In today’s tight labor market, hiring is challenging for employers across virtually all industries. Securing top talent is especially difficult for healthcare organizations, as the demand for home healthcare, home care and long-term care services is increasing while few job seekers are interested in careers in this space.
Given the competitive hiring market, top applicants are taken off the market within 10 days of beginning the job search. Job applicants also have the flexibility to be more selective than ever before and expect a simple application and hiring process, and streamlined communication each step of the way. Once you capture the attention of job seekers and they apply to your open roles, you need to have an efficient hiring process in place and keep candidates engaged – or top talent won’t hesitate to apply elsewhere.
If you don’t have the systems in place to move the hiring process along quickly, your best applicants will likely accept roles from competitors with more streamlined hiring. Job seekers you miss in these circumstances are known as lost applicants. Avoiding these lost applicants can be as simple as managing your hiring process. How big of a problem is this for the healthcare industry? Hireology research shows that upwards of 10 percent of all healthcare applicants are lost simply due to an inefficient hiring process.
Manage Your Hiring Process and Drive Accountability
In the past year, Hireology customers in the healthcare space who follow an efficient hiring process have reduced the lost applicant count for caregivers and CNAs by 25 percent and 37 percent, respectively. Reducing the overall number of lost applicants will enable your home healthcare agency, home care agency or long-term care facility fill open roles sooner, saving your team time and money as a result.
The costs associated with lost applicants – and attracting new applicants – add up quickly. Costs can include investing more in recruitment marketing channels such as job boards, time spent on unqualified applicants and lost productivity due to open roles. Below, we’ve outlined how your team can reduce costs and drive efficiency through the right hiring process and accountability.
Review All Applicants
Are you confident that your team reviews every job seeker who applies to your open roles? Without visibility into this data, you’ll risk overlooking some applicants completely and take too long to review others. If this is the case, you’ll lose top talent either to competing job offers or because job seekers will get frustrated with waiting to hear from your team.
To hold your managers accountable to reviewing all applicants, you can tap into actionable data that measures the health of your hiring efforts. Hireology’s Q&A analytics solution, Insights, provides transparency into key questions related to hiring health. One of these questions is, “Is everyone following my hiring process?”
This Insight will flag if a specific manager or location isn’t following certain steps in the hiring process – such as reviewing applicants – enabling you to outline next steps for improvement and drive accountability.
If the data shows not all applicants are being reviewed by one of your managers or at a given location, one way to speed up initial applicant review time is by tapping into prescreen surveys. These surveys are sent to job seekers as soon as they apply and are automatically scored, helping your team save time by focusing only on the most qualified candidates. Reviewing all applicants in a timely manner is a key step in ensuring your home healthcare agency, home care agency or long-term care facility doesn’t end up with lost applicants.
Speed Up Hiring Steps
Just as it’s important to measure whether or not you’re reviewing all applicants, your team should also have an understanding of your total time to hire. One of Hireology’s Insights answers the question, “How fast am I hiring?” This Insight measures the length of your hiring process, compares it to industry benchmarks and flags where candidates are getting held up in the process. Armed with this data, you can outline actionable steps to speed up the hiring process and reduce lost applicants as a result.
If the data flags that your agency or facility is losing candidates because it takes too long to move forward with next steps after an interview, you can tap into interview guides, which enable you to run compliant, impactful interviews and automatically score interviews on an objective scale. As a result, you’ll get back to top candidates sooner – keeping them engaged.
Additional steps that might get held up in the hiring process include reference and background checks. To seamlessly run reference checks, candidates have the option to fill in their references’ contact information and surveys are automatically distributed to references. This saves your team from playing phone tag with potential references – which would ultimately slow down the hiring process. References can fill out the survey on their own time and automated reference checks take less than two days to complete, with an average response rate of 85 percent. And for background checks candidates submit the required personal information and the rest of the process is taken care of automatically.
Effectively managing your hiring process and driving accountability across managers and locations will enable you to speed up hiring without sacrificing candidate quality – ultimately helping your agency or facility staff for success while avoiding lost applicants.
Your people are your main source of competitive advantage and with the right team in place, you can drive productivity, profitability and improved care at your home healthcare agency, home care agency or long-term care facility. For additional best practices on making your hiring as efficient as possible, read our resource, “The Hiring Process Playbook.”
