With an increasingly consumer driven environment, added pressure on funding, a care workforce whose average age is also increasing and clients/residents living longer it is no wonder there is a strong focus on ensuring that a future aged care system remains sustainable, affordable and flexible.
 
Of the 5 Strategic Imperatives identified by the Aged Care Workforce Strategy Taskforce (ACWST) – headed up by Professor John Pollaers – one of the most critical has been the industry’s ability to attract and retain care staff.
 
For many years we have worked together with Neil Eastwood, a highly regarded advisor and consultant on workforce recruitment and retention in the Social Care sector in the UK. Neil is the author of Saving Social Care which tackles this very subject. The UK has been operating in a consumer driven environment around 8 years now and whilst funding arrangements and regulation are different, there are many common challenges.
 
With great thanks to Neil, we have adapted his Practical Tips Program and created 52 weekly tips to help you better source, recruit and retain your care staff. Here is a sample, but if you want to get all of them, across the full year, sign up to our Weekly Tips mailing list.

1. Your relationship with Universities Nurses and allied health students get great feedback as frontline staff. They can’t stay forever but can often work less popular hours. Can you offer some practical training directly related to their course? Try the tutors, student welfare, noticeboards and referrals to get started.

2. Online sources can miss older Care Workers: Mobile job seekers are weighted towards the <25s, Facebook is most used by 25-34yr olds, but longest serving care staff are 50+. Make sure you don’t forget offline sources too..

​3. Non-committal responses: It’s important to listen for non-committal responses to interview questions about availability, pay etc. such as "I think so", "That's fine", Not really". These are proven flags to non-commitment and easy to spot if you are aware. Then the interviewer knows to dig.

​4. Care workers can make insightful interviewers: Involve care staff in interviewing candidates. They know what the job entails and being asked assists staff engagement which is a critical part of retention.

5. Smile more: Approximately 17% of resignations reported a friendly smile or a helpful colleague would have changed their mind. The early days of employment are so critical for long-term tenure.

6. A role for performance-related pay? Rarely used in care but successful elsewhere - recognise six months with no lateness or missed shifts (e.g. 1 hour off paid per month). If you have an absence issue this could be worth a trial.

Enjoyed these tips? Click here to sign up to more of these (interesting, relevant, surprising, clever) gems. 

Recruitment refers to the overall process of attracting, selecting and appointing suitable candidates for jobs within an organisation. Some people have made this their profession and love finding that right match, for others, these activities are a necessary evil to their normal job. No matter which one you are, you probably want to be more efficient with your screening process yet have more insights to make better hiring decisions.
 
For this article, we will only look at the selecting or screening part of the process, because this is where decisions are made that can either mean a win or a big loss for your organisation.

The traditional recruitment screening process
In the Aged and Community Care sector, the commonly applied screening process looks something like this for a popular frontline care role with, say, 90 applicants:

Skills can be taught, personality cannot
We are seeing some large levels of turnover in the sector, which has an industry average of around 25%. The cost of turnover is approximately 20% of that employee’s annual salary, making replacing staff very costly so something you want to get right from the start. 

​Example:

​There are many reasons that staff leave your business and a certain level of turnover is considered healthy, but do you keep track of what percentage of your staff has left for personal reasons (moving town, retiring, health issues) or because they were let-go by you? When we look at the reasons that staff are terminated by the organisation, these are often summarised as “they were fired for who they are and how they behaved on the job”.
 
So how can we find out more about our (frontline) applicants, their personality and work behaviours early on in the process and not solely base our first cull on what they know or can do?

The more efficient screening process
Enter behavioural screening. We know that psychometric assessments are not revolutionary to the screening process, but it is proven and ever-evolving. We have now entered the era of the 6th generation of psychometric screening and are seeing a shift in focus from testing skills and aptitude to finding people with the right personality and attitude for the job.  Because if you select those people who are more likely to have the right personal attributes and work-attitudes for the role, then you already have a head-start to reducing the number of people you will eventually fire for “who they are”. Studies* show that using behavioural and cognitive assessments in combination with a validating interview has a predictive validity of .76. That’s pretty much as high as it gets.
 
So, let’s see what the recruitment process can look like when adding behavioural screening.

​Adding behavioural screening at the top of the screening funnel can take the screening part down to a little over 5 hours with an increased predictive validity! The time saving is achieved by reading less resumes and in this case as well by the removal of the assessment center step in the process. However additional time savings can be found in reduction in no-shows at interview, a more structured interview process, better hiring decisions and thus reduced staff turnover (saving you time recruiting again!). As you can see below, in our example this company reduced their staff turnover by 5% saving themselves annually $80,000 in recruitment and related costs. 

Example - reduced turnover

So here you have it. Even though it looks like you’re adding a step to your screening process, you are actually adding robustness to your screening process without adding extra time. On the contrary, you’re screening smarter, with more insight into your applicants resulting in better hiring decisions. ​

.. and how can they be best used?
 
Did you know that personality assessments are constructed for different purposes? These design differences mean that they are not all alike and cannot be used for the same application. Some tests are ipsative and some are normative and there is a fundamental design difference between them and this design affects their suitability for purpose.
 
What is normative?
A normative assessment measures proven quantifiable personality characteristics on individual scales. A person’s “score” for each construct measures a specific set of traits against group data or patterns of normality represented on a bell curve and usually includes a social desirability (faking) scale to measure accuracy of responses. Normative testing allows people to be compared to other employees who have met with success or failure in a job – so this can predict candidates who will have the best chances of success if hired or promoted and to help avoid placing people in the wrong positions. Normative tests are therefore well suited to recruitment and selection applications.
 
And what about ipsative?
An ipsative assessment presents applicants with options equal in desirability and requires them to indicate which items are “most true” of them and which are “least true” of them in their everyday behaviour. Unlike normative assessments which measure clearly identifiable traits, ipsative assessments indicate only orientations and the relative type of person being assessed. What it does not reveal or predict is how two people with similar patterns or types will actually perform in a job. It is generally accepted that ipsative assessments are ambiguous, because ipsative literally means using yourself (rather than others or a defined population) as the norm against which to measure something, for example, your present performance against your past performance (rather than the performance of others). Ipsative tests are well suited for applications like development, coaching or team building where comparisons among people are not necessary.
 
The Care Advantage Assessments are Normative and best used for recruitment and selection applications. 
source: Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology (2009)