How One Colorado County Cut its Child Welfare Hiring Time by More Than Half

Some child wel­fare agen­cies see 90% of their staff depart over the course of a year, accord­ing to the U.S. Depart­ment of Health and Human Ser­vices. Equal­ly dis­cour­ag­ing: These vacan­cies can take up to three months to fill, the Amer­i­can Pub­lic Health Asso­ci­a­tion estimates.

Yet, thanks to the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s On the Front­line ini­tia­tive — a mul­ti­year effort to help strength­en child wel­fare work­forces — one Col­orado coun­ty is chal­leng­ing these trends.

Staff at Jef­fer­son County’s Divi­sion of Chil­dren, Youth, Fam­i­lies and Adult Pro­tec­tion saw their ​“time to fill” win­dow shrink from 72 days in 2014 to just 27 days in 2017, accord­ing to a new Casey Foun­da­tion report, Five Steps to a Stronger Child Wel­fare Work­force.

“Our biggest bar­ri­er was the num­ber of vacan­cies,” says Natal­ie Mall, the agency’s asso­ciate direc­tor. ​“When there are so many vacan­cies, everyone’s work­load gets larg­er and peo­ple can’t see the light at the end of the tun­nel, so they leave and the cycle starts all over again.”

Five Steps, free to down­load, high­lights best prac­tices for address­ing high turnover rates and ensur­ing staff mem­bers are hired, trained and retained to best sup­port chil­dren and families.

Mall says that On the Front­line helped Jef­fer­son County:

• Iden­ti­fy the great­est chal­lenge. ​“For us, we rec­og­nized our tenured staff were leav­ing because work­loads were so high,” Mall says. ​“A third of our work­force was vacant, which put stress on our team and this trick­led down to the chil­dren in care and their fam­i­lies. Chil­dren were being intro­duced to so many new case­work­ers that they did not know who they could trust.”
• Cre­ate sys­tems and process­es to make hir­ing less labo­ri­ous. Mall works with the human resources depart­ment to cre­ate a con­tin­u­ous post­ing to reduce the ​“time to fill” vacan­cies, instead of cre­at­ing a job post­ing every time some­one resigns.
• Lever­age rela­tion­ships and a Work­force Inno­va­tion Team. Jef­fer­son Coun­ty pri­or­i­tized cre­at­ing strong rela­tion­ships between human resources staff and agency lead­ers and estab­lished a Work­force Inno­va­tion Team that meets month­ly to review turnover and reten­tion data to con­tin­u­al­ly enhance the hir­ing process.
• Cre­ate hir­ing teams. Jef­fer­son Coun­ty cre­at­ed ded­i­cat­ed teams — small groups of two super­vi­sors and two case­work­ers — who screen and inter­view can­di­dates on a month­ly basis. This effort also helped to increase diver­si­ty among staff and boost team morale.
• Iden­ti­fy core com­pe­ten­cies. Mall’s team iden­ti­fied the core behav­ioral com­pe­ten­cies need­ed to be a suc­cess­ful case­work­er in Jef­fer­son Coun­ty. Dur­ing inter­views, Jef­fer­son Coun­ty screened for these com­pe­ten­cies, such as adapt­abil­i­ty, col­lab­o­ra­tion, ini­tia­tive and an abil­i­ty to facil­i­tate change.

“The Five Steps pub­li­ca­tion is a help­ful guide to not only improve the work­force but also to bet­ter serve chil­dren and fam­i­lies in need,” Mall says. ​“So many peo­ple are depend­ing on us to pro­vide them the best ser­vice and care. We need the most qual­i­fied and com­mit­ted peo­ple to be able to do so.”