Practice Plus Group

Recruitment within a complex healthcare organisation

Practice Plus Group is quite complex in how it delivers its three service lines to address different areas of the business market:

• Integrated Urgent Care - (NHS 111, Out of Hours and Clinical Assessment Services)
• Health In Justice - (healthcare services in prisons, immigration removal centres and non-custodial)
• Secondary Care - (hospitals, surgical centres, and urgent treatment centres)

The healthcare sector recruit for regulated and non-regulated positions and the sector is very competitive for talent. Key skilled professionals are highly sought after, coupled with hard to find skills, make it a competitive environment to attract and retain the best talent.

Practice Plus Group employ a mix of full-time employees and temporary staff for a variety of roles across a diversified portfolio, incorporating areas of volume recruitment.

Implementing a fit for purpose Applicant Tracking System

The reasons for implementing Eploy were to address restrictive functionality in the incumbent Applicant Tracking System (ATS), improve recruitment processes, and report accurately on candidate data management - a pre-requisite for the healthcare sector.

The recruitment team required Eploy features such as automatic screening questions and candidate assessment to support better recruitment decisions.

Eploy integrates with NHS Jobs which was an essential requirement to address the candidate experience when applying through the job board. Eploy Multi-Poster enables posting to over 1000 job boards including carehome.co.uk, Care and Health Jobs & Care and Nurse Jobs to reach a more diverse audience for jobs.

Practice Plus Group has a diversified portfolio across its multiple business functions with differing priorities and recruitment processes. In some areas, volume recruitment for a particular role type is prevalent. The requirement was to use Eploy to optimise the application process and recruitment workflow that would improve candidate communication and the quality of hire. The flexibility to configure Eploy’s core platform meant that requirements could be tailored across the recruitment process to engage with candidates in the best way, giving better control to the recruitment teams.

Different workflows developed in Eploy support the requirements of Primary Care, Health in Justice and Secondary Care. This is aligned to the volume of each service line. For example, Health in Justice has low mobilisation with an increasing number of sites being added, resulting in increased vacancies.

The various recruitment workflows offer a different approach for each service line to optimise the qualityof applications, and how the rejection process is handled. This also allows the customisation of candidate emails for each service line.

One of the issues the recruitment team experienced was a considerable candidate dropout rate with unknown reasons for this, due to the lack of data. After Eploy was implemented, there was an instant uplift in successful candidate applications and the quality of candidates.

Built into the recruitment process is handling applications which do not have the correct requirements to work in the UK. Previously, the team had to go through every application manually and this is now improved through automation using Eploy. With a more streamlined approach that includes adding in Right to Work checks to capture visa validity early in the process, automation saves time for everyone.

Inclusivity is something that is taken seriously at Practice Plus Group. A more inclusive recruitment approach has been incorporated as part of the recruitment process, starting at the application stage with inclusive application forms.

In collecting ED&I data, there is now clarification for candidates of why that data is required. Practice Plus Group neurodiversity experience provides the tools that the candidate needs to feel at ease during the recruitment process. Practice Plus has a non-discriminatory approach and use Eploy’s name blind applicant functionality until first interview. Candidate CVs can exclude candidate information (name, gender, ethnicity etc.) from applications during candidate assessment to eliminate bias.

Practice Plus Group launched its new employer brand for a more consistent brand experience and narrative around who they are and what they do. This has been consistently applied through the Eploy Candidate Portal with detailed candidate information about what it is like to work with them. Dynamic ads are used to present candidates with relevant and relatable content that assist candidates during the decision-making process. Dynamic content provides more meaningful insight on what it’s like to work for Practice Plus Group in each role or environment.

As a result, the Resourcing Team has seen greater volumes of applications coming through. Vacancies on the Candidate Portal are shown dynamically, positively impacting the volume of applications.

Onboarding using Eploy is a much smoother process. Two-stage onboarding is in place and includes offer and contract creation and pre-employment checks, maintaining secure data collection and compliance.

Talent nurturing in practice

Eploy’s talent pooling capability supports candidate engagement to amplify Practice Plus Group’s employer brand and nurture talent.

Using the Email marketing tools within Eploy, with branded campaigns for each service, enables the Recruitment Marketing Team to implement this across each workflow. Those who then go on to engage with the email content, and subsequently apply for a role, are already warmed up talent who are familiar with the Practice Plus Group brand. Audiences can be segmented specifically by the criteria set, such as those who are at screening call stage or have gone through the upfront validation checks in the process.

Rich Recruitment Data

The recruitment data from Eploy provides clarity around the candidate journey and the success of the recruitment team’s activities. The data builds trust and is imperative to the ongoing challenges the competitive environment of the healthcare sector to attract and retain the best talent.

Lucia Di Gaeta, Senior Recruitment Marketing Manager, Practice Plus Group commented, “I’m always discovering something new in Eploy and ways to improve. I discovered how I can get further granularity on the data of our recruitment marketing and talent pool engagement. Every email we issue to candidates and our talent pool is logged at candidate level. I discovered that if I create the group for a list, I get aggregate data. I can see who’s clicked, if they’ve applied or been through the process and engaged which means we can look from a pipeline point of view.

The recruitment marketing module for me is where I go to understand whether what I’m doing is impacting the pipeline. I’m able to make tweaks around the tracking to ‘deep dive’ into the data.

“When trialing a new job board, I can track if that job board is bringing us any candidates and where the candidates reach in the process. When talking to third parties about services they provide to us I can track and report on actual results. What’s incredibly valuable is to see the correlation between application volume and the status of the application. Any rejections can be identified to understand quality and what needs to be done to optimise it.”

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