Why I/DD leaders need to look at the entire hiring journey
Your organization needs more Direct Support Professionals.
So you increase advertising.
Applications increase.
But hiring doesn’t improve nearly as much as expected.
What happens next?
Often, we spend more money trying to generate even more applicants.
Sometimes that’s necessary.
But before assuming the top of the funnel is the problem, leaders should ask a different question:
What is happening to the applicants we already have?
An application isn’t a hire
Consider everything that has to happen between someone clicking “Apply” and showing up for their first day.
They apply.
Someone reviews the application.
They’re contacted.
A phone screen happens.
An interview is scheduled.
They attend.
A decision is made.
An offer is extended.
Pre-employment begins.
Requirements are completed.
Orientation is scheduled.
They show up.
Every transition is a place where a candidate can disappear.
If leadership sees only two numbers, applications and hires, most of that journey is invisible.
Before increasing advertising, find the bottleneck
Imagine 100 people apply.
That’s encouraging.
But what if only 50 receive timely contact?
Or 40 interviews are scheduled but 20 candidates attend?
What if offers are being accepted, but candidates are disappearing during pre-employment?
Each situation requires a different solution.
Applicant volume may be perfectly healthy.
The problem could be response time.
Interview scheduling.
Communication.
Candidate fit.
The offer process.
A handoff between departments.
The wait before orientation.
Without visibility into the process, leaders can easily spend money solving the wrong problem.
Speed is part of the candidate experience
Good DSP and case manager candidates aren’t necessarily waiting exclusively for your organization.
They may apply to several employers.
The organization that responds quickly has an advantage.
That doesn’t mean rushing evaluation or lowering hiring standards.
Speed and quality aren’t opposites.
The goal is to eliminate unnecessary waiting while preserving the parts of the process that help you make good hiring decisions.
Your departments are invisible to the candidate
Internally, recruitment may end at the offer.
HR may own the next step.
Training handles orientation.
Operations takes over on the first day.
Those distinctions may be necessary organizationally.
But the candidate doesn’t experience four departments.
They experience one organization.
If communication disappears during a handoff, they don’t think:
“There must be an unclear division of responsibility between Recruitment and Onboarding.”
They think:
“Nobody has contacted me.”
That’s why leaders should care about the entire candidate journey, even when no single department owns every piece of it.
Ask better recruitment questions
Instead of only asking:
How many people did we hire?
Leadership should be able to ask:
Are we generating applicants?
Are we contacting them quickly?
Are candidates responding?
Are interviews being scheduled?
Are people showing up?
Are we making offers?
Are candidates accepting them?
Are they completing pre-employment?
Are they reaching orientation?
Where are we losing the most people?
Now the organization can diagnose before reacting.
Don’t pour more into a leaking funnel
Advertising matters.
Recruitment marketing matters.
Applicant volume matters.
But none of those can compensate indefinitely for a hiring process that isn’t moving people effectively.
Before approving the next increase in recruitment advertising, make sure someone can show you what happens after people apply.
Because sometimes your staffing problem isn’t that too few people are interested.
It’s that too many interested people are getting lost on the way to becoming employees.
you feedback.