Before (and now after) the global COVID-19 pandemic, the professional talent pool for registered nurses was difficult for healthcare systems to navigate. Long hours, low pay, and high stakes mean the best talent is hard to find and attract. The pandemic deepened these issues — nurses were daily putting their own health and lives at risk just by going into work. As a result, large numbers of RNs and other healthcare workers passed away and left the industry completely, making the prospect of filling critical staffing shortages even more bleak.
Novant Health needed a novel approach to tackle their own staffing issues at the height of the global pandemic. As Manager of Strategic Initiatives within the People & Culture (HR) team, I wore the creative director-like hat for HR-related work (such as recruitment) for the entire 35,000-person healthcare system. I was tasked with creating a recruitment video campaign which would reach new RN candidates.
Working in-house for a super-regional healthcare system, I was keenly aware of what conventional recruitment materials looked like. They're dry, overly corporate, full of stock footage of generic people in scrubs smiling, and save for the system's logo on the end card are virtually indistinguishable from one system to the next. And being married to a nurse myself, I know that their target audience largely tunes them out.
While brainstorming how to cut through the noise and reach our audience, I thought about something that had become very common during the pandemic — combating stress and fear with nostalgia. People, myself included, were turning to things that made them feel comfortable or happy from their past, especially their childhoods.
And that insight isn't purely anecdotal — a survey1 conducted in 2020 exploring the effects of COVID-19 on entertainment choices found that more than half of consumers were finding comfort in old TV shows, films, and songs from their youth. Another study showed that nine out of ten people admit to thinking about the past at least occasionally, with 47% saying they do so almost always or quite often. And while people become more likely to reminisce as they grow older, the study found that Millennials (our target audience for this campaign) say they reminisce about the past "almost always" more than any older age group2.
A study found our target audience of Millennials indulge in nostalgia more than any older age group.
With this strategic opportunity in mind, I pitched a recruitment video series (one for each of a number of departments within Novant Health hospitals which needed nurses) that would largely break from the established brand voice and visual guidelines and lean heavily into emulating the look of classic sitcom intro videos from the 1980s and '90s — think Full House, Saved By The Bell, and Family Matters. To be most effective, my vision included a campy period-correct stock music track, retro onscreen titles, and treating the videos so they looked slightly sepia and noisy (as if recorded off of a VHS tape). I also wanted to include an animated Novant Health logo at the end to evoke a classic studio end card, complete with a slight mis-alignment of the red, green, and blue color channels so it would appropriately seem to have been created using a pre-digital video workflow.
To bring my concept to life, I selected Digital Spark Studios, a talented production house in Charlotte, to create the video series (five total). Thanks to their skill and experience, we shot everything in one (hectic) day, across several different departments and floors of a working hospital — I even got to stand in as a patient in several shots. They then did a masterful job editing the videos and applying all the nostalgic touches I wanted to capture the intended look.
Sadly, after concepting, storyboarding, planning, producing, shooting, and (mostly) editing five videos, the project was paused by leadership and ultimately cancelled before it could be fully realized. With a new employer value proposition (EVP) nearing debut, the Marketing department was worried this ad series wouldn't align with the refreshed corporate recruitment messaging. This concern gave leadership stakeholders, already nervous about the videos because of their radical difference from the messaging status quo, enough of a reason to cease work.
The videos' strength wound up becoming their undoing. I strongly advocated that these be finished and used, as they were very different from everything recruiting-focused the rest of Novant Health and most other healthcare systems were running at the time. That difference was the point of the project and while I understood the trepidation around the concept when it moved from an idea into reality, I was disappointed by the ultimate decision to kill the project. I still believe that these would have had a strong net-positive impact on the organization's RN recruiting efforts.