Low Unemployment Rates & Retiring Senior Leaders Pose Challenges

As a member of the President and CEO’s senior leadership team, Goswick provides strategic leadership to attract, develop and retain the best talent and position the YMCA as an employer of choice. The Dallas Y consists of 300 full time and 1,800 part time employees.

Goswick said, “The market is very saturated right now with low unemployment, so we need innovative ways to find and attract talent and compete with other local employers. In response, we’ve instituted a new minimum wage at the Dallas Y — higher than the state’s minimum wage — and we’ve made a commitment to raise it every year for the next three years.

As the cost of living continues to rise, we want to be ahead of the curve and be attractive to future hires. We’re also offering other perks including extra time off for our team members.”

The Dallas Y also faces the retirement of several of its senior leaders within the next few years. “Getting our bench ready and having an internal pool of people that are ready to move into those roles is a huge focus for us. We launched a succession planning program called “Achieving Your Leadership Potential” where we’re working with several employees to prepare them for those leadership roles,” Goswick said.

The YMCA of Dallas Turns to Checkster to Boost Sourcing & Ensure Child Safety

As they continued to grow and compete in the market, Goswick and her team needed a solution that would give them the much needed insight into their talent decisions and give them the confidence to hire the best — and safest — talent. They also needed to find new and unique ways to source talent in an increasingly competitive labor market.

“We hire hundreds of part time employees each year who interact with our children on a daily basis, so we are laser focused on child safety in our hiring process. We turned to Checkster to help ensure we’re hiring the best talent and that we’re not letting anyone through that has any potential for fraud,” Goswick said.

Prior to Checkster, the Dallas Y was conducting manual reference checks on potential hires. “I knew that there had to be a better, more effective and compliant way to do reference checks and ensure child safety. We want to only allow the best, verified talent in the door so that we can live up to our quality and safety standards.”

The Dallas Y also turned to Checkster to boost its sourcing strategy. “We loved what Checkster helps us do on the sourcing front,” said Goswick. “Once someone has completed a reference on the Checkster platform, we ask them if they would like to stay up to date on employment opportunities at the Y. We’ve had nearly 2,100 people raise their hand for this in just the past year alone, and now we have a high-quality candidate pool we can go back to and see if there is a good match with open positions.”

Competitive Edge in Tight Labor Market

Checkster has helped shorten the window for the YMCA to make an offer to top talent and better compete in a tight labor market. Before Checkster, the YMCA team would have to do manual, phone references which took days, even weeks, to complete.

Goswick said, “Now, with Checkster, we’re able to make an offer on the same day or very next day after we bring a candidate in, because we’ve got all of the candidate data and insights compiled on the Checkster report, ultimately shortening the window of time from posting to the job to time to hire. Checkster helps us get to the best people in a tight market. We’re making offers faster and gaining a competitive edge to get to the best candidates faster.”

Avoidance of Bad Hires

Checkster also provides near real-time information about potentially fraudulent or dangerous candidates. To date, Checkster has flagged 6 percent of the YMCA’s candidates as potentially fraudulent.

“Out of the 6 percent of candidates Checkster flagged as potentially fraudulent, 90 percent of them were indeed fraudulent and were pulled from our process. Checkster has helped ensure we only hire the safest candidates for our programs.”

She continued, “Checkster has also saved us money since we’re avoiding bad hires before we invest resources on onboarding and training.”

Higher Quality References Embraced by Management Board

Goswick’s team also uses Checkster for executive hiring. The YMCA has a management board comprised of volunteers who are brought into the executive hiring process.

Prior to Checkster, Goswick would give the board a verbal report on the information collected during the manual reference checking process. Now, she hands the board a Checkster report that shows much more information on each of the executive candidates — allowing the board to make a much more informed, more confident hiring decision.

“Checkster gives the reference much more time to think about the question and give more detailed information than what we got from a phone call. We’re now uncovering insights, like the percentage probability of re-hire, that we never were able to uncover before. That’s the beauty of Checkster — we’ve got aggregated candidate data now that we never had before.”

The Future Outlook: Checkster for High Performing Teams

Goswick and her team are considering Checkster’s Exit solution to better inform its succession planning strategy.

“We love the idea of launching an Exit survey to both the departing employee as well as their team members who are still here. With Checkster, we can get a sense of team manager performance this way and better focus on developing the good ones and seeing where others might be falling short. Using Checkster to better understand our bench strength of team leaders will be extremely helpful as we continue our succession planning efforts.”