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Ken Harrison:
Improving hiring timeliness through a district recruitment strategy presented by Ken Harrison and Elena Robinson with the Alabama Department of Public Health. As we get started, I want to review the makeup of the Alabama Department of Public Health. We are a centralized health department, and with local health departments in every county. There are 67 counties in Alabama. Jefferson and Mobile County act as separate entities, but the remaining 65 have a local health department in each county.

ADPH is made up of six districts, with nine to 11 counties per district. We have approximately 2700 staff. 800 of those staff are located in the central office the 1900 in the counties. Even though we have 2700 staff, we still have 600 openings. All applications go through the state personnel department when there’s a vacancy to fill, ADPH requests the job register from the State Personnel Department. Sometimes the register does not have many candidates on it, and that register does not have candidates, or that candidate does not have candidates on it that are willing to perform the job.

These small applicant pools increase the amount of time that elapsed between the date the job register was requested and the employee’s date of hire. While some ADPH is hiring, timeliness is outside of its control due to having to obtain registers from state personnel. The department has created six district recruiting specialists, and that’s one per district, to expand our local recruitment efforts, to fill registers, and also to hire staff. District recruiting specialists attend job fairs. They recruit at academic institutions. They educate students at high schools through speaking engagements on career opportunities, and help candidates with the process of filling out applications. They also play a significant role in our digital media recruiting efforts.

Alaina Robinson:
Now that we’ve talked about the makeup of the Alabama Department of Public Health and what our recruiters do to help along our hiring process. We’re going to discuss the objectives of this poster. The first objective is to assess the relationship between recruitment events and median hiring timeliness across Alabama’s public health districts. The second objective is to describe patterns in recruiter call logs to identify potential barriers to hiring and job register access, and the third objective is to describe social media and website engagement metrics as context for digital recruitment efforts.

We examined a six-month time period in which all recruiters were hired and actively engaged in recruitment activities. During this time period, the Spearman’s rank order correlation between the number of events attended and median hiring timeliness was negative, 0.89, indicating that more recruitment events were generally associated with faster hiring. However, due to limited variability in median hiring timeliness per district, this correlation should be interpreted descriptively, and with caution, our recruiters keep call logs of individuals who reach out to them with various job needs. Most people who contacted a recruiter were not on the job register, and their top needs were wanting to learn more about specific job positions, requesting help with the application process, and responding to a job announcement that the department posted on Indeed.

Of the 19 job announcements posted to Indeed that are filled as of May 2025, 12 were filled through Indeed, that’s a 63% success rate. In March of 2024, the department launched its digital media recruitment campaign, while not directly linked to hiring outcomes, social media trends in quarter two compared to quarter one, suggest growing interest in public health job opportunities among online audiences the greatest increase in average impressions, which is the average number of times content was displayed to users, was seen on Next Door, with an increase from 35,304 average impressions in quarter one compared to 43,789 average impressions in quarter two.

The department has also seen increases to its career-related web pages since November 2022, which was one month before PHIG funding was awarded. For instance, combined recruitment efforts contributed to a 386% increase in views to the Human Resources homepage in November 2024 compared to November 2022. Taken together, these findings suggest that recruitment and outreach may play a meaningful role in improving hiring timeliness, particularly when paired with more online job visibility and direct applicant support. While causality cannot be inferred, the observed correlation and caller patterns point to recruiter presence as a potentially impactful strategy in addressing public health workforce gaps. Future efforts should seek to understand which recruitment strategies are most impactful for which districts and incorporate more robust applicant data to investigate barriers to successfully making the job register.