Care & Nursing - Recruitment Software

&NURSING

RECRUITMENT SOFTWARE

The Recruiting Challenge for Care Providers

There has rarely been a more challenging time for care providers when it comes to recruiting new talent.

Care providers generally agree that Brexit, Covid and the cost of living crisis have all made recruiting harder. Covid has changed workforce attitudes and there is some evidence that some experienced carers retired earlier than previously planned. Now a cost of living crisis puts moderate salaries in the care sector under greater pressure than ever before.

All care leaders know these issues, but care providers must nevertheless sustain or grow their services despite difficult economic headwinds.

Recruiting able staff is the lifeblood of care.

According to Skills for Care, the turnover rate for directly employed staff across the care sector was 29% during 2022. That means a typical care provider must replace almost one third of its employees annually just to stand still. Attracting and carefully selecting capable people who stay in post longer is vital if care providers are to reduce staff turnover. As a supplement to the headline figure:

• Turnover rates amongst under 20s was 52.6%.

• Care workers with less than one year of experience show a much higher turnover rate (43.5%) when compared with care workers who have at least ten years of experience (15.3%).

Marginal differences in turnover rates are associated with factors like contract type. For example whether or not a contract is a zero-hours contract resulted in a 3.1% difference in overall staff turnover rates. The larger factors were:

• Leadership experience – Registered Managers in post for less than a year experienced turnover of 32.7% versus 23.2% for those in post for at least 20 years.

• Travel - Workers that travelled further were more likely to leave their role. Those travelling less than 1km evidenced a turnover of 30.7% versus 38.4% for those travelling more than 20km.

What can we take from these figures? Recruiting in the care sector is a constant challenge. Careful selection is important, but understanding that leadership experience and travel distances make a difference may help with attraction and retention.

The ongoing cost of recruiting stands out as a big concern for most care providers. Those costs depend upon external recruiting fees, jobsite fees, background check fees, employee time associated with recruiting and more. However, most seem to agree that external recruiting fees is the largest avoidable cost when recruiting. Whichever approach is used, recruiting budgets are under pressure.

Solve the recruiting challenge on a budget

Many care providers want to:

• improve retention

• reduce cost per hire

Thankfully, results are achievable with just some dedication and some time.

Staff Retention

Much has been written about staff retention. Employers experiment with wellbeing days, flexible benefit schemes, team building exercises and more. It’s all in the hope that these additions will make employees feel more valued. However, one of the most powerful tools for improving staff retention can also be the cheapest; improving internal communications. The consensus appears to be that a solid programme of internal communications can:

• Improve individual employee engagement and reduce resignations

• Improve staff productivity and happiness

• Help build and reinforce your company culture

What can you communicate to your company? Anything and everything. What leaders know isn’t necessarily common knowledge across the workforce. In regular internal communication, consider including:

• Your mission statement and what it means

• Bids, wins and even losses

• Growth targets, goals or realistic ambitions

• Organisation awards, accolades and membership changes

• Employee feedback and your reaction to any ideas

• Employee successes, promotions or inspirational stories

• Upcoming changes to technology or infrastructure and why it will help

• Profile or snapshot of a leadership team member

• Welcoming a new member of staff

• Feedback from service users

The more your employees know about your organisation, the more they can feel part of something bigger than just their own role. Now let’s get onto reducing cost per hire. Here are some simple cost-cutting objectives:

• Reduce or eliminate recruitment fees altogether

• Minimise recruiting administration

• Ensure least cost for job advertising fees

Reduce Cost per Hire

The biggest cost savings are made when you manage recruitment yourself. You can do that either with or without dedicated technology. An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is a recruiting system that helps employers manage recruitment centrally and save lots of time with recruiting administration. An ATS should pay for itself several times over but you can reduce cost per hire without dedicated recruitment software too. To do that, just follow some basic steps.

Read on to find out how.

Set up a central recruitment@ or hr@ mailbox for receipt of recruiting related emails. That can be shared between the people who are doing the recruiting administration work. This helps to separate and manage all recruiting related emails, including applications.

(CVMinder ATS can connect with your preferred mailbox)

2.

1. Write an advert that is optimised for discovery by jobseekers. This should also be easy to navigate and include all of the points that talented jobseekers wants to read. Don’t forget to mention experienced leadership and, if it’s a carer role, any consideration for maximising contact time / minimising travel time.

