Using Data to Improve Your Hiring in Human Services

You are looking for really talented, compassionate, skilled, dedicated people. You know you are not going to be able to pay them a lot. And you don’t want there to be a lot of turnover.

You think the answer to this is to talk about how great your organization is, how they can join an exciting team, how they can contribute to helping those in need in your community.

You will hire a really keen person. They will work with you for less than a year. Then they will leave. And you will go through all the effort again of posting and hiring for the position.

Maybe, just maybe, if you had used data and transparency in your posting you’d end up hiring the right person for the job, being transparent about the demands of the job, and making sure they are up for the challenge before they get started.

Here is a mash-up of job descriptions I’ve helped provide some organizations in the homelessness services world over the past couple years. The result? Hiring people that are highly skilled and motivated who did not leave because the work was harder than they thought it would be.

(name of organization) is a national leader in working to end homelessness – and we want you to be part of our team to provide leadership in our emergency shelter if you:

believe every person that uses the shelter can and should achieve housing, regardless of presenting issues;marry your compassion for helping people with intelligence and strategic problem solving to get individuals out of homelessness;understand – but are not crippled by – the complexity of homelessness;do not confuse opinions about homelessness with facts about homelessness;motivate staff to share a vision of homelessness ended one person, one family at a time regardless of whatever issues they may have in their lives;have a passion for creatively solving complicated issues;can put the mission, vision and values of our organization into your day to day practice;believe that shelters are a process, not a destination;exude positivity and promote positive change;can successfully manage programs and people when there is no clear right/wrong answer;are persistent when staff or shelter users try to tell you that they cannot or do not want to get out of homelessness.

Here’s what we don’t want:

people that have pity or sympathy for homeless individuals (empathy is okay);people with no experience in human services;people that hate data;people that think shelters and permanent housing are the same thing;people that refuse to grow, learn and innovate on the job;people that are judgmental or punitive in motivating change in others.

(name of organization)’s shelter has 86 different people under our roof each night. Approximately a third have been with us for greater than three months, approximately a third have been with us 1-3 months, and the remaining third less than a month. The average length of stay across all shelter users last year was 79 days per person. It is our target within the next year to get average lengths of stay to under 45 days per person, and to know for certain that at least 80% of the people no longer staying with us have moved into permanent housing (including reuniting with family when that is appropriate and safe) at the end of their stay in our shelter. Currently we only know for certain that 59% of our shelter users move into permanent housing, and this is unacceptable to us.

Here are other things you should know:

on average, in the course of any given month, more than half of our shelter users meet the HUD definition of chronic homelessness;on average, more than 70% of the shelter users in our facility each night have stayed in another shelter in the city directly prior to staying in our shelter, and 8% were living outdoors directly prior to staying in our shelter;on average, 18% of shelter users in our facility on any given night are tri-morbid (have a co-occurring chronic physical health issue, mental health issue and substance use disorder);almost 15% of shelter user information in our Homeless Management Information System is incomplete;the staff group of 24 people you will be supervising has an average of 2.3 year experience with us and 3.5 years of experience altogether working in the homelessness field, with over 70% having a degree in Social Work or comparable degree;each week you will spend three hours on Thursday mornings meeting with the entire senior management team of our organization, because the shelter is one of 8 core program areas we operate;your base salary will be $62,300 to start with incentives for meeting performance targets such as improved housing access and decreased lengths of stay in shelter;you will be expected to spend 14 hours per month working directly alongside your line staff to see how she/he is performing and to monitor opportunities for operational improvements, and we expect at least half of these hours to be between the hours of 10pm and 7am.

10 Things to Keep in Mind if You Are Serious About Ending Homelessness

1. Don’t just think about it – do it!

Imperfect action trumps perfect planning. Experiment in a thoughtful and deliberate manner. Evaluate what you are doing. Learn from it. Improve.

2. Be your own community, but don’t dismiss proven practices from elsewhere.

You have to make ideas fit where you live, not changing where you live to fit ideas. While there will always be local context to consider, avoid making excuses as to why a specific approach won’t work where you live. Instead, try to figure out how to make proven practices work where you live.

3. Make strategic partnerships – don’t be needy or excessively eager.

Strategic partnerships have mutual gain. They are not one-sided. Getting an organization or institution to do what they are mandated to do is not a partnership – that is accountability. To form strategic partnerships there has to be something in it for both parties. That can mean compromise. Don’t be too demanding.

