Linden’s recruitment revamp
FROM OCTOBER 2014’s RECRUITER MAGAZINE
Faced with high attrition rates and a “fragmented” hiring process, staffing agency Allied Healthcare’s new interim head of recruitment Mark Linden has set about redesigning everything recruitment-related within the company.
A new office, a new team of professional recruiters, a new applicant tracking system (ATS) and a training system for new employees are some of his introductions. It is hoped the changes will streamline the recruitment process, remove some “administration burden”, and reduce attrition rates.
The agency has 18,000 workers on the books and recruits 7,000 annually, but it is done in a “disjointed way,” with each of the 130 branches responsible for recruiting its own staff, he said.
There are about 95 ‘recruiters’, he said, but they are not necessarily professional recruiters; many are former carers themselves who then fell into hiring roles.
But Linden is, in his own words, “stripping that function out” and centralising it, as well as onboarding operations in a new Stafford, West Midlands office, central to the company’s UK-wide operations.
“We have to get back to the personal side of things … think about how I would want that person to be with my grandmother.”
In addition to the overhaul of recruitment, the company is investing in a training academy for all carers. Linden explained that they will all be put through a “quite stringent” four-day training course, which will hopefully weed out those not quite suitable for the role.
They will be taken through a day in the life of a care worker and shown the unglamorous side of the business, “because we want people to know exactly what they are getting in for”. It is hoped that this will stem the high drop-off rate of people within the first few weeks in the job.
Following the initial training, if candidates are still interested, and if Allied is still interested in them, they will enter into a longer training period, including being mentored and coached by senior carers. It would be a month before they are sent out on their own, Linden said. Coaching will continue throughout the person’s career with the company, leading to formal qualifications if they wish.
The centralisation process is mid-implementation and is expected to be operational in early November.
As for the people currently doing the company’s recruiting, Linden said he would do his best to re-deploy them throughout the company. However, with the centralisation, most will not be able to continue in their current roles.
He will hire experienced recruiters to fill 60 roles in the new centre, forming a proactive, not reactive, team because “we need a steady pipeline within this business”.
There is a sector-wide attrition rate of 46%, he explained. “For us that means that we have to recruit 3,500 people a year just to keep up our hours but as a business, we have to grow.”
Aside from high attrition, the other problem facing the care industry in staffing terms was that “the world isn’t full of vocational carers”. To get around that, a focus will be put on marketing to help change people’s perception of the industry and hopefully attract people who already fill a caring role, but may not know it.
• For more on recruiting in social care, see the feature on 'Social care in crisis' in Recruiter, October 2014, p28.
