Quality Over Quantity: How To Quickly Identify Top Candidates In Home Health

An influx in demand, paired with the recent displacement of millions of workers due to the pandemic, has led to an increase in applications among home health and home care providers. And while this rise in interest is a welcomed relief for an industry that has struggled to maintain a steady pipeline of candidates in the not so recent past, providers often find they don’t have a hiring process in place to help them sort through the volume and focus on those most qualified for the job.

Here are a few key strategies to help you cut through the noise so you can focus on quality, not just quantity, and ensure you don’t miss out on top candidates.

Make Sure Your Job Descriptions Are Clear

Many home health care providers are seeing an increase in applications coming from those who are not only new to home health, but the healthcare industry as a whole. And they may come in with pre-conceived notions as to the requirements needed for certain roles. To avoid influxes of less than qualified candidates, make sure your job descriptions outline clear role requirements, as well as role responsibilities.

The most impactful job descriptions paint a clear day-in-the-life picture for candidates and help them self-assess their ability to be successful in that position. Additionally, they clearly outline any educational or hard skill requirements a candidate must have in order to be considered. This, combined with a vivid description of your culture and mission, will drive quality candidates, not just quantity.

Encourage Referrals

The healthcare industry is a surprisingly small community. And it’s something home health care providers can and should take advantage of when recruiting for open positions! Continuously reach out to your top employees to let them know what roles you are hiring for and encourage them to refer those they feel would be a good fit.

Employee referrals not only help recruiters and hiring managers save time in their search, but come with a level of confidence that they're likely the right fit for the job.

Ask The Right Questions

Don’t save all your questions for the first phone screening or interview. Starting every application with a few key qualifying questions can help you automatically weed out those who may not be a fit for the position.

The questions you ask should vary by the position but may include things like required certifications, licensures, job history, education, job experience etc. Your application might even include personality or behavioral traits that you feel are essential for someone in that specific role.

Keep these questions simple, yet make sure they offer the right information that allows for you and your hiring managers to quickly filter out applicants who just aren’t a fit based on a few pieces of key, basic information.

Add Behavioral Assessments To Your Process

Behavioral assessments are an easy way to better understand and even predict the actions an applicant would take in order to better determine whether or not they’d be a fit for your organization, the needs of your clients, as well as the position for which they are applying.

OnShift Employ includes a library of assessments based on the many common positions home health and home care organizations are hiring. With these assessments in place, you can ensure you’re not only interviewing the right candidates, but hiring someone that is likely to be a fit in the long-term. It can also help you further refine your applicant pool so you can focus on your highest quality applicants.

Implement Structured Interviews

Taking the steps above can help you quickly determine which candidates you want to bring in to an interview. But the search for quality candidates doesn’t stop there. Make sure your interview process is structured in a way that is not only efficient in helping you interview candidates, but effective in helping you qualify their fit for the position.

Structured interviews ensure every hiring manager asks the same questions to every candidate. While the questions asked should vary by role, this level of consistency can help managers quickly score candidate responses and provide clear insights into which candidates should be either brought in for an additional interview or, in some cases, offered the position.

OnShift Employ, our talent acquisition software, allows you to create and score these structured interviews, while also providing a centralized place to store any additional candidate notes that may be relevant when it comes to the decision of whether or not to extend an offer.

Automate Background Checks

Once you’ve found the right candidate, it’s vital that home health care providers do their due diligence by performing a comprehensive background check. OnShift Employ helps providers automate this process through our integration with First Advantage, a global leader in background check and drug screening solutions.

Having this type of integration with your talent acquisition software can help save time, improve time-to-hire and create a streamlined experience for candidates. It also ensures you have the vital information you need to make informed hiring decisions.

Post On The Right Job Boards

As you make new hires, be mindful of the path they took to get there. While it’s important to cast a wide net when it comes to finding candidates, doing so can jeopardize quality by giving you an overwhelming quantity of applications.

Make sure you have the insights you need to not only understand where applications are coming from, but which job boards are actually helping to bring you your next top hires. OnShift Employ comes standard with 60+ key reports to help you get deeper insights into your hiring activities so you can optimize your hiring process over time.

Communicate Always & Often

As you find potential candidates, make sure you are reaching out to them right away to set up an interview. Many job seekers apply for multiple jobs at once with multiple organizations. And in general, they are more likely to accept a job with the organization that reaches out to them first.

Talent acquisition software can help automate these communications and reaching out to applicants to schedule an interview in a timely manner. It can also help keep candidates engaged throughout the hiring process, ensuring they are never left in the dark regarding the status of their application or their potential for receiving an offer.