How AMN Healthcare turned influencers into a recruitment engine

Hannah Orrell (​@hannah.orrell), Senior Digital Marketing Specialist at AMN Healthcare, was up against a recruiting challenge familiar to anyone seeking new employees in an industry driven by trust: nurses and allied health professionals typically don't respond to job postings, they engage with peers when considering new roles. To reach healthcare workers and engage them to consider open positions with the organization amid a crowded, competitive market, AMN Healthcare needed to find the right voices in the community and understand which stories actually moved people to apply for open roles.

Using Influencer Marketing by Sprout Social, Hannah's team turned influencer marketing from a brand-awareness tactic into a measurable recruitment channel that now shapes which creators the company invests in company-wide. One influencer video targeted at bringing in new healthcare staff alone generated 20 leads with no paid promotion behind it.
 

Turning creators into market intelligence

The shift started when Hannah's team started treating influencers as a source of audience intelligence. As they reviewed performance data from prior Influencer Marketing campaigns, a pattern emerged: the content that performed best wasn't the content they expected or planned campaigns around. Healthcare professionals engaged far more with authentic stories from the creator about career growth, work-life balance and peer advice than with traditional recruiting messages.

The team then shifted from building campaigns around what the team assumed the audience wanted, to using creator and audience data to find the topics and voices healthcare professionals were already engaging with, then built recruiting campaign strategy around those.

"We stopped asking ‘how do we promote our jobs,’ and started asking ‘what conversations are healthcare professionals already having,’ and ‘how can we add value?’" — Hannah Orrell, Senior Digital Marketing Specialist, AMN Healthcare
 

The how

Hannah's team built a repeatable process for turning creator data into recruitment outcomes by:

• Identifying trusted voices with creator performance data: Rather than choosing influencers by follower count, the team used audience engagement and content performance data to find creators whose stories were already resonating with nurses and allied health professionals that made up AMN Healthcare’s target audience for recruiting.
• Listening before launching a campaign: Ahead of Nurses Month, the team noticed an organic video from a nurse influencer describing what nurses genuinely want during the month:specifically recognition, not just giveaways. That insight from listening first then shaped the campaign's monthlong approach to appreciation gifts and experiences before a single asset was built.
• Shifting from promotional to peer-led content: As the team reviewed content performance and audience engagement, they saw the pattern repeat across creators: one influencer's video about open healthcare opportunities generated 20 leads with no paid promotion behind it, and a separate creator partnership helped generate 33 leads alongside a noticeable rise in the company’s booth traffic YoY at a major industry conference.
• Connecting influencer insight to the full funnel: Instead of measuring likes and impressions, the team tracked how influencer content moved healthcare professionals toward leads, event participation and applications, tying social activity directly to recruitment goals.
   

The business impact

That single video on preferred recognition over giveaways reshaped how the team approached Nurses Month. Instead of choosing appreciation gifts based on budget or past popularity, the team built the campaign around what that nurse had said nurses actually wanted. The result: 164 nurse-generated content submissions against a goal of 100— an 80% increase over the prior benchmark—and 35,268 landing page sessions, +11% over the prior year’s campaign.. The campaign beat their engagement goals, and that same nurse who sparked the idea in the first place later posted her own, unprompted, follow-up video saying the company’s campaign made her feel genuinely seen.

Beyond the campaign metrics, the social team’s program now directly shapes which creators AMN Healthcare partners with, what stories they tell and where they invest next.
 

What could this unlock for your team?

If you're already collecting creator or audience data, what would it take to connect it more directly to a business goal like recruitment or retention? Is there an upcoming campaign you’d potentially unlock more impactful results from with an influencer-led approach? We'd love to hear what you're seeing and brainstorm together how you might flex some new creator muscles in your upcoming efforts.