How to Solve Recruitment and Retention Challenges in Behavioral Health
Behavioral health and human services (BHHS) organizations are focusing on growth this year to keep up with mounting patient demand, but many can’t keep up with their current staffing needs. Recruitment and retention are two of the biggest pain points for these organizations, but there are tools available to help BHHS human resources teams stay on top of filling open roles efficiently and retaining current employees.
From streamlining the recruiting process to prioritizing employee retention initiatives, the right technology and strategies can help organizations find and hold onto top talent. Find out how to hire more efficiently and reduce your turnover costs with the right employee engagement and recruitment strategies.
Why Behavioral Health Organizations Struggle With Recruitment and Retention
Behavioral health staffing is a two-fold problem. The demand for services is outpacing the availability of qualified talent, leading to recruiting struggles. Meanwhile, BHHS organizations are also unable to properly retain the talent that they’re able to hire.
Industry staffing shortages have plagued the behavioral health and human services sector for a while, but the issue has worsened in recent years. The field does require specialized education and licensing for most roles, leading to a more limited talent pool. Professionals in helping roles are also predisposed to issues like compassion fatigue and burnout, causing some individuals to leave the field altogether.
In the latest Behavioral Health Industry Trends Report, we surveyed behavioral health leaders and human resources professionals. Recruitment and retention was the top priority for BHHS organizations in 2024. Seventy percent of respondents noted that they struggled with finding qualified candidates for open roles, while 62% reported that their organization had high turnover rates. In addition, only 13% of respondents stated that they are able to fill roles quickly, showcasing a need for better efficiency within the recruiting process.
How to Streamline Recruiting Workflows to Improve Hiring Efficiency
While plenty of industry-wide challenges can cause BHHS organizations to struggle with recruiting, there are steps you can take to optimize your recruitment process to hire more effectively. Streamlining your hiring process provides a better candidate experience and will help you find top job seekers within the limited BHHS talent pool.
Here are some things you can do.
Simplify Your Hiring Approval Process
Getting approval to fill an opening can be quite a process, especially for BHHS organizations who may not have the budget to fill every open role right away. Even when a role is approved for posting, getting all of the stakeholders on the same page about the job description, salary budget, and required competencies can be tedious.
ContinuumCloud’s Position Control feature simplifies this process by giving you a clearer view of all of the openings within your organization as well as the attributes already assigned to specific roles. With this position-based framework, roles retain information, such as credential requirements, salary ranges, and job descriptions after an employee has left.
The vacant role can also be accounted for in your labor budget, and hiring approvals can quickly be provided within the platform. This means that you don’t have to start from scratch, lose past data when someone quits, or run around in circles figuring out what roles to fill and how they will fit into your budget.
Quickly Get Your Job Posts Out to a Wider Audience
Posting jobs across different job boards and social media sites like LinkedIn is essential for reaching a wide pool of potential candidates, but posting on each hiring platform individually takes time.
That’s where technology like ContinuumCloud’s one-click job posting feature can simplify your recruiting workflow. With a single click, your job posting will be shared with multiple leading job boards and your own career site featuring your unique employer branding. This gets more eyes on your role to help you attract a wider pool of candidates.
Centralize Applicant Tracking and Evaluation
Once applications begin rolling in, you’ll need to have an organized workflow in place to promptly review job candidates. Using an applicant tracking system, such as the one built into ContinuumCloud’s HCM system, will allow the hiring team to collaborate on rating candidates and identifying top candidates to move onto the interview process. Candidate communication can also be managed within the platform for a fully centralized recruiting process.
Remove Redundancies in Your Onboarding Workflow
BHHS organizations are often chronically short-staffed, so you don’t want to waste any time in onboarding a new employee once you find the perfect hire. There are often some redundancies in the onboarding process that slow new hires and managers down, such as asking them to fill in information that they already provided during the application process. With ContinuumCloud’s HCM system, that data is ported over from the recruiting system to the employee’s digital file, providing a streamlined onboarding workflow.
Prioritize Retention Efforts to Maintain Staffing Levels
If your organization is struggling to attract and hire qualified job seekers for open roles, prioritizing retention efforts is essential to maintain stable staffing levels and reduce your recruiting burden. After all, recruiting and retention come full circle in meeting your staffing targets.
Here are some of the ways you can encourage better retention rates.
Identify Causes of Turnover
Make use of your workforce analytics to dig into patterns and identify factors driving employee turnover. HCM software like ContinuumCloud’s platform can provide ample business intelligence metrics to track trends such as heightened work hours or overtime that may contribute to burnout and employee turnover.
Conducting exit interviews and employee satisfaction surveys are also great ways to directly ask team members about what is impacting their employee experience or fueling their decision to leave. Departing employees can provide added insight on specific areas that your organization may need to work on to improve retention rates.
Implement an Employee Recognition Program
Make sure that your employees know that their hard work is not going unnoticed. Implementing a recognition program is an excellent way to boost morale and job satisfaction within your work environment. One frequently overlooked opportunity for recognition and team building is peer-to-peer recognition — which builds a supportive workplace culture by encouraging team members to lift each other up and highlight other’s efforts.
ContinuumCloud’s HCM platform offers a solution specifically designed for peer recognition called Shout Outs. Employees can publicly recognize their teammates with a quick message that will be displayed within the platform. This digital recognition option also makes it easier to include remote work employees in recognition efforts, as they tend to be overlooked more easily when it comes to calling attention to their work on a day-to-day basis.
Encourage PTO Use
With burnout being a major concern in the behavioral healthcare field, especially when organizations are dealing with staffing woes, it’s imperative that employees be able to rest when they need to. Create a company culture where using PTO is encouraged, and provide an easily accessible employee self-service portal where team members can view their PTO balance and request time off. This will help employees avoid burnout from excessive work hours.
Focus on Employee Development
When employees feel stagnate in their careers or do not see potential room for growth within your organization, they are more likely to pursue opportunities elsewhere. To work on retaining employees, organizations need to be intentional in providing professional development support and maintaining open communication regarding advancement opportunities.
Managers within the behavioral health industry are often spread thin and strapped for time, so finding ways to optimize the performance management and career development efforts is important. Talent management tools like digital goal tracking and ContinuumCloud’s templated performance check-in and recognition messages can streamline the process while ensuring that employees still feel like their professional development is a priority.
Amplify Your Recruitment and Retention Efforts With ContinuumCloud’s HCM
The behavioral health and human services field presents several unique employee recruitment and retention challenges, so you’ll need a specific solution geared toward those needs.
ContinuumCloud’s HCM platform was built with the needs of BHHS leaders and employees in mind. From the initial hiring approval process and job posting to tracking career development throughout an employee’s tenure with your organization, ContinuumCloud supports recruitment and retention efforts throughout the full employee lifecycle.
Contact us today to learn more about how ContinuumCloud can help your organization improve its recruitment and retention strategy.