For Participants enrolled in Self-Direction, one of your roles is to hire your own Direct Care Professionals (DCP), or employees. Before you hire anyone, it’s important to understand employment process. From identifying candidates, to interviewing and training, there are many tasks involved. While the process may seem daunting, PAS and the MDHHS can help you understand each step along the way.
Check out the tasks below before reading more in-depth about them:
- Selecting a Financial Management Service provider. If you’re with PAS, you can cross this off!
- Prepare application and interviewing documents.
- Conduct interviews with candidates.
- Perform background checks and review driving records.
- Hire your Direct Care Professional (Employee).
- Train your new hire.
- Submit timesheets and documentation.
- Receive additional support.
Selecting an FMS Provider
After selecting an FMS provider, you will have a understanding of your budget. This will help guide in you in knowing how much you can pay your employee and how often they will work for you.
Prepare Application and Interviewing Documents
Finding the right talent can go a long way towards a mutually beneficial working relationship with your employee. In this stage, you’ll draft a job description, interview questions, and share your job posting.
Your job description will help prospective employees understand what you are looking for in a Direct Care Professional. Clearly identifying your support needs will help candidates be able to match their skills with your needs. Although not required, you (Employer) may find it important to ask for 2-3 professional references. Professional references can speak on the applicants previous experience and confirm the information provided during the interview as well as on their resume and application. It’s important to make sure these references are not close friends or family that will hold a personal bias towards the applicant.
When you’ve polished up your job description, you’re able to share your job posting. Some key elements to remember when you’re posting include a job title, date of posting and when the candidate can expect to begin working, and the job location (city, state). You can post your job on a popular job board like Indeed. On Indeed, candidates can search for jobs using name and location filters. This makes it extra important to include a relevant name and location. Otherwise, you can try sharing your job posting on social media channels like Facebook and LinkedIn.
Before you interview any candidate, it is important to draft a list of interview questions. These questions will help you learn more about each candidate’s prior experience and let you learn more about them on a personal level. These questions will standardize your interviews and guide you through each conversation. To provide candidates with a fair and equal interview process, candidates should be presented with a similar set of questions. Though, don’t be afraid to ask follow-up questions to learn more about an individual candidate’s experience.
PAS is able to provide you generic job applications, sample interview questions, background and driving checks. If you need further support in the interview process, PAS is able help during your interviews.
Interview Stage
After you (Employer) select a qualified group of candidates, you will be ready to interview them. Before interviewing, candidates will have filled out and submitted your application. Depending on the number of candidates and your personal preferences, there may be multiple rounds of interviews where narrow down your applicants at each stage.
Before extending a provisional offer of employment, it’s important to contact your preferred candidate’s professional references to confirm their interview statements and application materials. After this is completed, you may be ready to extend an offer of employment, pending a background check. PAS will be able to perform this background check for you.
To learn more about conducting background check and the rest of the hiring process, please read What do I Need to do to Hire a New Employee? (Part II).
For more information on the employee hiring process as a whole, please read the MDHHS’ Self-Direction Technical Requirement Implementation Guide.