In the world of applied behavior analysis (ABA) therapy, there is a consistent order of events that will bring your organization success:
Hire more behavioral technicians ➡️ serve more families ➡️ grow your business.
Simple, right?
If you’re in the ABA therapy space (or any home healthcare space), you know why it’s a lot more complex than that:
- These are incredibly hard jobs that require selflessness and serious commitment to children and their families living with autism.
- The job requires a significant amount of training (and usually the company is fronting the bill on that).
- The emotional and physical toll of working with children and families can burn out behavior technicians quickly, causing extremely high turnover.
I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Steffanie Chaviano, vice president of talent at Autism Learning Partners, and heard how they turned hiring around for an organization where staffing is the limiting factor to their growth — a pretty tall task.
Here’s what she said:
What are some challenges that come with hiring skilled healthcare roles, like behavior technicians?
Steffanie Chaviano: It is such a hard job and I think for people that don't know what being a behavior technician is, they see the job posting and they think, “oh my gosh, I could work with a kid who needs help, I'm gonna make such a big impact and it's gonna be so rewarding.”
Then you're walking into a family's home for the first time after you've gone through extensive training and it is incredibly nerve wracking. But those families desperately need these services. So it was so critical for us to figure out a recruiting system that was gonna be able to increase the volume of behavior technicians that we're hiring so that more families get access to care.
How did you discover a technology vendor that fit your hiring needs?
SC: We knew that we had to hire more behavior technicians and we saw that even adding people to the recruiting team did not translate to an increase in hires per recruiter. Our system was broken. So we knew that we had to incorporate some type of automation at the top of our hiring process.
We soon realized that there were still many parts of the process that could be more efficient if we decided to move our entire hiring process into Paradox — using it as our ATS and automating other parts of our recruiting process.
How did conversational AI help you transform your hiring process?
SC: Our recruiters used to have to do a ton of paper chasing, not just with filling out forms, but making sure they were filled out correctly. They were responsible for manually keeping track of where everyone was in the process. We could never get a good read on how many phone screens we were actually doing because there was just so much cold calling that was happening to applicants that were coming in. So as applicants are applying, we would see a ton become unresponsive and our recruiters had to be able to reach back out to those people to keep them engaged.
Now, in the process, that's all automated.
Retargeting of candidates is all happening on an automated basis. Recruiters know exactly what their day is gonna look like every single day. There's no more form chasing anymore with Paradox, [they] handle all of that for us.
How has efficient hiring impacted your business growth?
SC: It was probably an hour to an hour and a half a day per recruiter previously that was dedicated to just figuring out who they needed to follow up with. Now that is gone from the process.
We have all seen the benefits of what that automation has brought. We previously were hiring 400 new hires a month. Now, without adding any additional headcount, we've been able to 550 to 600 hires per month.
What does the future look like for Autism Learning Partners?
SC: Our goal is to make sure that we are pulling families off the waitlist as much as possible. Can we get them into care sooner? That's why this is just so incredibly important. We have so many efforts right now all around retention. We are calling it “BT Care”— what can we do to hold onto behavior technicians longer? And one of those things is within the recruiting and onboarding process, really making sure that we are giving a very accurate depiction of what the role is like.
I feel like our journey with Paradox has taken stages. Now, we obviously can get high volume. We want to make sure that our quality is still high. Can it be even higher than what it's been? Can we be more selective? Can we change our selection criteria? So we're also in the process of doing some research to figure out like, what is the profile of a successful behavior technician?
