If recruiting carers isn’t easy, could you be part of the problem?

Regardless of location, company size, or service offering, the most common carer recruitment issues I hear from care provider owners, directors and registered managers are:

• Care workers’ pay is too low compared to Lidl/other
• No one wants to work in care
• People are only applying to keep their benefits
• Everyone goes to our competitors because they pay more
• We can’t find the right people with the right values
• I don’t have enough time for recruitment

The reason I provocatively ask whether the recruitment challenge ‘could’ be your fault, is that in many cases, owners/directors and managers are contributing to recruitment failures themselves (not deliberately of course). I’d even go as far as to say that in 90%+ of cases, they’re unaware that their own company’s actions are wasting time, money and letting potentially great talent slip through their fingers.

Ouch.

Recruiting carers is an ongoing process, not a set of connected events

Recruitment isn’t something you can pick up and put down, do when you’ve got time in between other things. You can’t take shortcuts anymore; you need polished scripts, to track your numbers and high levels of drive and tenacity if you’re going to be successful. 

The challenge is, most care providers have no in-house recruiter, little time, systems, or effective recruitment process.

Have you selected someone in the business to be the ‘recruiter’?  Is this a stretched administrator who’s been tasked with the ‘on top’ job of recruiting? With no training or knowledge of current best practise, that would be challenging for anyone. More likely than not, they’ll not be enjoying the extra responsibility.

Even when a care provider is big enough to have an HR Manager, they’re unlikely to be trained recruiters. It takes a specific skillset nowadays and your HR Manager will have 101 other things to do on any given day too. Overseeing the recruitment process is one (important) thing, but calling 30 candidates on a Monday morning and chasing interview no-shows is something else, and they too are unlikely to relish the task.

You already know that the days when you could post an advert and be swamped with applications are long gone. Everyone is having to work a lot harder on team recruitment.

It’s time to adapt

Here are some key areas you may need to address in your current recruitment process.

• PROCESS AND DOCUMENTATION: When, where and how are you using application forms in your process? How onerous are they? How could they be more effective at converting browsers to applicants? How swiftly can you progress applicants, how can you speed things up?
• EASY APPLICANT CAPTURE: Is your Careers Page a live page with real-time vacancies? Can people apply directly?
• MANAGEMENT INFORMATION: Do you have an Applicant Tracking System, if you can’t measure your recruitment process, you can’t improve it.
• ACCOUNTABILITY: Who’s accountable for recruiting? Owners/Directors, is this really good use of your time? What could you delegate and to whom?
• EFFICIENCY:  How long is it taking you from advert placement to fill a role? How fast are you at compliance checking and onboarding? How many no-shows do you have and how will you reduce them?
• COST:  What is your cost per hire? Do you know?
• TIME:  Do you call every applicant three times, send them emails twice and text them twice before ruling them out? If not…why not?

Low recruitment success, high staff turnover, crippling recruitment agency fees (and single-digit growth in home care) chip away at your bottom line.

It’s not easy, but simple changes will transform your recruitment success.

You can make these changes yourself of course, however feel free to book a call, no strings attached, if there’s something specific I can help you with.

Scott