Sustainable Talent Acquisition
22 Jan 2024
The Australian healthcare and support sector continues to grapple with a shortage of qualified frontline care staff. This scarcity of staff has led to notable side effects, including empty beds, blow-out of agency costs and increased burnout of remaining staff.
To address this, a paradigm shift is needed via Sustainable Talent Acquisition. Finding qualified candidates is challenging, but ensuring long-term employment is even more so. Traditional hiring based solely on a resume is inadequate in the evolving work environment. Sustainable Talent Acquisition prioritises candidates with the potential for long-term commitment and engagement. It goes beyond short-term needs, identifying individuals aligned with the job and the organisation’s values and goals.
Sustainable Talent Acquisition is different from traditional recruitment, particularly around the depth of review. It considers values, personality traits, and career aspirations beyond traditional qualifications. Secondly, candidates are screened for their job and cultural fit, significantly increasing the likelihood of long-term tenure. Lastly, it focuses on the candidate’s motivation and passion, not just their ability to do the job.
Psychometric assessments play a pivotal role in retention-based hiring. It provides insight into candidates beyond resume qualifications, improving understanding of their workstyle preferences, personality fit with the job and broader cultural fit. More specifically, our Personality assessment reveals the candidate’s personality profile and matches that profile to a benchmark of proven high-performers in a similar position. The higher the resulting job fit score, the more likely that the person will perform better and stay longer. Secondly, our Attitudes to Work Risk assessment helps to identify any potential risk concerning three counter-productive work behaviours, so managers can make more informed decisions. The Cognitive assessment measures cognitive abilities, predicting performance beyond hard skills listed on a resume.
How to make your Talent Acquisition Sustainable?
- Less focus on automation and the resume, and more on connection and motivation. First text candidates telling them that you will give them a call for a quick chat. Then call and ask what makes them tick and why they applied. Although an ATS with all its automation reduces the recruiters’ workload, it also takes away the personal aspect of recruitment, which is so important for caring jobs and those quality people who apply for them.
- Use psychometric or behavioural assessments early on, before the interview. Then use the insights during the interview.
- Also during the interview, ask again about motivation, their values and personality. Focus on candidates that “will do” instead of “can do”. Traditional recruitment focuses too much on people who can do the job, but you want to find those who will do the job.
- Communicate with all candidates, including those you did not proceed with.
Once you have a more stable workforce, with less casual and agency staff, you can then shift your Sustainable Talent Acquisition focus to build a recruitment infrastructure for your current employees, enabling them to help you find like-minded colleagues via an employee referral program. Because caring people know caring people. This can be low-cost, high-yield, particularly when using a modern solution such as Care Friends.
By adopting Sustainable Talent Acquisition, providers can build a qualified and satisfied workforce, offering a transformative solution to the ongoing employment crisis.
Book a chat to learn more about the Care Advantage assessments and reports
