Filling long-term care jobs can be challenging in today’s tight labor market – and in many cases, it takes long-term care facilities longer than expected to hire qualified talent. Recent data found that, on average, long-term care jobs are open for 38 days. But another study found that top job seekers are off the market within 10 days of starting their job search – meaning your long-term care facility needs to act quickly or risk losing out on top talent.
To save time and money while filling your long-term care jobs with quality employees, you need an efficient recruitment marketing and hiring strategy in place. Below, we’ve outlined several tips you can implement at your long-term care facility.
Focus on Your Long-Term Care Facility Employment Brand and Career Site
Even at a time of low unemployment like we’re experiencing now, most employees are always on the lookout for new job opportunities. According to data from LinkedIn, 90 percent of U.S. employees would be open to new job opportunities. But since most job seekers are already employed, they have the opportunity and flexibility to be more selective when considering career moves.
In today’s highly competitive hiring market, your long-term care facility needs to sell quality talent on the opportunity joining your team presents. This goes above and beyond simply salary, as top talent today is looking for far more than money. To effectively fill your long-term care jobs, you need a compelling answer to the “What’s in it for me?” question. This can be made possible through a strong employment brand and career site.
About 70 percent of job seekers would reject a job offer from an organization with a bad employment brand. Your employment brand can help your long-term care facility stand out from other employers and attract top candidates no matter the economic conditions. Hireology data found that a strong employment brand leads to a 10x boost in applicant-to-hire conversion. And building your best team will ultimately lead to increased efficiency, productivity and revenue.
To get job seekers excited to join your team, develop a strong employment brand that encourages job seekers to build long-term careers at your long-term care facility. Your employment brand should include strong, SEO-friendly job descriptions, a compelling career site, defined career paths across departments, employee testimonials, a comprehensive list of benefits and continuous job openings. By building and maintaining a strong employment brand and career site, you can fill your long-term care jobs with engaged applicants who are motivated to grow their careers with your team.
Follow a Standardized Hiring Process to Fill Long-Term Care Jobs
HR leaders across industries spend about 12 hours each week – nearly one-third of a standard 40-hour work week – on manual tasks such as answering calls, responding to emails and updating spreadsheets. But spending this much time on administrative tasks ultimately slows down the hiring process, and takes time away from engaging with candidates and employees
Leverage Prescreen Surveys
One of the most time consuming tasks for any hiring manager is reviewing job applicants. At your long-term care facility, you might read through every single applicant that comes in – even if they aren’t qualified for the open role. Not only does this take a lot of time out of your day, but it will also slow down the hiring process, leading to a poor candidate experience. In fact, Hireology data found that the average hiring manager takes 10 days to review and respond to job applicants – and during this waiting period, top talent can quickly lose interest in your open roles.
By partnering with an applicant tracking system and recruitment CRM platform you can more efficiently fill your long-term care jobs and you can make the entire hiring process easier on your team.
To kick off an efficient, standardized hiring process, prescreen surveys can be automatically sent to potential candidates as soon as they apply, and will only take a few minutes for each candidate to complete. And once complete, these surveys are automatically scored, immediately eliminating applicants who aren’t a fit so your team only dedicates time and resources to the most qualified candidates.
Communicate via Candidate Text Messaging
Once you have qualified candidates in the pipeline at your long-term care facility, you’ll want your candidate communication to be as streamlined as possible throughout the hiring process. , But candidate communication can lead to a game of phone tag or overlooked email if you’re not tapping into the right recruitment technology. Rather than using traditional communication methods like phone or email, consider text messaging with candidates.
Nearly all job seekers today – 90 percent – would be open to interacting via text messaging throughout the hiring process. Your long-term care facility can leverage text messaging to schedule interviews, share directions to your workplace, follow up with feedback post-interview and remind candidates of actions they need to take – such as completing providing background check information. Not only does text messaging improve candidate engagement, but Hireology data found that candidate text messaging can save up to eight days on your total time to hire – helping you get qualified candidates on board sooner.
Run Impactful Interviews
The interview process is one of the most critical steps when it comes to filling your long-term care jobs – and it’s important to ensure your interviews are consistent. Instead of having your team run interviews off-the-cuff and take handwritten notes that might be difficult to consolidate when it comes time for feedback, your long-term care facility can benefit from leveraging interview guides that are automatically scored post-interview. This enables you to run compliant, impactful interviews and ensure you’re moving forward with the best possible candidates. Centralized interview feedback and scoring also ensures you get back to candidates sooner rather than later with next steps – keeping top talent engaged.
Complete Reference and Background Checks
At your long-term care facility, your employees have patients’ lives in their hands, so before extending offers job offers, you should make sure to complete reference and background checks. To complete reference checks efficiently, you can leverage hiring technology that enables candidates to simply fill in their references’ contact information, automatically sending out reference surveys – rather than playing phone tag with references. 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, with the rest of the process being automated.
By focusing on your employer brand and following an efficient hiring process, you can get top talent excited about applying to your long-term care jobs and keep them engaged throughout the hiring process. For additional tips on effective candidate communication throughout the hiring process, read our resource, “The Hireology Candidate Engagement Playbook.”
