Helping care providers win in recruitment

Helping care providers win in recruitment

There has never been a more challenging time to recruit in the care sector, but help may be at hand. Care England recently talked to James Lyner, Head of Care at automation company Plainly.com, about how it is helping care providers solve their recruitment challenges. More information at plainly.com/solutions/care-worker-onboarding.

What do you see as the main recruitment challenges for care providers? 

In my view, two things have come together to create the ‘perfect recruitment storm’ for care providers: country-wide labour shortages have created significantly increased competition for candidates, whilst increased and rapidly-changing regulation has compounded the problem. It takes longer to fill care roles while additional checks and paperwork are carried out, and it’s easier for applicants to get jobs outside the sector as they are not subject to the same paperwork.

This results in increased agency/temporary staff costs in the short term, causing financial strain and affecting margins. Occupancy rates will therefore decline in the longer term as staffing numbers cannot be maintained.

OK, how can you help with this?

Looking at the regulation problem first, many care providers still conduct part or all of their employee onboarding manually. This can be incredibly slow, inefficient and prone to error. Candidates often have a poor hiring experience, and providers risk making unsafe hires. The more checks and admin steps that have to be done and the longer each process takes, the greater the chance of errors and candidates dropping out.

With our solution, employee-onboarding steps happen very quickly, many without any staff involvement at all. On Plainly, it only takes about 8 seconds to prepare and send out an Offer Pack, for example. As everything happens automatically, there is little-to-no scope for human error, resulting in safer hires. When there are regulation changes – for example, the rollback from mandatory vaccination – you can update everything centrally, and it’s instantly applied throughout your organisation. This makes changes to processes and documentation incredibly easy to manage.

We can’t claim to cure what is a societal problem in relation to labour shortages. However, we can make you more likely to hire the available candidates. By making your recruiting process easier, faster and smarter compared with other care providers, you significantly increase the chances of hiring a candidate over a competitor. Using Plainly, you can expect to see attrition rates drop and time-to-hire greatly improve.

Many in the care sector are in crisis mode. Now is surely not the time to be bringing in a new piece of software?

Abraham Lincoln is quoted as saying, “If I had five minutes to chop down a tree, I’d spend the first three sharpening my axe.” Whether or not he said this, the point is a good one – now is definitely the time for care providers to ‘sharpen the axe’ on recruitment. They cannot hope to succeed unless they do.

The good news is that it is incredibly easy to roll out. You can have a fully-bespoke, automated solution built, tested and deployed in as little as three weeks. You can then focus on filling vacant roles much faster and safer than before.

To get a free demo of Plainly.com’s automated employee-onboarding, contact James Paterson james.paterson@plainly.com.

Find out about all Plainly’s care-specific solutions at: https://plainly.com/