Is Your Care Staff Recruitment Strategy Effective?

Care recruitment is impossible, isn’t it? The care sector has a recruitment crisis. Low unemployment, low pay, difficult work, zero hour contracts and better pay at supermarket checkouts. The list goes on. All these factors conspire to stop you from recruiting care staff.

Care recruitment is difficult but it is not impossible.

Creative and planned recruitment is vital. You need to be better than your competition. How many people operate a targeted recruitment strategy with a written plan? This blog post deals with creating a care recruitment strategy. It doesn’t look at the creative or sales side of recruitment, advert writing etc. That will come in later blog posts.

Only by having a clear thought out strategy and robust plan will you succeed in care recruitment

Care recruitment needs a clearly thought through strategy and plan to be effective. You can’t just rely on one source like Indeed or Facebook. You need to run multiple recruitment channels simultaneously. A channel is a way of reaching your recruitment target. For example, a Facebook advert is a channel. To to that properly you need to plan for it. The plan then needs to executed effectively and efficiently. Like any plan, you need to know your goals, objectives, what resources you have, what your timelines are and a clear process of how to achieve them.

You need to be creative and you need to plan. You need to be better than your competition.

Work out the finances

What does a care worker add to your business? Do you know this? If a care worker works 25 hrs per week how much value are they adding to the business? What does that add up to in a year or two years? What does it cost to recruit a care worker? If you know how much value a new care worker will add to the business then you should be able to say what you are prepared to pay to recruit new staff. For example, if a care worker doing 25 hrs per week adds £125 per week profit to the business then they could be adding over £6,000 per year profit to the business. How much are you prepared to spend to generate £6,000 profit?

You need to know the figures for all the above so you can set an effective and realistic budget (I’ll deal with calculating a care workers value and recruitment budgets on another blog)

If you don’t know what £ a care worker adds to your business, how will you know how much you are prepared to spend to recruit them?

Set the target number of care workers 

Decide how many care workers you want (or need) to recruit This should come from your capacity planning work. A growing domiciliary care business will require far more staff than an established 30-bed care home with low staff turnover. You need to work out exactly how many Full Time Equivalent (FTE) staff you need and how that translates to actual numbers of staff. For example, you may need 5 FTE staff based on 40 hrs per week. However, if staff only work a 20hr week you will need to recruit 10 actual staff. 

Set the budget

Once you know how many care workers you need to recruit and what you are prepared to pay for each one you can then set your budget for the recruitment campaign. 

Set the timelines

Set your recruitment target numbers against timelines so you can measure how effective your recruitment is

Know your demographics

What are the demographics of your target employees? What kind of people are likely to become care workers? This isn’t a straightforward as you may think. It will vary depending on the area. Whether it is rural or urban, small market town or huge diverse city, inner city or suburbs.  Where do they live (by postcode area)? How will you get to them? Research your geographical recruitment area, What is the demographic makeup of the area? What areas (by postcode are likely to produce the best response). Useful websites for this are the Office of National Statistics (ONS) https://www.ons.gov.uk  and The Skills for Care National Minimum Data Set (NMDS) https://www.nmds-sc-online.org.uk/

What channels do you have to get your message in front of your target?

Indeed, Facebook, Job Centres, Flyer Drops (targeted by postcode), Set up a Stall on Market Days, Work with Local Colleges and Training providers, Google Ad Campaigns, Areas Where Your Target Congregate; Supermarkets, Pubs, Take Aways, etc. Have a collective brainstorming session with your team and come up with 20 ideas of how to reach your target not including the above examples. We will refer to these routes as “channels”. The more “channels” you have the wide your reach. Some you will have to pay for (Facebook adverts) and some will be free or very low cast (Job Centre days, Market Stall, Visiting Local Colleges)

Set up recruitment pipelines

A recruitment pipeline is a series of steps from the initial placing of an advert to employing someone. Write these series down for each channel. I will go into more detail on creating recruitment pipelines and how to measure effectiveness in another blog post

Now its time to plan

You have the numbers of staff you want to recruit, the time in which you want to recruit them, a list of channels you will use to get your message to them and how much they cost, data about the people you will target and data about the areas you are going to target (because that’s where your target people live). For the plan, you will write all this down and you will now list the days and dates you are going to do all the above. The length of time for your campaign will depend on how many staff you are planning to recruit, what budget you have set and how many channels you are going to use.

Sample recruitment strategy

I’ve attached a recruitment strategy I used last year for a county wide reablement service I set up. I hope it can be of some use to some of you. I’d love to hear about any other ideas or strategies you use.

Want more help?

If you want to recruit more staff we would love to help. We can;

• Develop a bespoke strategy for you
• Set up a recruitment pipeline for you
• Work out an effective recruitment budget
• Undertake forensic research
• Train you and your staff in care recruitment
• Make your recruitment budget work
• Get you more staff

Call or email. It cost nothing to find out more

info@careskilled.co.uk
0333 444 5344

Check out our podcast on recruitment here