Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust was nationally recognised earlier this year with a Skills for Health digital innovation award for ‘leading the way’ in process automation. Director of people operations, Sarah Hayden, shares how using a digital tool has helped speed up recruitment and save staff time
It is well noted that two of the biggest challenges for NHS organisations is the ability to keep pace with, and quickly implement, new technology, and lengthy overbearing recruitment processes putting delays into a system desperate to recruit and retain skilled staff.
In short, especially when it comes to qualified positions, if there is a vacancy which can be filled, we cannot get a person in fast enough.
In 2021, our recruitment processes were inefficient and ineffective, taking an average of 13 weeks to onboard candidates. The considerable burden this put on teams already working at capacity, plus the reliance on temporary workers, created an unsustainable and unhealthy model. For an organisation which prides itself on spending public money wisely and strives to continually improve patient care, this was untenable.
Our recruitment team, working with IT colleagues, wanted to improve the experience for both managers and candidates, reducing repetitive, time-consuming processes and releasing more time to focus on delivering patient care.
We began a transformation programme of our recruitment processes, using Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to improve effectiveness and efficiency, reduce time to hire and improve the onboarding experience of new staff.
The aim was to reduce mundane administrative tasks for managers and the recruitment team, streamline paperwork, use an online system called DocuSign to improve the candidate experience and data quality, and release time for recruitment team colleagues to reinvest in activities that would add more organisational value.
We engaged with managers and candidates to make sure the processes we planned to automate were co-designed. These suggestions included:
- Reducing the number of forms a new starter has to complete (because do we ever love a bureaucratic process in the NHS) and making sure the ones they do have to complete, can be done so electronically,
- Making the onboarding process less dependent on the NHS recruitment system, TRAC.
The aspiration at the beginning of the project was to reduce time to hire from an average of 13 weeks to 10.
And so we built and launched our recruitment bot, affectionately named ‘Ravi’.
Ravi automates everything from adding a draft vacancy on to our recruitment system ready for authorisation, advertising the vacancy on various sites, inviting candidates to interview, drafting and sending conditional offers, through to sending contracts and welcome emails on the candidate’s first day.
This has released 24,177 hours of time back to the team – the equivalent of more than 12 full time posts and £325,000. As a result, the team has also been able to remove vacant posts, which has saved a further £135,000.
The impact on the recruitment of candidates has also been significant, with the original target of reducing the time to hire to 10 weeks, reached and exceeded – it now takes on average nine weeks. Vacancies are now filled faster, reducing reliance on bank and agency use. This is having a direct impact on the safety and quality of care our patients receive.
The streamlining of paperwork and rebranding of all correspondence has made the recruitment process simpler and more appealing to candidates – we regularly hear praise for the positive recruitment experience received.
This freed up opportunity to restructure the recruitment team’s focus to consultative rather than administrative, enabling stronger relationships to be fostered with managers and candidates. We were able to spend more effort supporting people to write effective adverts, focus on hard-to-fill roles, run bespoke recruitment campaigns and pro-active advertisement of vacancies – all of which are vital in an economy where all NHS organisations are fishing in the same talent pool to attract new colleagues to our teams.
RPA has been something we’ve been working on for about four years and the results speak for themselves. Across our human resources services alone, there are more than 100 automations in place. There are another 115 processes automated across KCHFT, reducing the admin burden on our clinical teams and freeing up more time for patient care.
The project has been so impactful the team has been asked to share their expertise at national NHS events and conferences, including a briefing at the House of Lords.
We have also been delighted to be recognised in two national awards: Skills for Health: Our Health Heroes Awards Digital Innovation Award and the #GoGiveHope award from our partners at Automation Anywhere (AA). The latter recognises an organisation that has inspired hope through its use of technology for good, aligning to AA’s social impact mission to fuel the future of work that empowers non-profits and uplifts human lives.
But more than anything, this work proves the impact technology and non-clinical support services can have on patient care. For colleagues working in this team, that has been really special.
