Community Integrated Care

To underpin becoming the UK’s leading health and social care charity was the need for an effective recruitment strategy. A strategy that could address the turbulent times of the industry, future needs of the organisation, and provide access to real-time performance data to deliver insight to understand, measure and monitor recruitment performance to set targets and be an employer of choice.

Recruitment challenges

The drivers for the initiative were in abundance. There was no automated recruitment system in place - just excel spreadsheets, no performance data and growing recruitment challenges for the social care sector. The inconsistency in how recruitment was handled across the stages and regions was apparent. There was no ability to formally notify candidates of receipt or outcome of application, delays with hiring managers shortlisting and selecting candidates, often because of the process; CV’s would be sent across by email with no ability to measure and monitor activity and progress. Candidate attraction was an issue, as was retention, with many leaving 3 months after joining. It was realised that improving the candidate experience, being transparent about the roles and the skills required would help with retention and attracting the right talent.

Re-thinking the recruitment model

Community Integrated Care re-thought the entire recruitment model, based on a framework to improve and automate a labour intensive, manual process and put values and behaviours at the core. The model was applied to all areas of recruitment including candidate attraction, candidate engagement, hiring manager engagement, talent management and onboarding.

The Recruitment Team mapped out what the process should be based on addressing known issues and bottlenecks across the candidate touchpoints and refined this to develop tasks and expectations for each step, SLA’s and the identified process owner at each stage. Alongside this, focus groups were held with each region to understand the right level of support required for hiring managers and to identify responsibilities across the process. This was then used to define the automation project through the introduction of an e-recruitment platform and handling recruitment regionally rather than centrally.

Key deliverables were to:

• Reduce the dependency on the recruitment function and empower regional hiring managers to manage the recruitment process for their business areas.
• Improve the candidate experience to alleviate the issues in placing candidates and increasing the application to offer conversion ratio.
• Automate the admin and manual process with an ATS and e-recruitment platform, as managing in Excel was not providing fact-based visibility.
• Monitor and improve key metrics to speed up the process

Implementing the solution

The Eploy implementation team worked alongside Community Integrated Care to implement the Eploy e-recruitment software platform and dedicated portals for candidates and hiring managers. This provided the Recruitment Team and approximately 360 Community Integrated Care hiring managers with the autonomy and tools to address the recruitment challenges being experienced in a consistent way to support the future strategy. It is now facilitating connectivity of the teams with a transparent view of accountability and a purpose to the role each collectively play.

In line with the company EVP, candidate messaging was updated to improve the relevance and engagement of candidates. Advert templates were redesigned to provide job seekers with balanced and consistent representation of what is required and highlight company benefits. The templates also allow hiring managers to incorporate information about each requirement so that adverts can be personalised and provide useful information about the home, people supported and their interests.

“From a candidate perspective we set out to achieve a smooth candidate experience that promoted positive engagement from the initial visit to our website, applying for a role to joining the team and beyond. Candidates should be able find the roles they were looking for, understand the diverse opportunities, be engaged with the brand and be kept informed throughout the recruitment process in a consistent and timely way. Using Eploy’s onboarding portal we have also been able to positively influence this part of the candidate’s journey and help colleagues readiness for work as well as understanding our values which are so important to us”. Richard Farrall, Recruitment Manager, Community Integrated Care

The candidate experience is now slick and communicates the importance of the company values. As well as the automation improvements Eploy is providing, such as access to a talent pool where candidates can be invited to re-apply and automating onboarding with electronic signatures that cut down on paper chasing; the candidate experience has a human touch through the onboarding phone call, welcome to the team postcard and a welcome video from the CEO.

Hiring managers across the operational divisions were engaged through briefing sessions to share what the project would deliver and embrace the new way of working. The sessions were supported with online sessions and training videos.

Results

The project and implementation of Eploy introduced a consistent process across every stage of the recruitment journey, from vacancy requisition, offer and rejection, offer management, onboarding and pre-induction. 

“The candidate experience now communicates our brand values and what it means to work with us. The careers site converts visitors to candidates through engaging layout and use of video showing our people and the role they play in a range of careers. Through the implementation of Eploy and an accountable process with SLA’s, we are creating a positive experience through relevant, on brand and timely communication which reduces our time to hire, previously a major issue. The length of time to conduct the required pre-employment checks and reference collection is notoriously long in the industry. We now have a realistic 9 week period from application to placement and are achieving this which is an improvement from an estimated 14 weeks prior to the project.”

The dedicated careers area uses Eploy’s candidate portal to provide candidates with everything they need to apply and start their career at Community Integrated Care. From job search by location, so candidates can search for vacancies based on location and distance to travel, often a consideration for lower paid care roles, candidates can now register online, set job alert preferences and keep track of their application status. The online registration has replaced CV’s and job enquiries coming into an email inbox which was impossible to manage at scale and provided very little data. Candidates can now select their own interview slots, manage their offers online with e-signatures and acceptance.

Through Eploy, the recruitment workflow process identifies steps to formally notify candidates of receipt or outcome of application, chase outstanding references and complete all pre-employment checks. The recruitment management information available through the Eploy dashboards forms part of the Exec KPI’s that are being used to review and drive performance for further efficiencies. Already the time to onboard has reduced from 55 days to currently 36 days and the team all possible through the rethinking of and delivery of the recruitment model.

Eploy Star badges have been introduced to recognise hiring managers who have embraced the new way of working and their approach to candidate engagement and smoother recruitment.

Community Integrated Care are also using Eploy to optimise their employee referral scheme, which is the most successful source of candidates, by encourage new hires to refer colleagues and friends as part of the onboarding process.

Chris Bogh, CTO at Eploy commented “Seeing the proactive approach the team at Community Integrated Care have taken to revolutionise their recruitment strategy demonstrates what can be achieved with the right strategy and supporting technology. We are proud of the flexibility of Eploy’s recruitment technology to deliver a solution that is delivering across the recruitment journey.”