How this care charity has held back the recruitment crisis

1 - How has your time-to-hire improved?
2 - How did you get more candidates over the line?
3 - How have you positioned yourself as an employer of choice?
4 - What are you planning to do next?
5 - How would you describe your applicant tracking system?

Cornerstone – a leading, Scottish social care charity – has been one a client of our parent company - Jobtrain - for over a year and they are already seeing great results! We’ve partnered with Recruitment Advisors Kerri Bellingham & Denise Elder to upgrade their recruitment process from an outdated manual one to be fast, easy-to-use, and helps hire more frontline workers.

Cornerstone had 2 main goals when implementing our applicant tracking system:

• Make the recruitment process more efficient for colleagues and candidates
• Improve the candidate experience to reduce drop-off and time-to-hire

How has your time-to-hire improved since using Jobtrain?

Before Jobtrain we were averaging about 90 days from interview to start date!

We have not long had our training on the reporting functionality too which means that we’re now able to constantly monitor how we’re getting on. Since using Jobtrain, we’ve cut our time-to-hire to under 3 weeks – and that’s with us working as a smaller team as well!

Jobtrain has helped to automate a lot of the “busy work” which means we can give more time to guiding candidates through the full process. The human element is so important to us. We like that a self-service calendar is an option for us, but in line with our Values and the fact we’ve been able to free up time elsewhere, we prefer to call and schedule interviews with them there and then!

How has Jobtrain helped get more candidates over the line?

With our old system we didn’t have the opportunity to shortlist whilst the job was still being advertised – but with Jobtrain we can!

As a sector, most people know that social care is struggling to hire enough staff at the moment. A manager might have 3 or 4 vacancies per post, but they can set up notifications to reach out to great candidates as soon as they apply! It means we can be more proactive, more flexible, and fill our posts much quicker.

We’ve managed to reduce our drop-off rate because of this, too! Care is so competitive right now and is subject to a candidate-driven market. There are so many vacancies and so few candidates that by the time a candidate has completed your application form, they might have an interview for somewhere else before you get round to shortlisting at the end of advertising! We’ve restructured our recruitment philosophy for the better – and that’s because Jobtrain gives us the tools to do so.

How have you positioned yourself as an employer of choice?

The branded candidate portal that comes with Jobtrain has made a real difference. Being able to add images and videos to our adverts has increased our application rate. We’ve designed images that spotlight our benefits as well so, at a glance, candidates can see what makes us different!

What are you planning to do next?

We’re looking to keep improving our drop-off rate at the offer stage now. We love what Jobtrain’s Welcome Hub will be able to provide us from an onboarding standpoint. We really like how it keeps candidates warm during the offer process and whilst they’re going through disclosure/PVG and compliance checks, so we are going to create a Welcome Hub for each of our 10 branches and 8 business support functions! We want to make the most of welcoming new hires with contact details of their new team manager, answers to FAQs, how to get in touch with payroll, where to get lunch on their first day – we love the flexibility it brings!

What three words would you use to describe Jobtrain?

• Simple
• Easy-to-use
• User-friendly

Whatever you want it to do, you’re given the tools to make it happen! We worked with Jobtrain to design our own bolt-on to improve the PVG and compliance process. Sorry, that was a little more than three words!

Has anything exceeded your expectations with Jobtrain?

No – but that’s not a bad thing because you delivered exactly what you promised! Our first conversation with Alica was really impressive. She really knew her stuff when we were chatting about our current system and what we were looking for. It’s reliable, flexible, the support team is fantastic, we’re very happy. We scoped out a lot of applicant tracking systems and despite Jobtrain being so affordable, we think we’ve got so much more for our money!

Anything else you want to tell us?

Care is experiencing a recruitment crisis right now. Jobtrain has saved our lives!