(CVMinder ATS comes with an analyser to help you optimise adverts)

Place the advert on an easily discovered careers page on your website. Make sure that the method of application is clear and that it comes off your website when it expires. Ideally you should have a web form to help with collecting the applicant details you need.

(CVMinder ATS does all this for you)

4.

3. Advertise your vacancy on free-to-post job boards that work. These might include Indeed and GOV Find a Job. Consider boosting your advert with some limited additional spend if your advert runs out of steam on job boards like Indeed. You can signpost your vacancy on social media too with a link to your website page. Check to make sure that the advert is the same as on your website. After finding an advert on a job board, some people like to find it on your website and apply there.

(CVMinder ATS can post your advert to job boards and your website automatically and comes with online applications as standard)

5.

When you receive applicants into your recruiting mailbox, review them quickly and respond to everyone. The most common complaint from jobseekers is that they never hear from employers. Engaging with applicants improves your employer brand, even if you are delivering bad news.

(CVMinder ATS helps with built in communication tools to make this quick and efficient)

6.

If you have collected only minimal information your best candidates may have to complete an additional application form. Make sure that this is easily accessible. There should be no barriers to accessing and completing your applications form. Forms created with products such as Microsoft Word can introduce problems for many applicants. Not everyone has access to Microsoft Office and many people use mobile devices to apply for vacancies. Explore other options for creating online forms.

(CVMinder ATS has flexible applications forms and journey management to make this easy)

7.

Don’t forget your GDPR obligations when collecting personal information. Make sure that you collect appropriate consents and that all personal information is stored securely.

(CVMinder ATS collects consents and keeps personal information secure)

Now that applicants can share their details securely you can get on with the job of shortlisting, interviewing and onboarding. Administering recruitment might be labour intensive, but it is manageable up to a point. The more vacancies and applicants you have the more you will benefit from an Applicant Tracking System like CVMinder ATS. With attractive, low-cost subscription options, it’s easy to see why. In summary, recruiting is challenging for care providers, but there are opportunities to improve outcomes and save costs. Recruit directly to avoid external fees and consider using an Applicant Tracking System like CVMinder ATS to improve efficiency and reduce costs further. When considering staff retention options, improving internal communications is a powerful way to educate and motivate your employees.

Easy steps to help you recruit internally

RECRUITING SUCCESSES

The Kent Autistic Trust

The Kent Autistic Trust was formed by parents of autistic children in 1985. It opened its first small living service in 1989 and has grown to provide supported living and day vocational services to over 100 people in Kent. The Trust offers year-round support to people in their own homes. It also offers single or shared accommodation to those who require it.

The Kent Autistic Trust is a professional and wellconsidered organisation with a solid track record of taking a person-centric approach. Some of its homes have been graded Outstanding by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) and that is a credit to the people the Trust chooses to hire.

Donna Newell is Head of HR. She and her team have many years of experience in both HR and recruitment and they are all too familiar with the challenges faced by care providers. Donna states “recruitment in adult social care sector has been one of our greatest challenges over the last few years with high staff turnover and vacancy rates. Although our turnover has remained low compared to the adult social care average, the scarcity of new workers since the height of the pandemic means we find ourselves competing with many other sectors for new staff.”

The Kent Autistic Trust concedes that recruiting is generally made difficult because of perceived low pay, training requirements and poor in-work support across adult social care. Most will agree that being responsible for some of the most vulnerable adults in society is a demanding job. Donna believes that care staff are expected to take on significant responsibilities when compared to front line staff in retail and warehousing for instance.

Donna says that “these challenges mean that we are now faced with recruiting in volume. Handling

a volume of vacancies means that our processes must be effective and streamlined. With 16 separate services across Kent, we also need to ensure recruitment is transparent and allows for multiple people to be involved in the recruitment process within our business.”

Donna goes on to say “CVMinder has proven to be an excellent management tool to ensure that we can track our vacancies and also that we are being responsive to applicants and the demands of our managers. Having a one stop shop ensures that we can post and update jobs at the touch of a button. Receiving all applications online and using filter questions enables our recruiters to shortlist batches of applicants swiftly. When we take to the road to hold open recruitment events, we use CVMinder to generate an applicant contact list. We use that to target applicants who have expressed interest in our company over a period of time in geographical area. This has been very successful and has considerably improved footfall at all our events.”

What is a product without service? Donna concludes “importantly, the CVMinder Team provides excellent support and a sounding board for our needs. I can say with certainty that they are the most responsive software provider we work with.”

