Why NDIS Providers Should Use a Hiring Rubric

With NDIS providers struggling to hire sufficient staff, well-designed and ongoing support worker recruitment is essential to meeting client needs, providing quality support services and growing your business.

With a hiring rubric, you'll be able to identify the most appropriate candidate for your NDIS support worker vacancies. This will support you in making more objective hiring decisions and reducing unconscious bias.

A hiring rubric makes the recruitment process quicker and simpler for you and your NDIS support worker hires alike. And, having hired someone who's a good fit for the role, it will be easier to retain them.

You can also present your hiring rubric as evidence in your NDIS audit. This will help you demonstrate that you’re meeting the Human Resources Management requirements of the Core Module of the NDIS Practice Standards. 

Types of Hiring Criteria to Consider

When drawing up your NDIS support worker hiring rubric, there are four main types of criteria that you should consider.

Credentials

Credentials include certifications, training and vaccine certificates. Registered providers should add the NDIS worker screening check to this list. All your support worker team needs this check before they can begin working. Unregistered providers can also choose to ask for the NDIS worker screening check.

Experience

Are you happy to hire an NDIS support worker without any experience? Or, would you prefer your new hire to have already spent a certain number of years working as an NDIS support worker? Do you want them to have had specific experiences relevant to your business, such as working with people with autism?

Skills

An NDIS support worker needs a range of hard and soft skills to provide quality personal care. While hard skills can be taught, soft skills such as patience, critical thinking and flexibility are often a question of personality.

Work Preferences and Styles

Work preferences and styles will determine whether a support worker is a good fit for your NDIS provider business. This includes factors such as preferred work hours, support from management, client and service types.

How to Define Your Hiring Criteria

Let's take a step-by-step look at how to define the hiring criteria for NDIS support workers.

1. Outline the Legal Minimum for Legal and NDIS Compliance

Some items can immediately be added to your list. It's your responsibility to ask for proof of the right to work, for example. For registered providers, an NDIS worker screening check is also essential.

Depending on the support services and NDIS participant type you're hiring for, you may also need to check additional credentials.

2. Decide What's Required for the Role

Make a list of what the NDIS support worker will be required to do as part of their job, such as personal care duties, travelling to remote locations and updating participant records. Based on that list, what skills, experiences and traits will your support worker benefit from?

3. Decide What Your Team and Company Needs

What will your team need from your new NDIS support worker? For example, are you looking for someone who can take on a mentorship role? Provide early morning shift cover? Would you prefer a new hire who likes phone calls and face-to-face check-ins or who embraces support worker apps and other modern technology?

4. Prioritise Your Hiring Criteria

The perfect employee doesn’t exist. So, now that you know what your ideal NDIS support worker looks like, you need to decide which criteria are most important — and which ones you can be more flexible about. 

You can do this in several ways. One option is to separate these criteria into essential, important and useful. Alternatively, you can assign your criteria numerical ranks. 

You can also use a mixture of these systems. While the essential criteria are non-negotiable, you can rank the important and useful ones.

5. Create Standard Interview Questions for Your Hiring Criteria

Having decided which criteria are most important in your NDIS support worker new hire, you need to create interview questions for each of them.

Some criteria, such as certifications and past experiences, are easy to ask about. Others, however, may require more creative thinking on your part. Consider using situational questions. These use the structure "What would you do if...?", and they help you evaluate candidates' work styles, critical thinking skills and priorities.

How to Evaluate Support Worker Hiring Criteria in an Interview

Making a hiring decision can be challenging, especially when multiple candidates meet all or most of your criteria. Turning your support worker hiring criteria into a rubric can help you compare candidates and decide who to hire. 

Print a list of the criteria ahead of the interview, and for each one, score the interviewee. You can give them a simple 0 or 1, or you can score them out of 5. This will make it easier to decide which candidate best meets your hiring criteria.

From Job Offer to First Shift: Streamlining Support Worker Hiring

Identifying the ideal support worker is the first step in building a talented team. But once you've extended a job offer, you want things to go as smoothly — and quickly — as possible.

That's where our software for disability support providers comes in. With ShiftCare, you can onboard and roster a new support worker in minutes. They can set their preferred availability and check their roster with the dedicated support provider app, in addition to bidding on shifts via our job board.

Plus, ShiftCare offers an extensive range of NDIS integrations for easier claims and improved NDIS compliance, in addition to client funds and document management, accounting integrations, time-tracking, expenses tracking and more.

Discover how easy managing your workforce can be. Try ShiftCare for free.