3 Care Recruitment Headaches, and How to Tackle Them
Care providers currently have more than their fair share of problems when it comes to care recruitment. We’re in a rapidly expanding industry, with a growing need for staff, who have to be drawn from an ever diminishing pot of experienced providers. Sometimes it feels there’s just too many issues to deal with.
The Swarme team thought it would be helpful, therefore, to look at the 3 most recurrent care recruitment headaches, and consider what we, as a sector, can do to tackle them.
1. Not Enough Applicants
There’s a squeeze on experienced care workers at the moment. We all know the reasons why people leave the profession, so the question we have to address is: How can we attract and train the next generation of care workers? Demand is only going to grow, so we as a sector will need to make it easier for people to enter the care profession. That means:
- Being able to earn immediately
- Digitally accessible training and mentoring in place
- Providing flexible working for parents, or people with a part-time job
- Speaking to different kinds of applicants via different digital channels
- Talking about the career path that care can make available to young people
2. Values-Based Recruitment is Tough
It is, unless we open up the criteria by which we’re judging the values of our applicants. Starting with a conversation, before you look at the CV, often opens up a whole sphere of experience that hasn’t made it into the formal application. Applicants may not match the values in the way you’re looking for them, but may have instead:
- Experience of caring for a family member
- Years of working in retail, where the customer came first
- Management experience, alongside listening skills
- Work experience in the voluntary sector
3. No Time to Spend on Recruitment
It’s all to easy to say “there’s your problem” but that doesn’t go anywhere near solving the issue. Large organisations have recruitment teams; smaller care homes and domiciliary care providers have a manager who’s trying to hold down many roles at the same time. These are symptoms of an expanding sector, not a problem with individuals. The solutions may include:
- Outsourcing social media management to a specialist company
- Running online recruitment days that everyone gets involved in organising and promoting
- Finding ways to manage your admin on the go, rather than needing to be at your desk
- Building a local network of carers you can call on to cover shifts
The Swarme team are no strangers to the ongoing headaches of care recruitment. We’ve all worked both a care givers, and as care providers over the years. Over that time we’ve encountered the range of range of hiring solutions available, and found many of them frustrating and counter productive. So we decided to create our own solution.
We call our online solution ‘The New Care Movement’ because it seeks to overcome the very issues we’ve covered in this blog. If you’ve read this far, take a look at what Swarme offers to care recruiters. It’s an online platform that immediately matches recruiters’ needs to available carers. It is accessible on all devices, works on the go, and changes the way the care sector operates.
Want to know more about the Swarme platform? Why not join us for our Zoom Open Day on Thursday 3rd November at 1.00. For more details, go to swarme.co.uk or call 0782 577 4700
