Find candidates that meet your business’s needs and learn strategies to help keep them employed with you.

Attracting and Retaining Staff

The pandemic induced a national staffing crisis, which has had damaging impacts on the child care sector. This impacts the ability for you to provide critical essential child care services for the community and also places your child care business at risk. Now more than ever, staffing is an integral component of the child care business model. Without the necessary staffing in place, other components of the business’s ability to operate are at risk. While some external factors may be out of your control, many others are within your control, with actions that you can consider today to address staffing shortages.

As you read about strategies to attract the best talent for your program and offer increased compensation and staff benefits, it’s important to note that a staple feature of the Child Care Counts: Stabilization Payment Program is that the funds can be used to meet the pressing challenges that the staffing crisis has presented. There are also ways to stretch your grant funds further by offering incentives to your staff that produce meaningful value for them without a high price tag.

Creating a Three-Part Job Announcement

When recruiting new staff, you may want to consider having both a job description and a job announcement for the position you are filling. The job description defines the job and the minimum requirements for the position. It functions like your contract with the employee by letting them know the important things that somebody who does this job needs to know or be able to do. The full job description provides a lot of details that, while relevant, may not be necessary to explain upfront. Remember that the WISER platform has templates you can use as a starting point for your job descriptions.

A job announcement, on the other hand, serves a different purpose. The role of the job announcement is to present to prospective applicants, “Here’s why you should come work with us.” It is more about creating a document that not only tells a person about the job but also explains to them why they should want to work for you. Think of it as trying to sell the job to an individual. To attract top talent, it is well worth the effort to take the time to craft a high-quality job announcement. In his book, Lean Recruitment, Gary Romano of Civitas Strategies recommends a three-part job announcement comprised of three main sections called the “why, what, and how.”

Part 1: The “Why”

In the first section of your job announcement, you will want to explain the “why” — why an individual should choose your organization as their place of employment. This doesn’t have to be lengthy — maybe five or six sentences — but you want to convey what qualities about your business will make them want to take that step into the unknown and come work for you. How do you stand apart as an employer? Is your workplace a fun environment? Is it an opportunity to help children who need your services the most? What inspires you and your current employees about working at your business? What is exciting about it? What do employees get out of being a part of this organization? Those are the things you want to include in this first section. This is also where you will want to include your basic business information such as where you are located, your neighborhood, and what is nearby.

In the next section, you will want to talk about the “what.” This section says what skills and capabilities are most essential for success in the position. However, be sure to keep it brief. Research shows that the more skills and capabilities you include in your job announcement, the less likely somebody is to really assess it and apply. They begin to see all the things that they can’t do rather than the ones they can. So, keep this section to the seven or eight most critical items that you feel are most important for them to succeed in the position.

So now that you have your job announcement, how do you get it into the hands of the people that you want to hire? Most people start with posting the job announcement online at sites such as Indeed or on local job boards.  Using WI ECE Jobs in the WISER platform gives you posting access to Indeed and 11 other posting locations. Using social media and state-wide and national professional associations is another approach to getting the word out.

There are also active approaches you can take to search for talent, such as reaching out to potential candidates who are in your network, and also those in your network that can help you connect with potential candidates. These are folks like your friends, your current employees, and the families that you currently serve. It can be really important to let them know that you are actively hiring because they can serve as your most effective connectors. Another useful group of connectors can be other professionals in the child care field. Not everyone is extremely competitive and there may be people that you know in the child care field who don’t see you as a threat who would be happy to help connect you with anyone who comes to mind.