Covid19 Impact on Frontline Applicant Pools

Quantity Up but Quality Down

Quantity
From mid-March, as providers started to build their backup (surge) workforce we have seen a large rise in pre-employment screening for key frontline roles in care, clinical, cleaning and hotel services. Up until the end of March this increase was steadily growing but April has seen a significant jump. This is to be expected given the large number of applicants now on the job market who are responding to advertisements, expressions of interest and specific campaigns being run. Also, as to be expected, providers are reporting a significant increase in applications from people with no sector experience.
 
Assessment usage (monthly averages) in March was around 30 % up on February and as of the April 27th usage is also significantly up on the March figure. To date in April, Care Advantage users have screened over 12,000 applicants for front line care roles. 

Quality
We recognise that any observation about candidate quality needs to involve several elements such as experience, qualifications, tenure and work style/personality. Due to our large data sets and the use of relevant job and performance benchmarks, we believe that the Care Advantage results can be used as a legitimate indicator of the quality of the candidate pools.​

Looking at March with only the latter part of the month showing an increase in recruitment task combined with an increase in the number of applications with no sector experience. No trends are obvious as yet, however when comparing March results (sample = 5,700 applicants) to our control samples (sample = 28,000 applicants from the 6 months to February 2020) it is clear that the “quality” of candidate pools for March has changed.

Based on these results we rate an applicant as an acceptable candidate if they score above 75% job fit (compared against the benchmark profile for that role) AND are not flagged for elevated risk (Hostility, Conscientiousness, Integrity). Based on these criteria the March pools have slightly fewer acceptable candidates.

We will keep an eye out on the quantity and quality of applicant pools in the weeks to come. 

Contact us if you want to learn more about this data or ways to quickly and 'from a distance' screen large applicant pools.