CandE Benchmark Research Case Study – Family Care Center

Welcome to the 2024 CandE Winner Case Study series. 

Each year, the CandE Benchmark Research Program collects case studies from CandE Winners – the employers with above-average candidate experience ratings in our research. These CandE Winners answer the following questions:

• What recruiting and candidate experience improvements have you made?
• How did you build support and commitment to make these improvements?
• Which improvements were the most innovative?
• How will you use your CandE Award in your employer branding?
• Do you use any of your CandE data to quantify business impact?

These are the employers from our 2024 CandE Program that invested in improving their recruiting, hiring, and candidate experience, reaping the ultimate benefits of a positive business impact – candidates more likely to apply again, to refer others, to be a brand advocate, and to be a customer for consumer-based businesses. 

This case study was from Family Care Center. Family Care Center practices differentiated care that creates a positive impact on the well-being of individuals, families, and their local communities. Their multidisciplinary teams of empowered clinical experts deliver compassionate, collaborative, accessible care to people of all ages, across a broad range of mental health conditions.

If you’re interested in participating in the 2025 CandE Benchmark Research Program, you can learn more about it here. 

1. What recruiting processes and candidate experience key improvements have you identified and completed in the past 6-12 months? What data or evidence prompted you to make these changes? (Be as specific as possible with examples for each.)

Over the last year, Family Care Center (FCC) made several strategic enhancements to our recruiting processes and candidate experience, each informed by specific data and feedback. These include: 

• Website and Careers Page Overhaul: We introduced an interview preparation page, a comprehensive benefits overview, and employee testimonials. We also upgraded our branding packages with Indeed and Glassdoor and launched a five-tab Careers page on LinkedIn. 
• Revamped Job Descriptions: To provide more transparency, we added insights into FCC’s work culture and the roles we offer, including selling points to attract the right candidates.
• Hiring Manager Training: We trained our hiring managers on reducing biases, creating structured interview guides, and improving the candidate experience, especially during preboarding. 
• Compensation Adjustments: We introduced cost-of-living adjustments and modified clinical hours to better suit our workforce. 
• Enhanced Employee Review Campaigns: We ran campaigns encouraging employees to review FCC on Indeed and Glassdoor, providing candidates with more perspectives on the company.
• Referral Bonuses and Predictive Index (PI): To incentivize internal referrals, we boosted our referral bonuses. Additionally, the PI assessment tool has been implemented to ensure candidates align with the roles we hire for.

2. How did you build support and commitment within your team and the broader organization to make these improvements? How did you demonstrate and report on the importance of a quality candidate experience with your leadership team? (Be as specific as possible with examples.)

We focused on getting buy-in from leadership by clearly demonstrating how improving candidate experience would directly affect our business outcomes. Key actions included: 

• Hiring Manager Training: We trained hiring managers on the importance of rolling out the “red carpet” to candidates. By providing an excellent preboarding experience, we showed how small but impactful interactions could elevate candidate satisfaction and loyalty. 
• Reporting Candidate Experience Data: Sharing real-time feedback and the impact of candidate experience on reviews and word-of-mouth, especially negative feedback, helped demonstrate to our leadership how critical this focus was. 

3. Which of these improvements do you think are the most unique and innovative and why? How do you know that your changes are making a difference? What data or evidence validates the innovative improvements you made? (Be as specific as possible with examples for each based on your people, your processes, and your technologies, and include any candidate quotes that validate the improvements made.)

One of the most unique aspects of our transformation is the investment in hiring manager training. We dedicated significant time and resources to ensure our managers were equipped to provide a seamless candidate experience. By doing so, we validated improvements with data, such as positive changes in candidate feedback, lower drop-off rates, and better alignment of candidate expectations with the reality of the roles offered.

4. Whether you’ve won your first CandE Award or multiple CandE Awards, how will you publicly use the CandE Award, and what it represents, in your employer branding and recruitment marketing? (Be as specific as possible with examples.) 

The CandE Award represents a significant achievement for FCC and is being incorporated into our employer branding strategy. Key initiatives include:

• Featuring the Award on our Careers site and LinkedIn, with marketing campaigns designed around this accomplishment. 
• We celebrated our win at a recent town hall with FCC employees and will release a press statement once the award is received. 
• The CandE logo is already incorporated into our email signatures to reinforce our commitment to candidate experience.

5. Do you use any of your candidate experience benchmark data to quantify and demonstrate financial, referral, and/or employer branding business impact to your leadership team, your recruiting, and/or hiring managers? If yes, how? (Be as specific as possible with examples.) 

We leverage our candidate experience benchmark data to demonstrate financial and reputational impacts. For example, we shared feedback with hiring managers to show how their interactions influence reviews and referrals. We also used data from our new branding and review campaigns to show increased engagement, validating the investments we made in improving the candidate experience.