4. Use humor, carefully.

This work is really, really hard. It is okay to find times to laugh and relax and reflect casually on why and how you are doing what you do. Remember that outsiders rarely understand our context or demands. What is blowing off steam for us may seem disrespectfully or uninterested to them, so be careful where and how you use humour. But my goodness, use humor. A lot.

5. Don’t reinforce or reward bad practices.

Every time you make an excuse for an under-performing organization or person on your staff team you are saying it is okay not to succeed. I don’t think the people you serve think it is okay to suck. You shouldn’t either.

6. Don’t play favorites.

If you are a funder, competition for available funds will help cream rise to the top without interference on your part of picking your favorite organization. If you are a service provider, don’t play favorites with service users. The person/family that may use the most colorful language – or say nothing at all – may, in fact, be the person/family that needs your services the most.

7. Accept that some people/organizations just won’t get it.

Try to get people on board. Use facts. Use moral persuasion. Make an ethical argument. Haul out pie charts. Show them the economics of homelessness versus housing. Use pressure from peers, allies and elected officials. Use funding. And then if they still don’t want to get on board with ending homelessness, let them go. As I have heard many times, “It isn’t me. It’s you.” This time, it’s true.

8. Relax.

If you are Type A on steroids working to end homelessness everyone will hate your guts. You’ll come across as a self-determined, glory-seeking, zealot. Be cool. This problem wasn’t created over night. It won’t end over night either. Don’t sweat the small stuff.

9. See the glass half full.

Find evidence of success then exude positivity about it realistically and enthusiastically. This helps remind others (and yourselves) that success is possible, and that success breeds success. If you are the “sky is falling” sort, people will not get on board with what you are trying to achieve. There are a litany of things to conquer – discharge planning, economic poverty, inadequate supply of supportive housing, etc. If all you see is the stuff that still needs to be tackled instead of the success you have already realized, people will not be motivated to continue to journey to the ultimate destination.

10. Be confident in the big picture and the long-term plan.

Your confidence can carry your organization/community over the hump from informed pessimism to informed realism in the goal of ending homelessness. It is hard work. There will be a lot of hard days. Some people will remind you that what you are trying to do cannot be done. New leaders will take office. Trusted service providers will have staff turnover. Some people will return to homelessness. That doesn’t mean you aren’t doing it right. It means you have to see the long-term. It means you have to investigate and evaluate your plan to update it and make improvements. And it means you have to embrace your potential to be awesome.

Four Mottos

Here are the four mottos that matter to me in the work that we do, with a brief explanation of each:

“Great consultants. Lousy businesspeople.”

We have to make enough to pay our bills, but we absolutely have no desire to ever be rich doing this work. We are not motivated by money. We are motivated by making a difference. That’s why we give away so many of our tools. That’s why we do so many things at a discounted rate.

“Training that doesn’t suck.”

A trainer that understands adult learning knows that any good training combines many different approaches. Here are my three foundations to training:

1. Training should be pragmatic for what you do.

If your trainer doesn’t get “it” then it will just be one gigantic snooze-fest. If you don’t actually learn something you can immediately put into practice it is a waste of time. Let me give you an example of a pet peeve – lots of organizations realize the value of knowing Motivational Interviewing, but are not taught MI by someone that has experience working with homeless or precariously housed people in either a homeless or permanent supportive housing setting. So many of their approaches assume a clinical or quasi-clinical setting, which seems like the antithesis of the sort of environment you function in on  a daily basis.

2. Training should be grounded in theory and evidence.

If your trainer has not read a peer reviewed journal article on the subject matter they are training you on in the last 10 years, chances are they have missed some relevant advances in the field. Your trainer should know why they are training you on the things they are training you on.

3. Training should be both educational and entertaining.

To me it is simple: if you are entertained at the same time you are learning you are more likely to put down your defenses and be engaged with the subject matters. You are also more likely to want additional training in the future if the trainer didn’t bore you to tears.

“Catalysts for better outcomes.”

We should be able to change behavior, knowledge, skills, attitudes, and/or results through our work. It should have a lasting impact. We never want to be the people who parachute in, look at your watch and tell you what time it is. Our job is to challenge and change.

“Hip and nerdy. Not your average consultants.”

