The cost of recruitment varies significantly across care organisations, with some facing high advertising expenses, others dealing with soaring agency fees, and many grappling with both. Additionally, there are costs associated with hiring the wrong candidate, when factoring in re-hiring and re-training.
Given the substantial impact of hiring decisions, having reliable data to inform recruitment strategies is paramount. Management information serves not only to ensure a positive return on investment in recruitment but also provides factual insights for evaluating success and addressing any issues.
What does Management Information tell you?
Management information (MI) is essential for ensuring successful recruitment outcomes. For instance, consider a recruitment campaign with an average time to offer of under 10 days and compliance within 23 days. Suddenly, in a particular home or service, this timeframe doubles and persists for the following month.
In such a scenario, it’s crucial to identify the root cause of the extended timeline. Is it due to a poor response to advertising, delays in arranging interviews or obtaining candidate compliance documents, inadequate training and resources allocated to recruitment activities, or other factors?
With robust MI systems in place, you can pinpoint the problem areas in your recruitment process and take targeted actions to address delays effectively.
Essential metrics
You should report on all recruitment and retention metrics including costs, cycle times, conversions, diversity, user experience, and retention. This allows you to take a deep dive into the following areas:
- Response volumes & quality
- Time taken to conduct screening and interviewing
- How long it takes to make offers after interviews
- Cycle times in the compliance process including onboarding forms, references and DBS checks
- Whether there are delays between compliance and start
- Tenure and reasons for leaving
- Workforce diversity trends
- Candidate and hiring manager experience
Having access to this information will allow for decisions to be made based on facts rather than intuition and guess work. If, for example, your advertising costs are increasing, you can use data to determine optimum cost per click budgets.
Barriers to Management Information
There are common barriers to MI reporting in social care. All good MI starts with good data supported by the right technology. Ensuring you have a suitable Applicant Tracking System (ATS) in place is a good starting point. If you’re using a spreadsheet or a HR system with ATS functionality that isn’t fit for your purpose – your data reporting abilities are likely to be falling short.
Management Information – your best bet
In adult social care, we have over 152,000 vacancies on any one day – and our candidate pools aren’t ever-growing. Turnover is higher than the UK average. Being able to target better candidates who stay with you for longer saves time and money – and ultimately delivers better continuity of quality care and support. MI will provide valuable insights in how to reduce unnecessary overspending and improve the quality of people you attract – and keep.
Significant data sets can be captured throughout the entire recruitment and starter process. Make sure that your data is captured, that it’s telling you what you need to know, and that your recruitment and retention efforts are focused appropriately.
Can you confidently say that this is the case for your organisation?
One of our latest big data reports specifically looking at sector retention can be found here: UK Care Sector Retention: Better or Worse? How does your own MI compare?