Local Solutions

It is helping to create a society in which all people can live with dignity, lead fulfilled lives, and reach their potential. Local Solutions has remained innovative as it has grown and now offers services to include accommodation for young people and their families, anti-bullying initiatives, welfare guidance and support for unpaid carers.

Jack Morgan leads recruitment for Local Solutions. He knows a thing or two about the recruiting pressures in the care sector and current staffing issues across the UK. With 8 years of experience in care recruitment and 4 years of training / tutoring experience he has used a number of recruitment methods and systems. Using CVMinder has helped Local Solutions to recruit 77 care staff and 18 core staff members over the past year. That’s a great achievement for the team

and represents a significant cost saving when compared to using external recruiters.

Jack says that “CVMinder has made the process as smooth and as streamlined as possible. That’s is critical when recruiting in a demanding sector like care. It gives us central control of everything and the management information we generate from CVMinder has helped to improve our recruiting approach. Without CVMinder our recruiting costs would be much higher and good candidates would be lost in the administration clutter.”

It’s not only a good system for care providers. Jack says that “The CVMinder Team always listens to our ideas. They have included new features that have helped us and their support is excellent. I would highly recommend.”

Since 1974 Local Solutions has grown its services to support disadvantaged, excluded and vulnerable people across the Liverpool City Region. During 2007 it launched its first services in North Wales and now operates in Flintshire, Denbighshire and Conwy.

CVMinder ATS Overview

CVMinder is an applicant tracking system (ATS) designed to help care providers in the UK with their recruitment process. It is a cloud-based software system that enables care providers to manage their hiring process, from posting job vacancies to onboarding new employees.

Here are some of the features that make CVMinder ATS the right choice for care providers:

Automatic job posting:

CVMinder allows care providers to post their vacancies on their website and relevant job boards like Indeed, talent.com and GOV Find a Job. This helps to save time and to leverage useful free advertising options.

Advert analyser:

CVMinder helps care providers to check and optimise their adverts. This improves the chances that interested candidates can find and apply for their jobs.

Flexible job application forms: CVMinder allows care providers to configure application forms with questions that are relevant to their care roles. This helps to ensure that applicants have the necessary skills and experience to meet the requirements of the job.

Candidate screening:

CVMinder has a range of screening tools that enable care providers to filter out unsuitable candidates. This helps to save time and resources during the recruitment process.

Secure team sharing:

CVMinder helps care providers to share information and recruiting responsibilities across the organisation. This saves administration time and helps to track decisions without emailing and creating bespoke excel spreadsheets.

Compliance tracking:

CVMinder helps care providers to ensure that their recruitment process is compliant with relevant legislation, such as the Equality Act 2010 and the GDPR. It also allows care providers to store and track candidate data securely.

Communication tools: CVMinder has built-in communication tools that

enable care providers to keep candidates informed throughout the recruitment process. This helps to ensure that candidates are engaged and reduces the risk of them dropping out of the recruitment process.

Interview and offer management: CVMinder helps to schedule interviews, track confirmations and manage employment offers. This helps care providers to improve focus across numerous vacancies and reduce candidate loss.

Employment check management: CVMinder allows care providers to customise employment checklists and securely share responsibilities. This helps to audit all checks and ensure inspection readiness.

Reporting and analytics: CVMinder provides care providers with a range of reports and analytics that help them to track the effectiveness of their recruitment process. This helps care providers to identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions.

Overall, CVMinder ATS is a comprehensive recruitment software system that is tailored to the needs of care providers in the UK. Its flexible options, compliance tracking, and communication tools make it an ideal choice for care providers looking to streamline their recruitment process and attract the best people.

Some advanced CVMinder ATS features

With increasing interest in fair recruiting and a measured approach, growing care providers can add other CVMinder ATS options, including:

Candidate scoring:

CVMinder allows care providers to ask job-specific questions in their application form and then score the applicant’s answers. Some answers can be scored automatically by CVMinder. That helps care providers identify the most suitable candidates faster.

Self-Assessments:

The CVMinder Team can assist you to implement a self-assessment scheme for candidates. That helps care providers gain a deeper understanding of each candidate and improve candidate selection.

Candidate relevance:

CVMinder can automatically determine the relevance of each applicant. Pre-determined relevance can help care providers to reduce recruiting time.

Anonymization:

CVMinder can disguise the name, education dates, disability and other candidate information from your employees. That helps to reduce recruiting bias and improves fairness in recruiting.

