Recruitment and Retention Strategy
Your recruitment and retention strategy should be tailored to both your current and future staff needs. You should have a clear awareness of your upcoming needs based on your predicted turnover of staff and how your current recruitment campaign is working.
The first part of your strategy should focus on recruitment.
You should have a consistent lead for recruitment to ensure they are familiar with the process; this could be yourself or something you delegate to a deputy.
While you might have found positive results with your usual recruitment practices, you can also explore recruiting from groups that you might not previously have considered or whose working patterns might not fit your traditional approaches.
You might find that people in education, people who have children in education or retirees, are looking for part time work but cannot commit to full days or only certain days of the week.
There are many services who are now offering a ‘signing on’ bonus, typically payable in stages to ensure people stay with their service beyond the initial few months.
Sometimes the gap between the financial incentives is minimal the thing that makes a service stand out is the commitment to them as a person. Make it clear how you will support them outside of the financial benefits, what development opportunities can you offer them, what can you offer them that makes you stand apart from other services.
The Department of Health and Social Care’s national recruitment campaign, ‘Made with Care’, aims to raise the profile of the adult social care sector as a rewarding and stimulating place to work, and support the existing recruitment efforts undertaken by the sector to help care providers recruit the dedicated staff they need.
As part of this campaign, an Adult Social Care Recruitment Guide has been produced, packed with ideas on how to strengthen your recruitment strategy.
The next step in your strategy should focus on your staff retention. You will want to retain your workforce as you have invested time and resources in making them a part of your team. They will also know your business, how your work and have valuable experience.
Within any business there will always be a degree of staff turnover, as staff explore new careers or personal circumstances mean their current job is no longer for them.
Holding an exit interview with any staff who leave will help you to understand their reason for leaving, it could be another similar business has recently increased their rate of pay or is offering a ‘signing on’ bonus. An exit interview can sometimes be an opportunity to retain a valued member of staff.
You should always try to benchmark your service against similar services, utilise the ASC Workforce Dataset and review job adverts from other care services. You might find that your rate of pay is no longer competitive, or others are offering more flexible working arrangements.
Things to consider
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Ensure you have a dedicated lead for recruitment.
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Regularly review your current and potential recruitment needs.
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Consider offering more flexible recruitment as this might appeal to a wider audience of people.
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Consider a ‘signing on’ bonus as a financial incentive, potential paid over a period.
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Ensure your service stands out when you advertise.
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Review the Adult Social Care Recruitment Guide for ideas.
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Conduct exit interviews with any staff who leave, to understand their reasons for leaving.
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Benchmark yourself against other services using the ASC Workforce Dataset.
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Review job adverts from other services to see what they are offering.
There are now a broad and diverse range of different routes in which to recruit new staff. The same routes that you have previously used might not be as effective as they once were, and new platforms should be explored and different ways of reaching out to potential employees might yield surprised results.
There is a diverse range of platforms within which you can advertise staff vacancies:
Consider using social media as a new way to reach out to people, it gives you the option to provide a more personal approach and stand out from the crowd.
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