Halving recruitment time and increasing compliance: How CASPA is streamlining community services hiring 

A fast-growing community services provider with a complex workforce

CASPA (Community Accommodation and Support Agency), a not-for-profit disability and child protection organisation, has grown rapidly in recent years. Operating across regional and remote ares of the Northern Territory, New South Wales and Queensland, with recent expansion into Western Australia, their workforce has doubled to around 700 employees in just five years.

“It’s really fast-paced. We’ve got full-time, part-time and casual staff and a high turnover in our frontline support staff, which means we’re always recruiting. At our busiest, we’re hiring 20 to 50 employees a month across multiple locations,” said Lorrisa Hos, Senior HR Advisor

Keeping up with the pace of that recruitment used to be a massive challenge because of volume demands and manual and disconnected systems in place.

Manual processes and compliance challenges were holding HR back

Before implementing Employment Hero, CASPA’s recruitment and onboarding processes were time-consuming, prone to compliance risks and heavily reliant on manual work. Their existing systems didn’t integrate well.

“We had so much manual handling. Everything was separate. One system for onboarding, one for recruitment, another for compliance. None of them talked to each other. It was really hard to keep up. We were spending all our time chasing documents, some employees requiring filing over 15 documents, cross-checking spreadsheets and making sure people were compliant,” Lorrisa said.

The inefficiencies were more than just frustrating, they meant the HR team couldn’t focus on longer-term strategic work.

“There were so many admin-heavy processes that we couldn’t spend time on other projects like continuous improvement.”

Recruitment is faster and easier with automated pre-employment workflows

With Employment Hero, CASPA has transformed how they manage recruitment and onboarding, especially in the pre-employment phase.

“The biggest impact the platform has made for us has been the pre-employment stage. Previously, there was a lot of paperwork like printing documents, requesting signatures, scanning and emailing documents back and forth. Now, applicants just upload all their required documents straight into the system. It’s all in one place and it saves us so much time.”

That change alone has cut recruitment turnaround time in half. 

“We’ve gone from doing monthly intakes to fortnightly. That means we’re saving 50% of the time we used to spend just managing documentation,” Lorrisa explained.

Not only has this reduced time to hire, it’s also freed up the HR team to do more meaningful work.

“We can now focus on building proper HR resources like a human resources manual and we can spend more time supporting staff directly, which ultimately helps with retention.”

Greater transparency, better compliance

In healthcare and disability services, compliance is everything. From accreditations to internal investigations, CASPA needs to be able to access up-to-date and accurate records fast and Employment Hero has helped them do just that.

“Employment Hero’s compliance features have given us so much more transparency. Different teams, like our investigations team, can now upload and access the documents they need such as specific management reports, without coming through HR. We can assign them restricted access and visibility of certain documents and that’s been a huge time saver.”

Having a central source of truth also helps during audits and the complaints process. 

“It means we’re not scrambling for documentation when we need to prove something. It’s already in there and time-stamped. That’s made a huge difference,” she added.

More time, less stress and a more strategic HR function

The value of Employment Hero for CASPA goes beyond faster recruitment. It’s changed the way HR operates within the organisation.

“It’s time saving, and when you save time, you save money. We haven’t had to hire more HR staff since implementing Employment Hero, as we’ve grown and been able to give our team a better work-life balance,” Lorrisa said.

From a management perspective, the improvements are clear. 

“Upper management have commented on the performance management processes too. It allows a transparent process and documentation. Managers and employees can access their assigned supervisions and annual appraisal templates and reports, everything they need in one place. It creates a culture of trust and is a lot more productive.”

Empowering HR to better support the support workers

CASPA’s mission is to support vulnerable people and with Employment Hero, their HR team can now better support the people doing that vital work.

“Employment Hero has given us the tools to step back from the admin and put our energy into what really matters — supporting our people, improving our processes and staying compliant while we do it,” Lorrisa said.

Want to see how Employment Hero could support your organisation? Book a demo and discover how we can make work easier and more valuable for your team.