A behavioral health organization cannot improve access to care if it does not have enough qualified people to provide that care.
That statement sounds obvious. It is also routinely treated as a separate problem from outreach, filed under HR or operations rather than marketing. STRIVE3 approached it differently while developing a national recruitment marketing plan for the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Readjustment Counseling Service (RCS) and its network of Vet Centers: as a genuine marketing challenge, built with the same rigor as any campaign aimed at the public.
A Staffing Problem Hiding in Plain Sight
RCS was facing a vacancy rate of 15 to 17 percent across Vet Center staff positions nationally when this work began. That is not a rounding error. It is a meaningful share of counselor and social worker roles sitting empty at a program whose entire mission depends on having enough qualified clinicians in the room with the veterans who need them.
The underlying obstacle was not a shortage of qualified mental health professionals in the country. It was candidate apprehension, unfamiliarity with what working at a Vet Center actually looks like, and general hesitation about government employment that kept many potential applicants from ever considering the role in the first place. That is an awareness and positioning problem, which meant it was a problem STRIVE3’s marketing discipline could actually help solve.
Treating Recruitment Like a Real Marketing Campaign
STRIVE3 built the Vet Center Recruitment Marketing Plan around the same architecture used for public-facing outreach: defined SMART goals, a target audience analysis, a messaging framework, a unique value proposition, and a full multichannel plan spanning digital marketing, content development, partnership building, event sponsorship, and traditional media.
The goals themselves were specific rather than aspirational. Raise engagement with recruitment content by 50 percent within six months. Add four new university or college partnerships in that same window. Generate 200 qualified-candidate applications through targeted digital and traditional channels. Increase retention of newly hired staff by 20 percent within a year of hire. Secure five new partnerships with military and Veteran Service Organizations. Each goal had a defined timeframe and a way to measure whether it had actually been achieved, not just attempted.
The plan also leaned on an existing asset RCS could build from directly: a standing relationship with Student Veterans of America chapters on college campuses. Rather than starting from zero, the strategy called for expanding outreach to top psychology and social work programs, positioning Vet Centers in front of students already oriented toward mental health careers before they entered the job market elsewhere. Visibility in respected professional publications, like those from the American Psychological Association and the National Association of Social Workers, was built in for the same reason: credibility with the exact audience that needed to see Vet Centers as a serious, mission-driven employer.
Measuring the Whole Hiring Funnel, Not Just Interest
The KPI structure behind this plan reflected the same measurement discipline STRIVE3 applies to public outreach work. It tracked engagement with recruitment content through click-through rates, shares, and email open rates. It tracked growth in partner organizations and recruitment events at the Vet Center locations with the most pressing staffing needs. It tracked media placements in professional publications and job board advertisements.
But it did not stop at interest. The plan also measured the number of qualified applications received and completed, distinguishing a genuinely engaged candidate pool from an application process too cumbersome to finish. It tracked time-to-offer and overall time-to-hire, because a slow hiring process loses strong candidates to competitors regardless of how effective the awareness campaign was. Recruitment marketing that stops at “people are interested” without tracking whether interest converts into a hired, retained clinician is measuring the wrong thing.
Why Workforce and Outreach Are the Same Problem
Here is the connection that makes this more than a standalone HR initiative: an organization cannot responsibly market access to care faster than it can staff that care.
A public awareness campaign that succeeds in driving more veterans toward Vet Centers is only good news if those Vet Centers have the clinical capacity to receive them. Push demand generation without addressing staffing, and the result is longer wait times, more frustrated intake calls, and a program that looks less trustworthy than before the campaign started, not more. The recruitment plan and the awareness plan were never separate initiatives. They were two halves of the same system, because the mission depends equally on both.
That is the lesson every publicly funded behavioral health program eventually has to learn, whether it is a CCBHC, a community services board, or a state behavioral health authority: before investing further in outreach, it is worth asking where staffing capacity actually stands, which locations are understaffed relative to the populations they serve, and whether demand generation in a given area would connect people to care or simply overwhelm a system that cannot yet absorb them.
Outreach gets people to the door. Workforce is what happens once they walk through it. A mission-driven organization that only invests in one of those two things has not actually solved its access problem. It has just moved where the bottleneck sits.