Raise Recruiting Rapid Recruitment for Ontario Ministry of Health

From COVID Crisis to Rapid Recruitment

The challenge for the Ontario Ministry of Health was the urgent need to hire and onboard 500 new contract tracers and have them start within weeks – not months. Being stretched to capacity represented another challenge as they had limited resources to coordinate a group of this size.

At Raise, the high volume, quick turnaround recruitment project was one of the most daunting projects they had tackled. The team had to deliver results using a combination of people, process, and technology to mobilise the essential project that required a rapid response. It was an opportunity to do their part to assist the government and the community during a global pandemic.

The magnitude of the project posed time-sensitive obstacles and big-picture visibility concerns. Being tasked to work in tandem with the Ontario Ministry of Health, they refined their internal approval processes to recruit and deliver in the timeframe required and have since increased the number of hires.

The power of Talent Pooling

Determined to meet the challenge of this monumental project, the team at Raise got to work immediately. Knowing the value of proactive recruitment, the team began attracting quality candidates and inviting them to create a LiveHire profile for their Talent Community. These proactively sourced candidates – curated in LiveHire’s Talent Pool feature – were critical to Raises ability to hit the ground running when the project officially began.

Raise used LiveHire for everything – making it the central source of truth for their global team of recruiters. Resolute about maximizing LiveHire’s features to define each process made the technology integral to the workflow. The mobility of the candidate profiles to switch between talent pool buckets enabled multiple recruiters to work at once while simultaneously delivering a seamless candidate experience through the entire recruitment process. Visibility over these stages helped to control the workflow – exposing potential backlogs and highlighting stages that needed additional resources to move it along.

A centralised workflow

The team received close to 12,000 application inquiries for this project. Therefore, establishing unhindered candidate visibility from the beginning was crucial. Within LiveHire, candidate profiles are pre-populated with resume details giving consistency through format – and making it easy to read quickly.

Using the candidate profile features to manage workflows gave the team a birds-eye view for efficient project management.

Here are a few examples of how they achieved that:

•Effortless team collaboration by referring to the notes section in a candidate profile. This gave them easy internal insights when needing to glance over a profile quickly.

• A full view of the message history with SMS functionality gave a record of all communication with each candidate. Having sent over 5,000 messages in one month, that’s a considerable amount of communication to keep track of manually.

•The ultimate time-saver was the message templates. Having 22 high quality and consistent prepared messages sent out in bulk made communicating with thousands of people possible. In total 6,139 messages were sent out using the bulk message templates – a feature that makes working at scale possible.

• The rating option on candidate profiles allowed them to prioritize within candidate pools when hiring in phases. They began with the 4 and 5 star-rated profiles as they progressed through to the hiring stage. This ensured quality candidates were always sourced.

• Additional candidate requirements to fulfil during the recruitment stage, such as the e-skills course, were recorded with the highlight feature. Completed candidate requirements could then be funnelled through to review and progress.

•Once through to the onboarding stage, the team created categories of employees using the Talent Pool feature to distinguish groups working various shifts across times and days. This allowed them to do two essential things; bulk message important information such as shift times and instantly see the number of employees within that shift block. This instant visibility made fulfilling candidate quotas simple because they knew where to dial the hiring needs up or down.

From a project management perspective, the swim lanes assisted with candidates’ progression through the recruitment funnel. This became faster as the team became familiar with using one source of truth for all candidate information.

Within seven days of the job opening, 42% of hires were made. The median time-to-hire was 13 days over the project, which they attribute to a collaboration of process and technology.

The hiring process became so rapid the recruitment team had to slow down to ensure a smooth onboarding process for the Ontario Ministry of Health to manage.

Breaking through barriers

For Raise switching from their previous ATS to LiveHire has been a breath of fresh air. Implemented in July 2020, they quickly familiarised themselves with all the features and product capabilities. Aligning key features to process steps and team training gave them the right combination of ‘people, process, and technology’ to manage the project successfully.

The philosophy of Raise is ‘slow down to go fast’ – evaluating how they are going to approach something to do it right. This mindset of focusing on how they will go fast without compromising on quality speaks to their tenacity. It was never a question of if they could achieve this project but how they could best achieve it. Leveraging intuitive, mobile-friendly technology has been a game-changer for the team at Raise.

For a long time, people regard what they see as achievable as what has come before. But just like the story of breaking the four-minute mile, when people see what is possible, they have the confidence to break through barriers. That is what Raise has done when it comes to rapid volume hiring. Since the successful recruitment for the Ontario Ministry of Health, other provinces are looking to them to manage their COVID-19 staffing resources, which has positioned them as specialists in rapid response recruitment. The ability to scale the recruitment and onboarding process has never been more important due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

A project of this size and complexity requires tightly managed processes to efficiently source applicants and perform the necessary tests and checks to maintain quality assurance – and that’s all before onboarding – which would typically take several weeks. The logistics of escalating a recruitment process of this volume of candidates required professional project management from a reputable recruitment firm.

The recruitment of hundreds of contact tracers to Raise, specialists in volume hiring for government agencies, was a win for the Ontario Ministry of Health. The program also serves as a blueprint for future volume hiring initiatives, either for COVID-19 or any rapid response recruitment project.