If people ever think of OrgCode as just another consulting firm, we have failed. Our research should be different than what you have experienced before. Our reports should be different than what you have experienced before. Our training should be different than what you have experienced before. Same thing with our planning, facilitation, engagement strategies, charrettes, keynotes and materials. The world has lots of “average”. We believe you deserve something better than average. If we are just “the world’s okayest” consultants, we suck.

Job, Career or Vocation?

I’ve had jobs – and probably you have too – that were only about doing something for someone else in order to get paid. I have some great stories from some of those jobs (especially summer jobs during undergrad years). But when I have had jobs in my life, time off was critical – from milking every coffee break to downtime on the weekends to vacation time.

I’ve had career stops when I was truly a careerist. In those times in my life a lot of what I was involved in was not as much about the content of the tasks (though I did like a lot of what I did), but more about how far I could get up the ladder and how fast. It was about advancement. It was about status. I may not have called it that at the time, but upon reflection that is a lot of what was driving me at that time. In careerist mode, I worked loads of hours above and beyond what I was required to do because I wanted people to see my drive and pursuit. I was in work early and out later than most. I became frustrated when I couldn’t see a clear pathway to the next rung on the ladder up or when my ideas stopped getting traction or when I sensed competition from other careerists.

Since late 2009 I have been in vocation mode. The difference? I felt a calling…a summons of sort to do the sort of work I am doing now. From my career years to the present I have been heavily immersed in matters of homelessness, housing, social policy and leadership development. I don’t particularly love the title “consultant”, but my consulting years I think are the ones where I have had the broadest reach in making a lasting difference across the most lives. My love and passion in the vocation mode is the work itself. It has nothing to do with status or money. At all.

While I was in careerist mode, getting a raise with each advancement in my career was the reward. There was a value that could be attached to the status. Reaching six figures was a moment I won’t soon forget. Now I don’t find myself motivated to do this work because of money. In a perfect world, I would get to do all the things I do for free and have neither mortgage nor other family financial obligations to worry about, nor would any of the staff of OrgCode have to worry about their finances. So yes, having positive cash flow is necessary, but not a driver. We aren’t a typical for-profit business in that way. To me the measure of success in my vocation is not how much profit it yields me. There isn’t much about this job I don’t like, but a big one is negotiating prices for the work that we do.

I knew I was ready for the vocation stage of life when I started listening to my inner passion. I don’t really know how to describe this “listening to my inner passion”. I don’t mean to say there was a person talking to me or that I was hearing things that weren’t there. It was more of an emotional connection…the more I was engaged with people and projects that I thought could have a lasting impact on social issues in their community and it was aligned to my perspectives on justice, the more I wanted to be doing that thing.

Once I started listening the work became all about the passion. It was a passion to learn more. It was a passion to share more. It was a passion to have a larger impact on the world. It was a passion to make a difference.

As a trusted mentor to seven people currently in their journey towards awesomeness, I love the sessions I have with people about their feeling of vocation, career or job. I am in no way judging one as being better than the other because I think it is dependent on the needs and wants of each person. I feel a connection and kinship, though, with those that have found a vocation in life that brings them meaning beyond financial remuneration or status. For several people this has meant less pay but greater emotional rewards. For others finding the vocation has also meant finding a way to put other parts of life in balance. For others still it has meant similar trade-offs in life like mine (in order to follow my passion I end up spending less time in person that I love because so much travel is involved.) Those in the careerist mode have come to appreciate how their lives are made more productive if they embrace the role that people with a vocation play in their achievement and how people in job mode provide a foundation for their career to occur. And the one that I have in job mode has realized careerists and vocations people are not dismissive or judgmental of job mode folks.

The truth is, we need all three: jobs, careers and vocations. And a further truth is that many of us will experience two if not three of these throughout our life times. I consider it a moment of grace that in my late 30s I had the opportunity to listen to and follow my vocation. I don’t see myself turning back. This is truly whom I am and what I was called to do in this world. I am grateful and perhaps lucky, and meanwhile committed with fervour to embrace my vocation, open to wherever it takes me and however much money it loses me.

