Sound Care Group

About Sound Care Group

Sound Care Group is a group of aged care providers and rest homes located in New Zealand, dedicated to providing genuine and holistic care for their residents. Their locations include Athenree Life in Katikati, Cambridge Life in Cambridge, Eltham Care Rest Home in South Taranaki, South Care Rest Home & Hospital in North Dunedin and Steele Park Home in Hamilton East.

With a team of 200+ support staff across their locations, their goal is to meet the needs of their residents’ physical, emotional and psychological wellbeing.

We spoke to Mel Tan, Group Services Manager at Sound Care Group to better understand how they support their team who are responsible for providing meaningful care to their residents.

The nature of Mel’s role at Sound Care Group is varied and one where no two days are the same. She manages the group marketing efforts, supports on-site managers and also handles certain aspects of HR including recruitment, employment relations and HR advisory.

With so many responsibilities in her day-to-day, she was looking to streamline the HR responsibilities in her role. That’s why she turned to Employment Hero, to help her manage their HR and manual employment admin.

The challenges…

Manual and time-consuming recruitment processes

With such a large workforce across the country, one of the major challenges for Mel was recruitment and finding the right people to bring into the business.

Mel was tasked with managing the entire recruitment process, and initially it was done manually – and all by herself. This proved extremely time-consuming and overwhelming as the number of applicants, roles and moving parts of the recruitment process exceeded the number of hours in her work day.

“I was doing all recruitment manually. I would have a spreadsheet to record down all the candidates, but soon after, the list had grown too long. It became hard to track the ones to decline and those to move on to the next stage. The number of roles also increased, along with all the candidates.”

At Sound Care Group, they also hire people from overseas and on work visas, which makes the process much more complicated. For Mel, she knew there was an easier way.

“I believed there was a better way of doing things, which is why I brought up the idea of automating recruitment, to help me go through the process without hiring any additional recruitment staff. It would be more cost effective in the long run.” 

The time-consuming part of hiring didn’t stop once they were hired – it carried on through to onboarding. When it came time to issue employment contracts and policies, it could sometimes take Mel up to 20 minutes per contract. This was far too long, especially if they were acquiring a facility and had to issue 30+ contracts to new staff members.

An overwhelming number of filing cabinets and physical documents

Before Mel brought Employment Hero into the business, their document management was outdated and inefficient. They were manually filing and storing physical documents and files. It made file management incredibly difficult and looking for specific documents was always a challenge.

“Our staff files were all physical files. It was very hard to look for documents that you wanted to find”. 

Luckily, they turned to Employment Hero to help change all of that.

The solutions…

A one-stop digital shop for everything employment

With the introduction of Employment Hero, Mel and the team at Sound Care Group now have a single source of truth for everything employment-related. They can manage the entire recruitment process with ease, easily generate and issue contracts, track certifications, stay across worker eligibility and so much more. And the best part? It’s all stored safely and securely in one place.

It’s a huge time-saver for both Mel and the broader team at Sound Care Group. With Employment Hero, all of their employees can easily log into the app and access important information related to their employment – freeing up time in Mel’s busy day.

Recruitment and onboarding completed in record time

Providing standout care for such an important part of the New Zealand community is only possible when you have a team of passionate and supportive people. That’s why finding and hiring the right people is such a critical part of their business.

Now, Mel can manage recruitment with ease. No more spreadsheets, long email threads or outdated processes. Everything is stored securely in Employment Hero including CVs, cover letters, notes and stage of hiring.

She can easily view each candidate in the ATS, and once they’ve made an offer to a successful candidate, she can move them straight through to the onboarding stage.

“Employment Hero enhances the onboarding experience because it’s just so convenient. Successful candidates can read documents from their screen, sign it directly and it just gets saved to their profile.”

Easy contracts populated in a matter of clicks

Mel also loves just how easy it is to manage contracts and policies in Employment Hero. Not only does it boost her compliance confidence exponentially, but it also frees up time in her to focus on other important tasks.

“Previously, we would have to keep Word files of contracts. Now our process is much more efficient, saves us time and we’re confident we are issuing the right document every time.”

Now, once they’ve hired someone, she can issue contracts and policies to them in just a few clicks before their first day. This change means the new employee is ready to hit the ground running and there’s no need for forms and paperwork.

“Before Employment Hero, if I were to issue contracts manually, I would complete about 2 or 3 in an hour. Now, with Employment Hero, I can do one contract in just 5 minutes. You invest some time initially to set up a template, but that’s just a once off because you can then issue it over and over again. That’s an invaluable amount of time saved.

“Employment Hero also helps ensure accuracy because I only need to input the same things once. And if I spot something I only need to correct it once too.”

Certification tracking, sorted

In the aged care industry, it’s essential employees both have, and stay up to date, with the necessary certifications.

“We’re now using the certifications functionality for monitoring nursing registration and expiry. We’re also able to monitor the expiry of driving licenses for our team.”

An easier way to check worker eligibility

Bringing the right people into the Sound Care Group is always the number one priority for Mel when hiring – whether they’re based locally or relocating from overseas.

For employees who are relocating from overseas, Mel now has a single place where she can see all details about visas. She can easily track the expiry of their work eligibility, something which they struggled to stay across previously.

“We hire people on work visas and we appreciate the fact that we can track the expiry of their work eligibility.”

Employment Hero is helping growing businesses streamline their HR and recruitment processes 🚀

For Mel, she achieved her goal of implementing a powerful HR and recruitment system that streamlined their once time-consuming paper-based processes. Beyond the implementation of Employment Hero, Mel has been able to free up significant time spent on HR admin and focus back on more strategic marketing and HR work.

“Employment Hero is very efficient and it saves us so much time”, Mel said.

We love hearing about the impact Employment Hero has made for Mel and the team at Sound Care Group. If you’d like to learn more about how Employment Hero can support your team and transform your HR processes, request a demo with one of our team.

If you’d like to see how much time and money you can save with Employment Hero, take a look at our return on investment (ROI) report.