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Staffing and recruitment firm C&A Industries has experienced tremendous organic growth over the last 10 years. It is the parent company of specialized workforce solution firms Aureus Medical Group, Aureus Group, AurStaff, and Celebrity Staff, along with FocusOne Solutions, a managed services provider. Other C&A firms include AurTravel, a travel agency; AurHomes, a corporate housing provider; and The Kim Foundation, a non-profit affiliate. With 30 percent growth over just the last two years, it is Training & Development’s responsibility to ensure that all employees receive the same quality of training.
The Medical New Hire Training for Aureus Medical accounts for more than 70 percent of C&A Industries’ employees and six of C&A Industries’ eight affiliate businesses. The goal for this training is to increase employee retention by 3 percent by January 2021. The company aims to accomplish this by aligning culture across the eight internal business segments and by increasing its talent development offerings by 13 percent by January 2021.
Program Details
The Medical New Hire Program has experienced many alterations over time, most of them aimed at encouraging a reduced time to competency.
Under the direction of C&A Industries’ CEO and executive director of Training & Development (T&D), the team condensed the initial 12-week course down to 10 weeks of variable training tailored to the individual employee experience on the job. Rather than complete a standardized training program, each employee receives training classes that address the individual’s specific challenges and successes while ramping up, what milestones he or she has achieved, and observed performance actions by managers while sitting on-team.
The staffing industry is known to have a one-size-fits all training program when ramping up new sales employees with a six-month ramp-up time. C&A Industries aims to train specifically to the single industry in which the new hire is marketing for seven different medical industries in total and to know the entire candidate/client process from start to finish. The program also is differentiated between candidate-driven markets and job-driven markets; each market requires different sales tactics in order to be successful.
The company addresses all learning styles by offering multiple modes of training, including in-class facilitation (including the Executive Forum facilitated directly by the CEO and general manager), on-the-job training, Q&A panel sessions with subject matter experts, online simulations completed in the computer lab, role-playing, mentor feedback discussions, and online videos. The training timeline is as follows:
Week 1: Getting Started
Week 2: Learning to Qualify
Week 3: Completing the Hire Flow
Week 4: Matching and Pitching Jobs
Week 5: Putting It All Together
Week 6: Candidate Management
Week 7: Getting Creative with Recruiting
Week 8: Home Stretch
Week 9 and 10: One Foot Out the Door
By Week 2, new employees are moved from the training cubes to their full-time desks on teams and begin to have weekly one-on-one meetings with a trainer and branch manager; these meetings occur on a monthly basis for the duration of their employment to identify if additional training opportunities are needed. Mentorships are pivotal to the new hire training program, as new hires meet weekly throughout the duration of the training and are tasked with completing weekly progress sheets. The mentors aid T&D in identifying where new employees are at and what needs to be done to better support them. In addition, by the time an employee has reached Week 6, action plan training is available as an option for successful competency training, and can be extended beyond the initial 10-week training timeframe if needed. After six months of successful on-the-job application of duties, the new hire is placed into the Placement Process Sales Training program.
Results
Observed actions as identified on Account Manager Customer Service Evaluations across all eight affiliate business as identified by third-party contract clients included:
- An increase in overall response rate
- Consistency in communication and message when working with two or more supervisors
- Teams operating under a more unified vision and focus
- Team leads approaching circumstances of conflict with new strategies and becoming more solutions minded
- Increased positivity
Last year, C&A Industries increased the frequency of Medical Hire Start Dates from eight classes to nine total classes for an increase of 12.5 percent with new hires from six of eight affiliate businesses. The company also utilized the Jump Start Program on two occasions to accommodate three affiliate businesses that needed to start employees earlier than a Medical call date could accommodate. These additions accounted for a 4 percent increase in total talent development offerings. As a result of an increase in offerings of 17 percent across all eight affiliate business segments, C&A Industries’ companywide retention rate rose to 87.2 percent, up 2.1 percent from the year before. Additionally, the reduction in training time from 12 weeks to 10 produced significant savings.