Orchard Care Homes, a leading provider of elderly residential and nursing care homes in the North of England and the Midlands, has streamlined its recruitment process following a review of the company’s processes.
With ongoing recruitment requirements across its portfolio of 24 homes, the company experienced delays in new recruits being able to start due to extensive compliance requirements which lead to additional costs as agency staff backfilled roles.
Orchard engaged Plainly.com, a leading provider of automated processes, as part of its strategic recruitment review, with the aim to speed up the recruitment process to identify, engage with and hire the best candidates quickly, saving costs by reducing reliance on agency staff to fill gaps created by an extended time to hire.
While Orchard appreciated that at least some of the solution would be in the form of a technical platform, they were firm in the belief that end user experience was critical to any solution they looked at.
“The care industry is littered with tech platforms that don’t address the day-to-day needs of their end users or are cumbersome and time consuming to implement. We approached this project knowing what we wanted for the end users in our care homes and our admin teams and it was very clear that their needs had to be at the forefront of any decision making” said James Lyner, Process Improvement Manager.
Plainly.com’s brief was to address four key areas – process, documentation, contract signing and document management – to fit Orchard’s requirements around saving time, costs, increasing consistency and oversight and ultimately ease of use by non-technical staff.
The results were immediate and Orchard’s new recruitment process now provides clarity about where every candidate is in the process and who internally needs to action things, ensures mandatory steps can’t be missed, e.g. DBS checks have to be received before a candidate can move to the step in the workflow, keeps the process moving with prompts and alerts and clear next steps at every stage and provides a centralised view of all local recruitment in an instant.
Orchards’ 24 care homes can access details of all candidates in the recruitment process at the touch of a button, maximising consistency of approach. Offer packs are now ready in seconds and contracts signed and returned in minutes and user feedback is overwhelmingly positive.
Rebecca Dobson, Director of People and Talent at Orchard, said “The model of local care homes managing most of their own recruiting is one Orchard believed in and didn’t wish to change. Local managers know their market best and could be most agile in responding to specific recruitment needs. However, any platform had to considerably improve oversight at a central level to ensure consistency of standards, processes and compliance could be maintained and reported on without the current need for on-site manual auditing.”
“Having used Plainly.com for the last four months as a home manager it makes the recruitment process quicker and easier to monitor. To have everything in one place and a system that pretty much does the majority of the recruitment process for you is a huge benefit”, said Lucy Gradwell, Quality Monitoring Officer at Orchard Care Homes.
Rebecca continued, “The results so far have far exceeded my expectations because they have addressed all the areas that I wanted covered – time, cost and compliance.
Streamlining the process with automated workflows and documentation has reduced hiring times by half, with a 50% plus reduction in administration time, meaning candidates are now ready to start with us in as little as seven days. This is having a really positive impact on candidates and their experience of starting work with us.”