So what are you going to be when you grow up? I gave answers I thought people wanted to hear and little to what I really wanted. After grad school my answer to that question had more to do with careerist pursuits. Now, (well, as an aside I can tell you my father thinks it is possible I can get a real job after I get a haircut and take out my earrings so long as I hide all my tattoos) I can answer the question of what I want to be when I grow up with a lot more clarity: I want to be me; and, I want to be the best me possible making the biggest difference to complex social issues as I can. That is what I feel called to do. Whether or not I achieve that is what I should be measured against after my days on this earth are through.

Street Outreach and Coordinated Access

Recently in a community I had a well-established street outreach provider ask me how they can help explain their importance now that coordinated access was taking shape in the city. It seems that with the infrastructure of coordinated access taking root, the street outreach provider was facing questions from its primary funder of whether it should continue to exist.

The short answer is that yes, I think that street outreach should exist in a city that has coordinated access.

Now a longer answer…

Street outreach has merit as a service when it is connecting people to long-term solutions to her/his homelessness. Street outreach, in my opinion, has little merit if it just about providing food or socks or clothing or sleeping bags or prayer. Yes, those things can meet immediate needs, but it doesn’t solve the problem of having someone sleep outdoors, in whatever location they may be in. So, I think street outreach should continue to be funded in communities with coordinated access if there is a housing-focus to the street outreach.

To use an analogy that seemed to work well in a training I recently did with an outreach provider, street outreach is to coordinated access as fluffers are to the adult film industry. Yes, the (ahem) “money shot” (housing in the case of coordinated access) is the conclusion that is remembered, but it was only made possible because of everything that occurred behind the scenes up to that point that no one ever sees. The things street outreach workers see and experience day in and day out as they work with a person in getting them a step closer to being housed is beyond the imagination of many people.

Street outreach provides an important access point into the homeless service delivery system for those people that do not use shelters or cannot use shelters because they are barred/trespassed or have legal restrictions that prevent them from using the shelters. In some communities street outreach is the only access point to housing for people that use substances but there are no shelters that allow people to enter if they have been using substances.

When street outreach has a positive connection with police and paramedics and can respond to issues that are deemed to be a “social disorder” there is also considerable benefit in having them in the community. Skilled street outreach workers can deal with complex social situations that are not really an emergency warranting police or ambulance, thereby freeing up first responders to attend to other emergencies, while concurrently helping that individual start to get connected to the long-term solution to their homelessness and even connect into shelter if the person is willing to go (which can be made easier if the community is coordinated shelter access as well as coordinated access to housing).

Finally, let me leave you with this thought – because visible homelessness is most often what the general public sees and therefore how it judges a community’s response to homelessness (rightly or wrongly), I think it would be foolish to remove funding from a street outreach provider that is doing high-quality work because there is coordinated access. The general public cannot see nor can it easily understand coordinated access. What the general public can see is street outreach workers engaged with its most vulnerable people laying on street corners and camped out in parks.

Waiting Lists to Nowhere for the “Un-houseable”: How Not to Do Coordinated Access

Assessing for the sake of assessing sucks. That isn’t coordinated access. That is a bureaucratic response (and not just government) to the issue that solves nothing.

Recently I was in a community that has been putting coordinated access into place over the last few months. In an effort to get community buy-in, their weekly meeting of housing providers allows for over-ride of assessment if the person is deemed to be too complex. Want to guess what is happening? They have a list of dozens of names of people with higher acuity that no housing provider is stepping up to house.

Creating waiting lists of people with complex issues instead of solving their homelessness is not about ending homelessness. It is a waiting list to nowhere.

Who are these people on the waiting list? Yes, they all have higher acuity. To a person they have co-occurring, complex issues across quite a spectrum – substance use, mental health issues, physical health issues, involvement in high risk and exploitive situations, numerous interactions with emergency services, and more. But in addition to that, they are almost exclusively people that have been housed several times before. They are the waiting list of people waiting to be re-housed…people that previous attempts at housing have broken down because of partying, guests, drug use, noise complaints, loneliness, paranoia, etc.

If we want to truly end homelessness this is the exact population we need to figure out not only how to house, but how to keep housed. If we want coordinated access to work we can’t allow there to be an over-ride to not accept the “unhouseable” and instead we need to put our collective wisdom together to figure it out.

Study after study, community after community, shows that 80% or more of people with complex issues in a Housing First program will remain housed. That means that at least 20% in each community are not. I suspect that is the group on the waiting list to nowhere. It is when we figure out how to meaningfully house and support this group that coordinated access will really make a difference and we will truly end homelessness.