Colten Care slashes time to hire by 20 days

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Colten Care is a family-owned, independent, award-winning care home provider founded in 1981 in the South of England. Colten Care provides nursing, residential and dementia care with a difference, and in more than 40 years in the industry, they’ve built an outstanding reputation thanks to their amazing people and focus on keeping residents at the heart of all they do.

As a family business, Colten Care states that a strong family ethos is central to everything they do and where only the best is good enough. Colten Care was built on core values that still guide the company from the heart of their business today – being friendly, kind, individual, reassuring, and honest. The company says that its values shape the company culture and play out in their home every day through meaningful, heartfelt interactions between staff, residents, and family members.

Colten Care’s mission is to be the care provider of choice and employer of choice in the South. Having been ranked one of the Top 20 care home providers in the UK for the last eight years suggests Colten Care is well on its way to fulfilling its mission.

Rethinking recruitment

William Aitchison, Recruitment and Onboarding Assistant Manager, shares that before using an ATS, Colten Care’s recruitment was much more manual. The ATS allowed them to move everything in-house so that every home operated a central application tracking system and had more control over the recruitment process. Aitchison says that their first ATS served a purpose in that it helped them post job adverts and handle applications but that was the extent of its functionality.

Colten Care switched its former ATS for Teamtailor’s all-in-one recruitment software and besides its smooth and quick integration, the change allowed Colten Care to reexamine its processes and start afresh.

Aitchison explains, “Initially we were going to bring everything across from the old system. However, when we stepped back and thought about it, there wasn’t really a benefit to doing that aside from the applications that were in process, which we moved across.”

“The capabilities with Teamtailor are so much more advanced so rather than having to handle existing candidates and moving them across with limited information, we decided to just turn the page, start again, and keep all of the old information in a document elsewhere if we need to refer back to it.”

“We decided not to bring across historic candidates, rejected candidates, the old talent pool, etc., since we’d exhausted it years ago. If any of those candidates apply again, they’ll be in our new talent pool rated with tags and we can manage with them in a new way. We just thought there’d be more value in starting again with more information rather than searching through an existing pool.”

Seamless integration into the business

Many organisations fear that switching to a new ATS provider will result in a steep learning curve that will result in loss of time, money, and productivity. However, as Colten Care experienced, Teamtailor customers often share that ease of use and ease of implementation are two very welcome surprises.

“We didn’t know how long it’d take my team to get used to using the system but within just a couple of weeks, we were in the flow of things”, shares Aitchison.

Increased collaboration

Teamtailor’s software is designed to help companies streamline their recruitment by allowing teams across departments and locations to work closer together. This is something Aitchison and Colten Care have seen.

“In my team, four people use Teamtailor at the highest level of recruitment. In addition to that, we have about 30 managers in our office who use it for their own needs. On top of that, there are two other levels - home managers and the senior admins of each home. So, there are another 50 or 60 users there. I keep tabs on all of them at their different levels. Being able to see what people do in the analytics feature is helpful.”

When asked which of Teamtailor’s features Colten Care finds particularly useful for managing candidates, Aitchison shares that he uses the Review feature a lot, which allows users to rate candidates. “If a candidate applies for a job but is far from one of the homes, they might be better placed elsewhere. Instead of just rejecting the candidate, home managers can message and refer the candidate to another home manager at a closer location.”

Aitchison continues, “In other words, rather than us losing candidates because they might not work for a specific home, it’s much easier for home managers to send a message and say, “This one’s for you”, which is really helpful. They know how to do it and it’s intuitive.”

Screening candidates to find the right hire

As part of the application process, Aitchison and team ask candidates to answer a series of questions, which acts as a filter of sorts. “Initially, we set standard questions across the board so we can see how people ask the questions and the volume of applications we get.”

Aitchison elaborates, “We have homes where we’re getting seventy or eighty applications a day, but only two or three are suitable. So, it’s important to us to have questions in there, like, “Do you have the right to work in the UK?”, “Do you drive?”, “Do you have over one, two, three years experience?”, for example.”

Once the team has the answers to those questions, they know which candidates meet their requirements and can then use the smart move feature in their ATS, enabling them to focus on the candidates best suited to Colten Care.

When asked what advice he would give to people interested in recruitment and finding the right talent, Aitchison says without any hesitation, “Transparency”. “Selling someone ‘the dream’ without being able to back it up when they start is a waste of your own resources, and the candidates’. Incorrectly selling a position to ‘fill’ a vacancy comes with a cost when the candidate realizes it and soon leaves, which is not fair on them.”

Flexibility, he says, is also essential to finding the right candidates. “While some homes receive seventy or eighty applications a day, at the other end of the scale, we have some homes that don’t get any applications at all.”

Aitchison explains that asking the right questions is the key. “The questions need to be based on the different homes, different areas, and different types of roles. This way, we can set different questions for any position and not miss out on a pool of people by setting difficult questions.”

Attracting and converting talent

While Colten Care chose Teamtailor to help them manage and streamline recruitment, the company has also discovered that Teamtailor’s drag-and-drop career page builder is also a powerful way to attract and convert candidates.

Career sites enable companies to engage with potential candidates and understand them better. “With a Teamtailor career site, we can track the full application right from the start.”

“We have a variety of traffic to the website, some candidates just want to make an application in as few clicks as possible, while others like to read about the company and positions. We have created our site with all types of applicants in mind,” Aitchison shares.

Recruitment trends

Among the notable trends he has observed in HR and talent acquisition circles, Aitchison says he notices less resistance to office-based jobs than a year after the pandemic ended. “More people are accepting office-based jobs rather than remote or hybrid. Money isn’t everything, it’s more about the whole package,” he says.

“Covid gave a lot of people a new lifestyle, more family time, less work stress, etc. Some people got a taste for this, and prefer a more balanced lifestyle instead of being salary-driven.”

Aitchison concludes, “Where you work, who you work with, and a sense of reward and achievement have become increasingly important.”

With Colten Care’s growing list of accolades, it’s safe to say its employees agree.

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