly cost is then multiplied by 52 weeks to derive the annual temporary agency wage for a band 5 nurse. The difference between this annual wage and the average base wage for a permanent member of staff gives us the average additional cost of hiring a band 5 agency nurse.
At Just R, we have a unique approach – we do not charge a cost per hire. Instead, we offer our clients an all-inclusive fee that covers our comprehensive services.
73% of job seekers between the ages of 18 and 34 years old found their last job through a social media platform.
Social media is the number 1 marketing channel in terms of reach, effectiveness and cost efficiency. Outperforming websites, email marketing, influencer marketing, SEO as well as all traditional methods. Not only is social media the marketers choice, Just R have spent the past 7 years testing and monitoring campaign effectiveness and will continue to do so.
Social media works. The results we are generating every day continue to prove that this is the most efficient way to attract within the healthcare recruitment space.
Yes absolutely! All Just R campaigns leverage Facebook’s ownership of Instagram and the ease of delivering ads across the Instagram platform. Our campaigns lead with Facebook, with Instagram support, in order to capture additional audiences and provide additional campaign touch points.
Of course we should consider all relevant platforms which are reaching prospective candidates. But we also must be realistic as to what is possible and sustainable. TikTok is an incredible platform with growing reach and engagement, generating amazing results for some brands. However, in order to achieve that, brands must embark on a TikTok-first content strategy. This requires imagination and full creative control, which when working with NHS teams simply isn’t possible. TikTok offers great potential, but the risks outweigh the reward and we would not recommend it as part of an initial strategy. However, it could be built into a longer term strategy once a strong collaborative relationship is in place.
Brand association is also a challenge with regards to TikTok, and negative associations have been made between the NHS and TikTok in the past.
Typical candidate recruitment methods such as NHS Jobs and Trac Job boards reach only the people who are aware of healthcare careers, are actively looking for one and know where to find them. This heavily restricts the audience aware of your vacancies, limiting the volume of applications you will receive to vacancies whilst also only ever reaching people aware of healthcare jobs and not increasing the pool.
We deliver tried and tested high volume, content led, campaigns, posting every day on Facebook, with Instagram adverts across all campaigns and in some instances we also either create content for or also run additional campaigns (at additional cost) on Twitter and LinkedIn.
The reason for Facebook first is that, in the vast majority of our projects, Facebook will deliver the best ROI by far. If an alternate platform is more relevant (in a small number of very niche projects) this will be recommended at the proposal stage. For all others the tried and tested solution is Facebook and we will not risk using NHS budgets to test unknown channels. We continue to test (through our own campaigns and when we find formulas and channels which we find more effective than Facebook / Instagram we will switch our recommendation, until then our recommendation remains the same.
The way we post is through organic and targeted advert posts, combining a mixture of information, education and direct call to action posts. We deliver campaigns with the aim of the target audience seeing 1 or 2 posts each week, drip feeding over time information on different facets of your organisation, convincing them over time to want to join.
Facebook continues to dominate the social media landscape, remaining the number 1 digital platform. Facebook not only reaches an astounding 44% of the UK population but it also continues to offer the best ROI in terms of adverts vs all other social platforms. These stats coupled with 7 years of tried and tested campaign success mean that all Just R NHS campaigns adopt a Facebook-first approach. There is no guarantee this will always continue to be our approach in the always-changing digital world, but until another platform provides better results we will not advise otherwise.
Twitter is expensive for advertising, and you can’t write much in each post. It’s also not the right audience – generally, people who are already in healthcare may be on there, but probably don’t follow your Trust. This doesn’t reach those passive candidates.
There are many more benefits to other social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn (especially for professional roles higher up in organisations).
We run a mixture of organic and paid advert posts. Our campaigns run long term in order to reach people over a long period of time with ever changing, interesting, engaging content.
The audience is constantly changing, people engage and disengage with social, they move, they grow older, qualify, etc. You will always be reaching and in general wildly exceeding the guaranteed minimum audience reach.
Advertising is the techniques and practices used to bring products, services, opinions, or causes to public notice to persuade the public to respond in a certain way toward what is being advertised.
The imparting or exchanging of information by speaking, writing, or using some other medium. The successful conveying or sharing of ideas and feelings.
The key difference is communications share and inform in order to make someone feel something, whereas advertising takes you a step further to influence, persuade and take action.
Our campaigns always have a minimum guaranteed audience reach and due to the expertise of our team we generally wildly exceed this number. Our campaigns generally reach 40-100,000 people each month and this audience is targeted to be within the geographical region the Trust lies within.
The videos we create at Just R tell stories and motivate people, they are either to support building a recruitment brand, contain a call to action (CTA), or sometimes both. They are aimed at educating, engaging and urging people to take action by capturing their imagination and emotions.
There are 3 scales of videos we provide, each requiring different levels of input from NHS teams; The Big Idea, Show and Tell and Lights, Camera, Action.
You need to stand out and let people who who you are. You need to distinguish yourselves from other workplaces, such as Amazon and Aldi, as well as other NHS Trusts. Your Employer Brand helps attract the people you need through the demonstration of your culture.
It has been proven that great video increases the reach, interest and applications made to organisations, and it therefore must be an essential part of NHS social media recruitment strategies. Video enables your best people to become ambassadors and bring your Trust values and people to life to 100’s of thousands of people.
For social campaigns we focus on short form videos, these are videos typically less than 60 seconds in length as the typical social attention span is 8 seconds! We also produce longer, story led videos for use on websites and to be sent directly to prospective candidates.
They have gone home or ultimately decided not to become nurses, retired, opted for positions with greater balance (such as working for Amazon, Aldi), or other organisations with purpose (Just R), they are typically purpose driven people and if they don’t feel fulfilled can look for this elsewhere!
RPM is an applicant tracking system which manages candidates prior to entering the Trac system. RPM’s purpose is to manage your candidate pipeline. Candidate information within RPM can be uploaded into Trac via CSV files.
Values based recruitment takes onboard on a person’s character, underlying values and principles, attitudes and beliefs – traits which cannot be trained (easily)! Skills, evidenced by certificates and ‘relevant’ experience are the typical recruitment measures. These are the things which can be trained.
If the NHS recruited based on values rather than skills and experience there would be a workforce closer aligned to the needs of the service and patients. This increases patient care and safety which in turn leads to increased staff retention, higher Trust credibility, higher Trust status and access to more funding.
Think about job design! Just because a registered nurse no longer wants to work on wards why could they not be utilised within recruitment or HR? Could they support education or retention? Experienced nurses and registered professionals can be attracted back to the NHS, providing great value and expertise in areas outside of wards – it just requires a little imagination…
A database full of people who are interested in working in your Trust.