CVMinder also support other features like Email integration. The CVMinder Team can advise you how to connect CVMinder ATS to your own email service like Microsoft Exchange. That helps to improve email delivery when you want to keep candidates updated.

CVMinder Benefits

CVMinder ATS helps any care provider recruit for themselves and avoid costly recruiting fees. Some of the benefits:

Less time recruiting

Personalised templates for all communication, automated jobsite posting and easy, secure sharing of candidate details all accelerate recruiting and selection.

Adverts work harder for you

A built in advert analyser helps improve the search ranking of your adverts so they work harder for care providers. That is particularly vital when free-to-post adverts can be outcompeted by paid or sponsored adverts.

Easier for applicants

Support for online applications reduces dependency on downloadable application forms. That makes it easier for people to apply for care roles on any device.

Stronger compliance

Built in GDPR compliance and support for securely collecting sensitive information, care providers can recruit more and shred less.

Better management decisions

Management reports give care providers a detailed view of where your best applicants see your adverts, your recruiting performance and more. That helps you to make data driven decisions that improve recruiting outcomes.

With low cost subscriptions available to care providers, CVMinder ATS saves time and money when recruiting.

Advertising advice

When care providers recruit for themselves they commonly advertise vacancies on their website, some social media accounts and jobsites. With so many jobsites available, there are literally hundreds of advertising options to choose from. Care providers commonly agree that Indeed is the dominant jobsite for the care workers. Other options include GOV Find a Job, TotalJobs, CVLibrary, Google for Jobs and perhaps carehome.co.uk / homecare. co.uk. Some job boards require a subscription, some provide free advertising options and others allow free

postings with optional sponsorship to gain higher ranking.

Advertising costs are also increasing. CVMinder ATS can help to keep those increases under control by tracking applicant sources and helping care providers to make informed advertising decisions. Most gain more from free advertising options than expected. Whichever option is preferred, it is important to make sure that adverts can be found and they attract the right people.

Here are 3 suggestions to help care providers improve their job adverts:

1. Optimisation – use a job title that jobseekers understand and repeat that job title several times throughout your advert. That helps jobsite search engines to increase an advert’s search ranking.

2. Job first – Always write about the job first. The opening paragraph should summarise the scope of the role as much as possible. This helps appropriate jobseekers to quickly develop interest and read on.

3. Readability – Section out your advert with headings to make it easier for jobseekers to scan and qualify the particulars of a vacancy. Also try to avoid using long words and long sentences. Making advert easier to read encourages people to take on the detail and that can improve applicant suitability.

CVMinder ATS comes with a built-in advert analyser. It helps care providers to prepare adverts in a way that achieves higher readership. Great adverts also help to improve applicant suitability.

CVMinder’s advert analyser helps to avoid common mistakes too. Mistakes can otherwise harm advert

ranking on job boards. Simple mistakes can include salary issues, advert duplication / similarity and including words or phrases that job boards don’t like. Avoiding these issues helps any care provider improve its success rate.

Implementing CVMinder ATS

CVMinder ATS is easy to implement and quick to learn. The CVMinder Team does most of the hard work for you. We’ll consult with you and take a look at your current application process with existing documentation. Then we’ll set about building your CVMinder system to meet your needs. It generally takes no more than 2 weeks to go live from the date of order.

During that time, you’ll be asked to pop a simple jobs widget on your website. We’ll style that remotely so it blends with the right colours and fonts on your site. Once that’s done, you’ll be ready to advertise vacancies on your website and support online

applications. We have existing customers with more than one jobs listing page and we can handle that too, even if those pages are on different websites. We’ll choose a date with you to take you through training. During training you’ll have a chance to review all the system settings and suggest any changes. We can make those changes on the fly and you will retain control of everything afterwards.

CVMinder ATS is hosted in the UK. That’s sometimes referred to as being hosted in the cloud, so there’s nothing to install. You just order the system, answer a few questions and set a date with us for training. It couldn’t be simpler.

CVMinder ATS

MAKES RECRUITING AND COMPLIANT EASY PROFESSIONAL FROM £79 + VAT PER MONTH

• Reduce advertising costs

• Flexible Application Forms

• Branded Applications

• Fast, fair shortlisting

• And so much more

Recruiting made easy with CVMinder ATS, the best Applicant Tracking System for HR and internal recruiters.

T: +44 (0) 1634 202 101 cvminder.co.uk