Workforce Consultancy
Company Background
Medacs Healthcare, the largest provider of healthcare managed service and workforce solutions in the UK, began working with Community Integrated Care in 2018. Community Integrated Care is one of the UK's largest social care charities, delivering life-enhancing support to people with a diverse range of care needs and employing over 5,500 staff in a variety of roles.
The Challenge
With growing pressure across the social care industry due to increased demand, coupled with ongoing staff shortages and difficulties in recruiting and attracting staff; fulfilling social care service requirements is now an expensive undertaking.
Many services have been forced to use high-cost agencies to supply the additional nursing and support workers they need to deliver safe and effective care to service users. In summer 2018, with rising staffing costs due to candidate shortages and high attrition, Community Integrated Care acknowledged that to fulfil commissioned service hours within budget, they needed to secure 250 full-time support workers.
Improving retention and the time taken to hire staff were also critical to developing a more sustainable and efficient workforce and maintaining the high-quality care standards that Community Integrated Care strive to deliver.
The Solution
Medacs Healthcare’s workforce solutions team were invited to conduct a review of Community Integrated Care’s current approach to temporary and permanent staffing to identify quantitative and qualitative opportunities, including quick wins.
Following the review, the Medacs Healthcare team were commissioned by Community Integrated Care to deliver a six-month Recruitment Efficiency Programme. The strategic goals agreed were to improve recruitment processes, to better align people, processes and technology, to reduce the average time to hire to less than nine weeks, and to reduce recruitment costs across the board.
The Journey
A dedicated Project Manager was immediately appointed to implement an overarching recruitment strategy, ensuring accountability and planning across all teams and aligned to the desired goals. Critical success factors included:
- Upskilling current recruitment personnel with clear SLAs, new policies and KPIs for tracking performance.
- Developing a new, more efficient recruitment service level with a more proactive approach to candidate engagement and a consistent applicant experience from advert response to onboarding.
- Embedding a new ‘start stop continue’ process for compliance documentation to ensure all new recruits were fully compliant in line with CQC standards.
- Structural changes to facilitate regional onboarding.
Performance was monitored and reviewed throughout the project to ensure that efficiencies and benefits were realised, risks were identified and resolved and any additional requirements were met.
The Result
- Improved service fill rates by 27,000 hours whilst keeping agency usage at sustainable levels
- Increased headcount with 215 new part-time and full-time support workers
- Significantly reduced the time to hire to less than nine weeks
- Delivered additional cost savings of over £50,000, through regionalised onboarding
- Improved Employee Value Propositions
- Embedded best practice policies and technology (Applicant Tracking System)
- Implemented new standards of performance for all recruiters to ensure further improvements and sustained results
"We now have a sustainable recruitment model and the right processes in place to ensure we continue to recruit the support workers we need to consistently deliver care in all our regional locations"
CEO
