How to solve the challenges of hiring in the Care Sector

Jobtrain’s Director of Strategic Partnerships – Giles Heckstall-Smith – co-hosted a session with Zoe Printer and Rachel Dalboth from The Firm, and Rebecca Phillips from our client – Aspris Children’s Service. It was a fascinating discussion, looking at the barriers to attracting top talent to care organisations and how to overcome them!

Below is a brief summary of what was discussed in the webinar - and to watch it all just see the full recording below!

What are the biggest challenges faced in care recruitment today?

Using a mentimeter, our attendees showed us the core challenges facing them. The most commons ones were:

• Candidate quality
• Retention
• Onboarding
• DBS and compliance
• Cost of advertising
• Achieving a speedy time-to-hire

Rebecca: We are now experiencing competitiveness with the retail sector. The length of an application form is typically really short in that sector, so we found that candidates who aren’t connected to the care sector in some way are changing their minds halfway through the application process.

Reducing the length of our application forms helped combat this. There are lots of retail employers that make applying for a role quick and seamless. When we timed our application form we learned that it took almost 30 minutes to complete! So we went back, tried to cut it back, and focussed the whole process around learning if the candidate matches our values.

What values have you identified as important?

Rebecca: We run care homes for children, so the most important thing is friendliness! This approach attracts more candidates too because care workers (or future care workers!) need that friendliness to keep them engaged.

Keeping the human element at every stage

Rebecca: We definitely recommend reviewing the language, communication, and touchpoints that are there to keep candidates engaged. With our marketing team, we reviewed our emails and our messages and saw that they were really robotic and lacked warmth and personality.

The Jobtrain ATS also comes with a Welcome Hub that can keep candidates warm with videos, pictures, tips and tricks for your first day, a message from the candidate’s manager. That really helps.

How are you measuring the success of your new strategy?

Rebecca: We’re measuring our withdrawal rate and running surveys at certain touchpoints. Particularly when a colleague starts their job, we reach out to them with a survey to make sure they’re having the positive experience we want them to have. Some of these initiatives are new and we’re never going to stop changing, so it’s important to keep track of what can be improved.

What stage do you find the greatest delays or bottlenecks in the hiring process?

• 3% Screening Candidates

• 19% Time taken for hiring managers to feedback on candidates

• 3% Offers and contracts

• 71% DBS and Right to Work checks

Rebecca: It’s not surprising that DBS and right-to-work checks is so high in that survey. We went live with a digital right to work check platform earlier this year and it made a real impact. It means that candidates that go into that system can cut out a lot of the tricky manual stages that slow them down. Currently our average time-to-hire is 60 days. I can’t say that’s just because of digital right-to-work because we implemented multiple initiatives across the process, but it’s definitely a factor, and we’ve had great feedback from people who use it.

Giles: The Disclosure and Barring Service is under a great deal of pressure at the moment, and unfortunately there’s only so much that we can do to influence that. But having a certified, online, digital right to work check platform can give you a great degree of confidence. From a Jobtrain perspective that is integrated into our platform. Unfortunately for international applications it still needs to be a manual process but hopefully that will be improved.

How do you reduce the bottleneck of hiring manager feedback?

Rebecca: We broke every stage down so we could see where the blockers were and which stages our managers were responsible for. Sometimes having that value-added data is key to showing where the challenges lie. When we showed that to our managers it really opened their eyes!

Giles: That’s a great idea. Your ATS should be able to break down your bottleneck into stages. In a more positive way, you can get more granular and use your hiring manager view to see where there’s churn, so you can see at what stages your candidates are dropping off, rather than just getting stuck! There’s a lot of work that goes into bringing the best new starts to your organisation, so knowing where you’re successful and where can be improved in a clear, reportable way, shows that it’s all worth it!

What recruitment initiative has worked well for you over the last year?

The panel used another mentimeter and asked attendees what’s been working for them. Here are just some of the answers!

• Reviewing pay regularly based on time-to-hire, geography etcetera
• Creating a central onboarding team
• Increased the refer-a-friend bonus for a bonus week
• Partnering with other providers for a recruitment open day
• Inviting unsuccessful applicants to the office for reapplication advice
• Values-based pre-screening prior to interview
• Keeping within National Living Wage
• Interview open days with offers on the day
• The power of social media

Giles: It’s easy to forget about social media, but if you include your employees in your marketing machine that can be massively impactful. Having colleagues and employees sharing jobs, appearing in videos talking about the organisation, sharing pictures of real people that the candidate will eventually work with.

Rebecca: There is no one silver bullet. The one thing that is really important is you do have a solid applicant tracking system so everything is in one place. Constantly review the content and language in there, the way you create your job adverts, the job descriptions you use, to make sure it keeps the human touch element.