Kaiser NW Permanente: Careers Website Marketing Project 

The Overall Problem

The NorthWest Permanente Physicians & Surgeons website was created to serve as a gateway for great practitioners to find job openings at the various NW Permanente locations around the region. With many great health care providers in the area, NW Permanente needed a way to showcase what set them apart from the competition in order to attract the best talent to service their patients.

GRAYBOX and NW Permanente had an existing relationship going back a couple years related to other technology initiatives, and was referred to the talent acquisition team by another department within NW Permanente.

After a preliminary assessment of the current state of both website and marketing initiatives, GRAYBOX recommended a series of actions on both fronts to help bolster the effectiveness of the talent acquisition team’s efforts.

Our Solution

1. Marketing and Website Strategy & Audit

GRAYBOX scheduled a series of preliminary strategy meetings to define the overall objectives and problems that needed to be solved. GRAYBOX engaged executives, physicians, patient advocates, and staff members who managed data related to this website to gain an understanding of how it was intended to serve each type of user, what the team’s goals were for talent acquisition, and what strategies had worked (or not worked) for them in the past. Through this, GRAYBOX created a both a broad strategic plan for the next 12 months, as well as a more tactical action plan that was executed over the course of the first 4 months of the engagement to make foundational improvements to NW Permanente’s technology. By ensuring the business goals were well understood, and the landscape was well grounded, GRAYBOX would be able to successfully drive toward accomplishing the goals of NW Permanente.

2. Website Adoption and Optimization

As a starting point to the tactical improvements, GRAYBOX undertook a ‘Website Adoption” for the existing WordPress website. This process ensured the GRAYBOX team had access to the code at a sufficient level to tackle the first phase of the project, and gave our team the opportunity to review and document the current state of the site so that we could effectively support the NW Permanente team’s requests in the future. Once the adoption was complete, GRAYBOX started work on updates to the website CMS, content changes, and updates to technical underpinnings to improve their SEO readiness, GRAYBOX was able to provide a better foundation from which to begin the more substantive marketing efforts.

3. Search Engine Marketing (SEO and PPC)

GRAYBOX followed two parallel strategies for improving the performance of the NW Permanente physician careers website. First, our team analyzed the existing content on the site, along with the history of analytics data, to evaluate where improvements could be made to support search engine optimization. Our team of experts made recommendations, and implemented changes, for navigation, on-page content, page template structure, and the relationship of job postings to locations, all in furtherance of increasing the likelihood that their job postings would be found by job seekers. In parallel, the GRAYBOX team took over management of the NW Permanente AdWords account for talent acquisition. We refactored the structure and bid process for campaigns, added new campaigns in support of business goals, implemented goal / conversion tracking to be able to measure the effectiveness of our efforts, and incorporated all the new and improved data into a series of Google Data Studio reports to be reviewed monthly with the Partner.

4. Job Posting Integration

To help support the easy flow of job posts to the web and to the website, the NW Permanente team implemented a new candidate tracking system. The GRAYBOX team worked to ensure the data from this system was automatically integrated to the website, eliminating the need for duplicate data entry between systems.