Healthy HR for seniors at ResCare
- Summary:
- Unified talent management system helps ResCare on path towards getting candidates from “hire to home” in a week.
The faster ResCare can hire and train are staff, the faster it can put those people out in the field helping the elderly, disabled or others needing aid.
ResCare is a $1.8 billion company providing a range of care to people with disabilities or seniors needing help to stay at home. It also provides training and job placement to people with barriers to gaining employment.
Until ResCare began the move to standardize on Cornerstone’s cloud-based talent management tools, it was using a variety or manual and automated HR systems to manage its 52,000 employees located across 42 US states, as well as in Puerto Rico and Canada. Shelly Morgan, director of HR technology at Res Care elaborates:
The reason we needed a talent management system is because we were doing lots of things that were paper based and we had multiple systems which I would consider a little ‘broken’ in the way they talked to each other and the way they integrated.
Consolidating these multiple systems into one standardized platform would help ResCare have clearer visibility across the business. With 600,000 applicants and 30,000 hires a year, it’s no surprise that on-boarding and recruitment, together with learning were the first Cornerstone tools ResCare chose to implement. Morgan explains:
We wanted to replace what we had, but we also wanted to look to the future to ensure we had everything in one platform, that was easy to use and the ability to get our data quickly and make decisions quickly.
ResCare is a low-margin business, says Morgan, and Cornerstone was seen as an ideal partner to help them run as lean a business as possible:
It’s extremely important for us to be as efficient as possible and have a system that is really flexible and easy to configure and doesn’t take a lot of administrative power.
Benefits
Since recruiting and on-boarding went live in July 2015, the company has begun to experience some significant benefits, including an impressive 30% increase in applicant flow.
Keeping a steady stream of applicants is extremely important for a company like ResCare, as Morgan explains:
We’re recruiting direct support professionals who often make minimum wage, so it’s important to get a lot of applicants, because typically you can’t convert a lot of those applicants to hires. And we had seen a decline in out applicant flow prior to Cornerstone.
Unemployment has really turned around here, so there’s more competition for those workers. So it’s important to hire those applicants quickly so we really needed to drive applicate flow especially in some of our harder markets.
Another bonus post-Cornerstone is that the time to onboard people has been drastically cut. Even though none of the application content itself has changed, ResCare has been able to shave an impressive 35% off the time to onboard staff. Morgan adds:
It’s easier to use and the candidate experience is more streamlined. Our old ATS was clunky and was hard to get through the applicant process, whereas with Cornerstone it looks very modern and is easy to get through quickly.
Although it did have an ATS some local operations were very paper driven. Using Cornerstone has enabled the company to go completely paperless.
Implementing Cornerstone learning management is also helping speed up the on-boarding process, because it signals a move towards more of an online learning model and away from a more instructor-led approach. The aim is for about 85% of learning to be online.
Rather than the big-bang approach taken with the recruiting and on-boarding systems, ResCare is taking a phased approach to implementing learning. Roll-out started in June 2014 and is scheduled to reach all regions by next year. Morgan says:
We’re still rolling out in several of our states to our direct support professional population because we didn’t necessarily have the equipment out at these locations or the ability to train online. We’re still working on that and expect to complete learning by the end of 2017.
The company is using a mixture of internal and externally generated learning content. In both cases the aim is to create shorter, more specific and interactive courses taking advantage of gamification techniques to entice learners. Morgan says:
Our goal is to get people from hire to home in seven days. I can’t really tell you where we are now, but we are a lot quicker than we were before and we’re really picking up the pace of this.
Performance management is next on the agenda, which will be deployed initially to leaders in December/January, before gradually rolling out to direct support professionals.
Morgan is looking forward not only from the nuts-and-bolts point of view of being able to cascade goals out to employees for the first time, but also the wider cultural effects of having an integrated system that provides everything an employee needs. The aim is to help create a company culture that encourages growth and developing.
Automating succession planning – currently following the typical 9-box grid method, but on Microsoft PowerPoint and spreadsheets – will quickly follow in early 2017.
With all these different talent elements together, Morgan hopes to be able to take advantage of the analytics within Cornerstone:
We’ll be looking at some of thing that Cornerstone offers that really can help us predict things that we need to do differently. So I’m really excited about the future in the next few years. We’ve only set ourselves up for success with the Cornerstone platform to really be a data-driven organization.
The hardest thing about the implementation so far, says Morgan, has not been the system change itself, but change management:
The challenge is bringing people along and really working through that change management process to ensure you have product adoption. So for me, I would say that was the biggest thing I’ve learned through this process.
Change management is particularly challenging at ResCare because of its dispersed workforce and de-centralized leadership. So from the moment the contract was signed, Morgan began talking about the Cornerstone move to people at all levels. In fact, she says, the conversation has never stopped since then:
We continue to talk about it, because there are things that come all the time and you’re getting releases and new functionality, so it’s important to keep having conversations and talk to users about the challenges they are having.
Many of the direct support workers were not used to technology, so a lot of effort went into creating quick reference guides and training materials together. Some 270 local HR specialists were also there to help implement the system and ensure these workers are up to speed.
To help those people many of whom did not know how to apply for jobs online, ResCare set up easy to use kiosks in local operations so they could walk up and apply for jobs.
ResCare is still only part way through its transition to Cornerstone, but the benefits are already being felt. On top of increased candidate numbers and faster application cycle, there have also been internal benefits to HR. Morgan notes:
It’s easier to see what’s going on. You have the ability to come into on-boarding and see where someone is in the process. Not only can we see whether someone has actually completed the on-boarding process, we can see where they are at in learning and send reminders and stay engaged with the employee.