Isabella Towers joined Jobtrain for some work experience recently. Part of that experience was researching the care sector, considering our applicant tracking system, and writing an article that explains why the two are a match made in heaven.
Assuming you can’t relate, put yourself in the shoes of someone with a family member in a care facility. If you can relate - keep your shoes on!
The loved one seems to be lacking some belongings. You enquire into the facility, and after an investigation from the staff, an employee seems to be the cause; they were pilfering. As anyone would, you act, maybe through legal recourse, removing your loved one from the facility, or leaving a scathing review.
An ATS, or an Applicant Tracking System, is a crucial piece of software to any business, but those in the care sector especially so. An ATS is a central digital hub that applicants’ information can be fed into (CVs and compliance documents for example.)
Applicant Tracking Systems can have a set of words to look out for to organise CVs based on how many desirable words they have in them. For example, if a job listing focuses around a position that requires medical training, the recruiters could get the ATS to search for words like “hospital”, or “First-Aid course”, and applicants with those words in their forms would be sorted together in order to make it easier for the recruiters to pursue applicants they think will be best suited to the role.
The ATS can also store compliance documents, allowing employers to ensure that any applicants being advanced through the hiring process fit the requirements for who can work in the position. This streamlines the recruitment process and ensures that it is easy to find applicants who fit the criteria well, which gives the hiring managers less time administrating, and more time interviewing – and an ATS also keeps track of interview slots, keeping them all in one convenient place.
Filtering – when words are filtered to quickly arrange skills, applicants can be arranged into groups, sent to interview without the hirers having to sift through every less desirable application, allowing more time to go into the important face-to-face part of the hiring process.
DBS checks – DBS checks are more colloquially known as background checks. They are carried out by the Disclosure and Barring System. DBS checks are incredibly important for jobs involving vulnerable people, like most all careers in the care sector. They allow potential employers to see if an applicant has a criminal record that they may need to know about, due to possible relevance to the role. This ensures safety and disclosure to the people being taken care of, as well as their families who want to know they’re in good hands. A business could possibly be found liable, if they did not perform the necessary background checks to guarantee a clients’ safety, in the case that an employee who should have been excluded from the job due to a criminal record is hired and subsequently violates a rule of the care facility or the law.
Manual applicant tracking can be more comprehensive in the case that an employer is not sure they can add every word they want to look out for into the filtering system, since an ATS needs to be told directly. However, an ATS can do hours of work looking through data in just a few moments. In any business, reducing valuable time spent on work so dramatically can reduce cost just as much.
Typical ROI in the first year of usage shows reduced agency spend, and faster onboarding. And in more of the long term, an ATS can save millions on compliance fines. If a business is found to have not done the necessary checks, and a violation of regulations or legal guidelines followed, they can be fined between a hundred pounds and millions of pounds. An ATS can prevent this; it can easily automate reminders for the strict DBS and training checks that care homes must undergo. It can also be a more secure, palatable substitute for Excel spreadsheet hiring, which often breaches GDPR.
With demand for care talent rising, forecasts suggest 1.22 million care workers will be needed between 2016 and 2036, and 1.84 million posts in adult social care in England in 2023/24, including 131,000 vacancies despite a fall of 22,000 year on year, competition is fierce.
Our applicant tracking system gives your care home a branded careers website tailored to you and a smoother way to engage candidates from first click to first shift. We help you reach candidates everywhere through comprehensive free advertising across channels like Indeed and Google for Jobs, a job listing distribution platform and integrated programmatic advertising that puts the right roles in front of the right people.
Crucially, recruitment and onboarding work as one: as Active Care Group told us;
Choose our ATS to cut admin, fill roles faster and deliver a candidate experience that reflects the quality of your care.
Jobtrain’s ATS can make your recruitment process so much simpler, and free up the skilled workers of your company to take care of important tasks, while the ATS does the simple scouring that clogs a company’s workflow.