PHI’s recruitment services help long-term care employers attract and select the candidates best suited for providing quality services and supports. We help employers establish new partnerships that help them reach a broader pool of candidates, and we assess and strengthen their employer brand. We also work with employers to create a culture of retention, which includes a multi-faceted approach to ensuring high job quality.
Candidate Selection
Employers often struggle to find and retain reliable and skilled staff that are capable of meeting client needs and providing high-quality care. The PHI approach to recruitment is designed to help organizations meet the varied challenges of attracting and selecting applicants who are best suited for success in the caregiving profession. By carefully choosing the right person for the job, organizations can overcome one of the more significant obstacles to providing quality services. Drawing from decades of in-depth experience working with direct care workers, PHI staff offer organizations support in strengthening their direct care worker selection process through customized staff development workshops and recruitment team coaching.
PHI’s staff development workshop introduces a framework for improved candidate selection and overall employee retention, one that uses a multi-phase outreach and assessment strategy. Utilizing a hands-on workshop design, staff identify and discuss the strengths and challenges of their current recruitment process, learn how to enhance their outcomes by incorporating elements of PHI’s approach, and discuss the impact of incorporating new processes. PHI staff can continue to provide coaching support to recruitment staff throughout implementation.
Maximizing Retention
We recognize that employers are committed not just to finding the right staff, but to keeping the right staff. Thus, PHI’s approach for maximizing worker retention focuses on creating a workplace culture of retention, starting with an effective orientation program and following through with a variety of initiatives that enhance support, relationships, skills, and voice for all staff.
New Hire Orientation
Even after a rigorous screening process, new employees will need to demonstrate their abilities in meeting quality expectations before an organization can rely on them to deliver person-centered care. Organizations need to be able to assess a worker’s caregiving knowledge and skills, as well as to train hires on their policies and procedures. Moreover, when workers with varying levels of experience are hired, the effectiveness of employee orientation programs is challenged.
To address this challenge, PHI partners with human resources and staff development professionals to customize orientation programs that create a welcoming environment; accurately assess workers’ preparedness; and use an experiential teaching process to provide information on agency-specific policies, procedures, and standards of excellence.
Key elements of an enhanced orientation include: support from peer mentors and supervisors who work as a team to introduce the unique mission, vision, and values of the organization; activities that help develop new hires’ relationships with their co-workers, clients, and their clients’ families; a review of the clinical diseases and chronic conditions among the client population being served; an assessment of new hires’ abilities to apply existing knowledge and skills using a person-centered approach; and the identification of areas where new aides need skills development to meet job performance expectations.
