Realistic Job Preview

Direct Support Professional Recruitment Toolkit

A Guide for Families and People Who Self-Direct Services (NOTE: This link takes you to a new page.)

Resources

Recruiting motivated and qualified individuals to provide direct support is important in maintaining quality services and reducing turnover. Several resources may assist in attracting, screening, and retaining direct support professionals.

A Realistic Job Preview

A Realistic Job Preview is a recruitment strategy used to give potential employees detailed and balanced information about job expectations, the employer, and the worksite, so they can make an informed decision about accepting a job offer from the employer.

Realistic Job Previews provide both positive and negative information that potential staff are unlikely to know. This Realistic Job Preview video (also available on DVD) illustrates the real, everyday work of direct support professionals. This video provides first-person stories from Kansans and advice for people considering direct support as a career choice. The topics include:

• On the job (what to expect)
• The rewards of direct support
• The challenges of direct support
• Qualities of a great direct support professional
• Lessons learned

Realistic Job Previews can help reduce turnover of new staff by giving potential job candidates as much information as possible about the job expectations. When a candidate knows what to expect before accepting a job offer, it is more likely they will be satisfied on the job because they will have fewer unmet expectations about the job.

For more information, check out the Research and Training Center on Community Living at the University of Minnesota: http://rtc.umn.edu/publications/index.asp#film

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The Direct Support Professional Recruitment Toolkit

Finally! A tool you can customize to market your agency and recruit quality Direct Support Professionals. The Direct Support Professional Recruitment Toolkit arms individuals, families, consortiums, and organizations with the marketing tools they need to attract and recruit quality staff into direct support roles. Traditional sources for employee recruitment including newspaper ads, brochures, and flyers, have frequently been generic and flat. This tool changes that approach into a dynamic and targeted recruitment campaign for human service agencies and those who direct their own supports.

Target Marketing

Target marketing is essential to attract the quality staff you desire. Although many employers are aware of what target marketing is, they find it difficult and time consuming to create a different marketing campaign for the different groups of people they wish to attract for employment. The targeted groups include: stay at home moms/dads, college students,
Gen-Yers, seniors, faith-based communities, Spanish-speaking communities, and displaced workers.

Customization

The Direct Support Professional Recruitment Toolkit is designed to be customized to reflect you or your organization’s mission, vision, and values as well as your log., and contact information for interested applicants. The Direct Support Professional Recruitment Toolkit includes brochures, flyers, newspaper ads, and recruitment cards for each of the seven target marketing groups. Materials are provided to you on a CD in two formats.

The Direct Support Professional Recruitment Toolkit was created for the Kansans Mobilizing for Direct Support Workforce Change Project by the Project Staff at the Research and Training Center on Community Living, University of Minnesota.

For more information on purchasing the toolkit, download the PDF brochure at http://rtc.umn.edu/docs/toolkit.pdf

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