How Home Health Care Providers Can Create A More Efficient Hiring Process

Making your next great new hire takes time. After all, you want to make sure you have the right people in place to represent your organization and provide stellar care to your clients. It’s important to be thorough—but when your hiring process is taking so long that you’re losing the best candidates along the way, it’s time to realize you’re process isn’t thorough, it’s inefficient.

Don’t miss out on top talent due to long delays and, ultimately, a poor candidate experience. Here are 8 key areas that can help home health care providers boost efficiencies and ultimately, gain a competitive edge when it comes to hiring.

1. Make Job Descriptions Clear & Concise, But Not Cold

Clear, concise job descriptions are essential to reducing the number of unqualified applicants coming in through your job postings, which can be time consuming for recruiters and hiring managers to sort through.

Provide a clear description of duties and expectations, as well as any certifications, prior experience or other relevant qualifications the ideal candidate should have.

But don’t make your job posts all business. Work to paint a picture of a day-in-the-life of someone not only in that specific role, but in that role at your organization, highlighting your stellar company culture.

Finally, look to technology to help automatically sort through candidates who may not be a fit by including pre-qualification questions at the start of your application. Talent acquisition software such as OnShift Employ makes it easy for recruiters and hiring managers to identify applications that have the highest potential to be your next great hire so they can reach out before someone else does.

2. Promote, Promote, Promote

Job promotion has gone digital. Take advantage of the many channels available to showcase your open positions and the benefits of your organization.

First, make sure you have a hiring software in place that supports automated job postings to popular job boards such as Indeed, Monster and more. But just don’t stop there.

Many home health care providers find having a dedicated careers page on Facebook, LinkedIn and even Twitter gives them an easy, effective way to promote job postings. It also gives potential applicants an inside look into what it’s like to be an employee at their organization.

With OnShift Employ, providers can quickly promote job openings to Facebook, LinkedIn and even Twitter, ensuring you get maximum eyes on all the great opportunities at your organization.

Ask your current employees to follow this page and encourage them to share job postings within their own personal networks. This can really help you cast a wide net in both a timely and cost-effective way.

3. Maintain A Steady Pipeline Of Candidates

Immediate hiring needs are not uncommon in home health, particularly as demand can shift at a moment's notice. That’s why it’s important to maintain a steady pipeline of candidates for key direct-care roles.

One of the best ways to achieve this is to maintain a private database of job candidates that you can quickly pull from for future openings. This is again where hiring software such as OnShift Employ can help. By securely storing applicant information, recruiters and hiring managers have an instant database of candidates they can instantly pull from. This simple step prevents recruiters from having to start the entire hiring process over again from scratch.

4. Pre-Define Your Hiring Process Across The Organization

Inefficient hiring is most often linked to an inefficient hiring process, or in some cases, no process at all. Work with those within your organization who are responsible for hiring and outline a specific process that everyone should follow. Outline key steps and provide guidance around when those steps should be taken. For example, replying to applications within 24 hours is a great first step in the process.

OnShift Employ customers use our talent acquisition software to create custom workflows and automate key steps in the hiring process. This, combined with robust hiring analytics, can help home health providers optimize their processes for even greater efficiencies.

5. Automate Candidate Communications

Playing phone tag with candidates is both frustrating and inefficient, but it’s important to be the first to connect with a candidate. Otherwise, you run the risk of losing them to the competition.

Talent acquisition software can allow home health providers to automate communications across key milestones in the hiring process. For example, OnShift Employ helps providers instantly communicate with new applicants via text message. These candidate messages can be customized to your organization and allow a fast, simple way for you to not only connect with candidates but provide next steps to reduce delays in the hiring process.

6. Adopt Structured Interviews

Structured interviews provide a standardized way to interview candidates that can be customized for each role and position. Each interviewee is asked the same key questions necessary to evaluate skills, qualifications and overall culture fit. Those answers are scored and then can be used to compare candidates and select the best fit.

OnShift’s hiring software allows you to store these structured interviews and scores right in the platform, giving everyone who is a part of the hiring process a centralized place to learn more about each interview conducted.

7. Automate Background & Drug Screenings

Critical background and drug screenings are some of the top places where even those with the most efficient hiring process can get held up. Fortunately, modern hiring software can help by automating this essential step, helping to reduce errors, maintain compliance and provide a competitive edge by further decreasing time-to-hire.

OnShift’s certified integration with industry-leading background screener First Advantage makes it easy for home health providers to implement screenings, while at the same time providing candidates with an easy-to-use, mobile-friendly experience. Pre-populated data from OnShift Employ makes it simple for candidates to complete the necessary paperwork and ensures no steps are missed in the screening process.

8. Move Onboarding Online

Paper applications are quickly becoming a thing of the past—and the same goes for onboarding. Today’s workforce is eager to get started in their new role. And let’s be honest, spending your first day in a room filling out paperwork isn’t the type of activity that really gets new hires energized.

By moving this key step in the onboarding process online, new hires can complete at least some of that essential paperwork digitally before they walk through the door on day one. OnShift’s hiring software for home health provides automated prompts to encourage candidates to quickly complete this paperwork, ensuring nothing is missed.

Then, on their first day, you can spend more time introducing them to your great culture and their new team members. With more and more studies correlating a positive onboarding experience and new hire retention, this simple step is one you can’t afford to skip.