GRI's Neutral Vendor Model
Penthia Care’s challenges are exactly the sort which GRI’s service offering solves.
GRI is not a recruitment agency. Nor do we own any recruitment firms. We are, instead, what is known as a ‘neutral vendor’. Completely independent workforce management experts who transform commercial arrangements with recruitment agencies, improve their service delivery, drive up standards of care and even reduce reliance on agency staff.
GRI analyses four weeks of invoices from Penthia’s existing supplying agencies (a piece of no-obligation consultancy). This reveals certain agencies are charging up to 206.7% per hour more for a healthcare assistant than the average charge rate. The figure for supplying RGNs is 146.2% more.
GRI prepares a white paper with our findings and recommendations, calculating a cost-saving figure should our model be adopted, and a detailed plan of how it would be up and running within 8-12 weeks.
Once Penthia contracts to work with GRI, we engage with them to draw up a list of preferred, high-performing agency partners from their existing agencies. We then renegotiate fairer commercial costs for supply and impose higher standards amongst these agencies, through the form of SLA agreements. GRI has a track record of onboarding, on average, 95% of an organisation’s existing, preferred agencies. This means if a home has carers they like using, they can almost always continue to do so.
Should an agency decline to supply under the new terms, GRI can recommend a replacement from our network of over 3,500 trusted and contracted agencies.
e-tips® is GRI’s easy to use online portal through which Penthia can alert agencies to vacancies, and check any candidates proposed (including compliance items and CVs) before choosing whether to book them.
We configure e-tips® for the needs of each individual client. A bespoke drop-down menu is created for every Penthia care home, so when a hiring manager wants to post a job to the agency panel, they simply click a couple of times on pre-populated lists of roles and requirements and all the agencies are alerted.
Required compliance items are also agreed and mandated in the system for each job – meaning no candidate can be proposed without having the requisite documents/certificates in place. These can be easily checked.
Agency charge rates and rates of pay for workers are ‘locked down’ in e-tips® so agencies can not deviate from this when a candidate is booked and the cost of a temp is known ahead of time.
Cathy Milne opts to add an authorisation layer to any recruitment – which means Penthia HQ receives an alert when a home wants to hire someone.
Finally, e-tips® can be set-up to run any bank management recruitment through its systems, ensuring that Penthia has full 360 visibility across its entire non-permanent recruitment.
Recognising that care homes may have urgent requirements out of hours, we establish a dedicated fulfilment number for Penthia, which allows home staff to call in to our fulfilment team, who then chase the agencies to ensure vacancies are filled. This frees up even more time in each care home. The fulfilment team can also assist ahead of time – booking shifts further in the future.
GRI’s implementation team then offers guidance on how to roll out the new GRI process, e-tips® use and fulfilment hotline number to Penthia’s homes and hiring managers. We also run user training via web-ex. It takes a trained user just a few minutes to add a job, check a candidate’s compliance items and book that worker via our e-tips® system.
Training is also run on the timesheet and invoicing process – which is extremely simple as e-tips® creates just one invoice, so there’s very little admin for a care home. Users can also be set-up as timesheet approvers. This means they receive a notification via email and can easily click to approve.
Every field in e-tips® can be reported on ensuring in-depth Management Information is recorded throughout the entire e-tips® recruitment process. From why the vacancy arose in the first place to which homes typically book the most temp staff, or whose bank performs best, MI dashboards are built depending on Penthia’s objectives. We also confirm who can access these dashboards within Penthia, and train and set these people up as super users.
GRI -- The Next Generation MSP
