Social care recruitment – can technology innovations help tackle the crisis?

For those of us who are involved in recruitment in care, this stat is not surprising news. High vacancy rates and poor staff retention are long standing headaches. Putting in place a creative, flexible and long term strategy to attract and recruit the right people is the challenge we are facing – and we are learning as we go.

Recruiters in the industry will, no doubt, welcome the report’s recommendation to assess national and local initiatives to support recruitment, and increase both the impact and take up of tactics that get the right results.

Early adopters of recruitment innovation

Information and advice on how to find and keep workers is detailed by Skills for Care. Visit the recruitment and retention section of their website for more information.

With so many recruitment innovations out there, is now a good time to take a closer look at this guidance with recruitment innovation in mind?

This question sparked an office debate at Jobtrain HQ on how adopting new technology could be part of the solution.

Attracting more candidates – will your voice make the candidate’s chair turn?

70% of active job seekers apply for up to 5 new jobs every week (Jobsite 2017)

Skills for Care say reaching a diverse pool of potential recruits with the right values and behaviours for a career in care is just one way to tackle the problem.

How do we attract the attention of the right candidates? Who are they? One of the key components here is to make sure your company values are clearly represented in the job advert. To attract care workers, please don’t try and present your organisation like Google or Sky might. Your organisation will have its own values and that’s what you want candidates to buy into. So, make your adverts reflect that message – and equally make sure your recruitment technology supports it as well.

Invest in creative, engaging and stand-out ways of grabbing the attention of the right candidates to keep them engaged throughout the recruitment process.

Attracting the best care workers

Read a job description or watch a video – which would you choose?

A picture paints a thousand words. Don’t be afraid to use an image in your job advert. Research tells us that candidates are 25% more likely to respond to an advert that includes an image. We all look to pictures before words on a page and this is something that at Jobtrain we are heavily focused on.

It is one thing to simply make this a recommendation, but the key step is making it easy for care organisations to include such images when they want to advertise a job. This is now a firm part of the ‘arsenal’ of recruiters who are using Jobtrain and it’s really exciting how you can now engage with candidates throughout their entire recruitment journey in glorious multi media.

When searching for people with the right values and behaviours, making the most of interactive media such as including video scenarios within online assessments is vital. This type of assessment allows candidates to watch a short video and be asked how they would respond to the specific scenarios, with their response being automatically scored and compared to other candidates.

Make the most of your candidate’s social networks. Heineken your reach!

Make it easy for candidates to share jobs across social media groups. It shares messages deeper into community networks in a way that job adverts simply cannot. In one click, candidates and employees can share careers content, successes and achievements with their friends, family and colleagues. This is the ‘Heineken’ of recruitment initiatives, reaching parts other activities can’t reach.

Why is this so important? Because the most successful hires (i.e. those people who stay longest with an organisation) are more often than not recruited via a recommendation. It’s arguably because the people recommended already have the same qualities and values that you operate with.

Create an engaging interviewing and onboarding experience for candidates

Now we’ve reached a wider pool of candidates, selecting those with realistic expectations about a career in the care sector is another factor in improving retention.

When we want to reduce resource for interviewing, identify the best matches quickly and reduce time to hire technology comes into its own. To shortlist candidates with the right qualities and values, recruiters must embrace innovation – from mastering pre-assessments, online behavioural testing to video interviewing. The goal? To make sure candidates always feel valued throughout the process.

11% of all offers are rejected after acceptance

Why? Because all too often there is a ‘vacuum’ created after the candidate accepts the offer. No-one engages with them in the same fashion. They are not ‘welcomed’ in advance of joining. That’s why Jobtrain are enhancing the whole onboarding process by creating ‘Green Room’ onboarding functionality that allows candidates to connect to their line manager, to receive updates and to complete all the necessary pre-employment forms in a more personal and engaged fashion.

Computer says ‘no’ is definitely not the way to go.

With all these new recruitment tools to consider, the discussion at Jobtrain HQ ended, thankfully, with a brew and agreement on one thing – let’s not lose sight of the basics!

What are those basics? Well, our own mission statement states that we:

…keep people at the heart of the recruitment process

Never is this more important than in the care sector. We believe in living the values not in just stating them on paper.

Giving candidates a wonderful recruitment experience, whether they are offered the job or not, is the cornerstone of all recruitment marketing.

Keeping candidates engaged with personalised and regular updates widens our referral network and avoids the fall-out from a negative candidate experience. We agreed that a good applicant tracking system will cover these basics for us already.

With the recruitment and retention challenges set to continue in the care sector, now might be the time to explore how features such as video interviewing and online testing can be embraced and set a new direction for the future.