With the shortage of applicants on internet job boards at present and the crisis in social care recruitment, which candidates should you try to approach and where will you source them?
Be Outstanding responded to our customer’s current concerns with the recent Masterclass webinar featuring Neil Eastwood. We hope that we can help you find the right people with some top tips from our successful Masterclass on recruiting social care staff in 2022.
Care industry recruitment expert Neil Eastwood discussed many useful aspects of quality recruitment in our Masterclass webinar. You can watch the full recording by signing up here, but as a taster Neil advised that there are two key areas to focus on when recruiting care staff at present:
- Family carers
- Employee referrals
There has been a large increase in those who have been caring for families and they offer the biggest opportunity for a potential pool of candidates. They have the skills of caring for people and the values that we need even if they don’t have formal experience working for a home care or residential and nursing home care setting.
Employee referrals or recruitment amongst those who already have a connection to someone who works in adult social care are also likely to lead to higher levels of successful recruitment than those from other sources. Some of these potential candidates within the local community will not be on active job boards and therefore this is the only way to reach them.
Neil offered additional advice including the importance of analysing the data to see which of your recruitment approaches works best in both attracting high quality candidates and retaining them. He stated that it is now mandatory to be the employer of choice and the candidate journey forms an important part of this.
In the Be Outstanding research, recruitment practices have proven to feature very highly in those settings receiving an Outstanding rating in ‘Safe’. Securing appropriately skilled care and support workers and demonstrating to the CQC that you have appropriate recruitment practices in place is a critical part of CQC inspections.
Be Outstanding’s software includes research on outstanding practice for the five key question areas assessed by CQC inspectors and includes guidance on the types of evidence that can support attainment of an Outstanding rating. It also allows you to store your outstanding evidence and present it to CQC inspectors in an easy-to-read report format.
If you would like to find out more or book a demo of the Be Outstanding care quality software, please click here.
If you would like to sign up to watch Neil Eastwood’s Masterclass and our future masterclasses, please click here.