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Recruiting and retaining talent in the current economy can seem like a herculean task, especially in the autism care space. Nearly 6 million people are out of work in the country, and people are continuing to apply for unemployment benefits and additional government support packages. All of which, impact the labor market. And in the data we see today, the rate of job growth in ABA roles, such as RBTs, is expected to climb from 12% to 17% in the coming years.
This means you’re going to have to be where job seekers are looking, or you’ll never fill your open positions. A lot of companies are expecting this wave of applicants to hit and fill all their positions instantly, but the truth is, the wave may never hit your island.
In the autism care space, smaller independent practices have always been up against organizations that had many more resources – all the right technology, the budgets to spend on job ads, etc. This is not going to change. It is the same old, same old. There may be some things you change about the way you operate day-to-day, but everything else will remain the same.
You need to be on all of the job boards, and you’ll need a platform that allows you to easily text candidates and get them in for an interview. Larger organizations have these things, and they work.
No matter where you are recruiting or how you’re recruiting, we hear the same problems all the time.
Resumes only tell you so much, and it usually doesn’t tell you much about the candidate’s qualifications in the autism care space because many times, they haven’t been a BT before. You may be spending insane amounts of money on job boards. And you may know deep down, that you have an inconsistent interview process or an inconsistent hiring process. In a desperate state, you kind of throw out all the behavioral questions and you just have candidates come through. In the end, this process bites you.
Let’s talk a little bit about BTs and RBTs. We don’t always recruit for our clients, but we lend a helping hand if they ask. When they ask, we go deep into the trenches – attracting, screening, presenting, getting them in to interview, and getting them hired, so we understand what it’s like from your perspective. Here are a few things that we’ve learned:
Think a little bit about your best BTs and RBTs. They generally blend some compassion, some patience, with some real capability. You’ll be able to see it because both the children and parents will engage with them in a way that you can tell is special. Those are the ones that you want to be looking at. When you’re interviewing candidates, you should be looking for attributes, not so much skills. You’re hiring for aptitude and possibilities, rather than someone who’s got all the experience in the world.
We (and many in the industry) use a combination of pre-screening questions and past experience to filter out candidates. Where do your best people come from? If they come from a camp counselor background or they come from a teaching background, then replicate that.
We also use psychometric testing and industrial psychology to understand the basic personality, the likes and dislikes, the work preferences, and the cultural preferences of those BTs and RBTs that perform best. And then screen every candidate against those. The basic personality tests that both your high performers and your candidates take, are then used to match them up.
All of those things will increase your chances of no surprises as they come in. No surprises for you, because you know what you’re getting, and no surprises for the new hire, because their expectations have been set and they’ve gone through a process that makes it clear what you’re looking for.
Do you have a career site that lists your jobs in real time? Can an applicant understand why it’s better to work for you versus the competitors or the other distractions they might have in the labor mark? Can they get a story? Can they see that you are their people? Can a candidate easily apply for a job using a smartphone?
Clicking on an email link to apply for a job is not easy, that’s not how candidates expect to apply for jobs. Around 80% of BTs and RBTs, will actually use their smartphone to apply for a job. So if you’re only looking at how to apply to your own place on your computer then you’re missing part of it, because a bad process can look really ugly on a smartphone and candidates just say, “Forget it, I’m not applying.”
Are you responding to reviews on Glassdoor and Indeed? Do you even know you have a profile page on Glassdoor and Indeed? Do you ever go there? What does it look like? How does it represent your company? Almost all of the people you will bring into your open roles are Gen Z or Millennials – meaning they’re 40 years old or younger. In that age group, they expect to have engaged employers.
Do you have any data at all that tells you that $100 spend on Indeed versus $50 on ZipRecruiter will get you more hires or not? Do you have any data that tells you anything about turnover? Do you have any data that says how quickly you’re engaging candidates once they finish their application? Is it two minutes, two hours, two days or two weeks? If it’s not within hours and it’s weeks, then you’re missing all the good candidates. They’re gone.
Once you build your foundation, more candidates isn’t always better. This is a hard lesson to learn for some people.
Think about it, you don't want to be looking through all the resumes and interviewing 40 or 400 applicants, you want to easily get it down to four or five candidates for screening and interviewing.
Use tools and technologies that can easily narrow it down for you. Let the technology handle the hard work. That’s what the big boys do.
They have a career site and they’re distributing all of their jobs in real time to Indeed, Glassdoor and Google. They sponsor jobs when they need to, and they have that capability.
It gives them an elegant, frictionless, mobile-friendly applicant process, and it’s easy for hiring managers too.
They know where they should and shouldn’t spend money, they know whether their recruiters or their hiring managers are getting it done and moving candidates through the hiring process fast.
You may be small enough to where you can do that by getting the hiring managers together and having a working session and creating some questions after that. You may want to do a survey of a broader group or engage some psychometric tests.
Especially if you’re suffering with turnover. If you’re suffering from turnover, it likely means that there’s a mismatch between what the expectation is of the candidate coming in and what they actually experience.
Start with a career site, job board distribution, and an applicant tracking system. Recruiting in the autism and ABA space is not going to change, much. It’s a growing field, there’s a great deal of competition for the best talent.
