When recruitment is an ongoing year-round process you need the kind of specialist software to take the job on!
Recruitment can be difficult in any industry: advertising, sifting through reams of CVs, interviewing, testing, interviewing again, collecting the necessary paperwork and bringing them onboard and a certain amount of training for their new post. It is something you simply must get right, otherwise you will be starting the whole process again.
Now spare a thought for recruiters in the Care Sector – you thought recruitment for your industry was difficult? Imagine the difficulties they face with such a high turnover of staff that recruitment is a permanent fixture of their routine. Let’s take a closer look at the challenges they face and suggest a solution to their recruitment woes.
Candidate Attraction
As we discussed in an earlier article, the Care Sector has its image problems. Myths have grown up that if you get a job in care then you will spend every day up to your elbows in old people’s waste. More needs to be done to dispel these myths, especially among the younger generations who don’t see much in the way of kudos in this line of work. Unfortunately, in this digital age where vacuous poseurs are idolised and there is a distinct lack of positive role models, image is everything.
The vast majority of people working as carers are middle-aged women, so the image of a career in the care industry needs a makeover to appeal to the young. The positive points – such as above average pay, training towards qualifications, a variety of opportunities in different situations and with different groups of vulnerable people of all ages (not just in caring for the elderly), chances of career progression and good old-fashioned job satisfaction just from knowing you’ve helped someone – need to be highlighted.
Processing Applicants
This is an industry where there is, and always has been, a high turnover of staff. This means, as mentioned above, recruitment is an on-going process with people coming and going almost like it’s a revolving door! For the HR department of a larger care company, and you must especially feel for the lone administrator/HR person in charge of recruitment for the smaller company, processing applicants is not something that takes place when the company decides they need one or two warm bodies coming in, it is an everyday occurrence.
They cannot afford to be lackadaisical, gaps that appear need to be filled quickly otherwise vulnerable people will go without care and that is something that must not be allowed to happen. Applications need to be processed quickly and efficiently and communication needs to be clear and concise throughout among all stakeholders.
Collecting Documents
Not everyone applying for these posts will have a professional CV, or evidence of qualifications, or whatever other documents you may need. Then, of course, we are looking at the amount of people you are dealing with and the regularity in which you will be requesting and collating documents. You need to keep track of them all and it is not going to be easy. You need to know who has handed in what and where they are and who has documents missing. You cannot lose track of them and you can never mix them up with other candidates’ files.
Processing DBS
With the sort of vulnerable people of all ages that the Care Sector comes into contact with and provides care for, the Disclosure and Barring Service is invaluable. You cannot take the chance that the wrong sort of person sneaks in, and there are far too many out there who harbour bad intentions. All candidates who apply for this line of work need to be properly screened to ensure they are entirely suitable.
Once again you run in to the problems caused by having a high staff turnover. As every single person applying for a job in the sector needs to undergo these DBS checks, HR will be inundated with the documentation. All of this needs to be collected, processed and stored efficiently to ensure everyone is suitable for the position they take up. The consequences of getting this wrong do not bear thinking about.
On-Boarding Candidates
What? You thought you could just offer them the job, they come in and start work? You can just sit back and put your feet up? No, this is the hard bit. You have successful candidates coming in all of the time; you are going to need to produce forms for them to fill in, contracts, bundles of information in the welcome pack and a dozen other bits and pieces of paperwork that you need to produce for each and every one of them. This isn’t just for when they first arrive either, you will be producing documents and letters for them throughout their length of service. Oh, and that revolving door we mentioned? You will need to produce documents to wave them goodbye.
The challenges are laid out for you, now what about the solutions we promised? Well, it’s more like one solution to all of these challenges listed above. The solution? Recruitive.
We will design and build a recruitment website that is second to none and integrate the most advanced recruitment software available with its award-winning Applicant Tracking System (ATS) that will make everything we’ve discussed much less of a challenge. Our package includes:
- Attractive Engaging Mobile Careers Site
- Automated online ATS
- Data and document collection from mobile
- Integration with DBS providers
- Integration with Medigold for health checks
- Dedicated area to share and collate candidate info
- Onboarding system enabling:
- creation of document and letter templates
- automated reference requests
- contract generation
- …and much more
Here’s a glowing review from Dimensions, just one of clients in the Care Sector:
“Ah it’s hard to remember because we have been with you a long time now. The process was much more clunky in our old ATS. In Recruitive the process is a lot more automated which saves the recruiters and administrators a lot of time.
The onboarding side of things is a million times better than what we had before – the candidate portal with the timeline and key information area is great engagement for the candidates and the onboarding checklist which links to the onboarding wheel gives a superior candidate experience and more engagement with the candidate as they can see how far along they are in the process.
The system is easy to use and looks nice. The amount of features we have in it is far superior to our old system and I love that it is so configurable. I am amazed at the talents your engineers have!”
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