Involving people who draw on care and support in recruitment

Marie Lovell, project manager at Skills for Care and a former manager of services, carer Hazel Griffiths, and Gary Stark who is an expert by experience discuss what it means to include people with lived experience in the recruitment process and why it’s important.

What do we mean by ‘lived experience’?

Lived experience is defined as “personal knowledge about the world gained through direct, first-hand involvement in everyday events rather than through representations constructed by other people.”

In social and health care recruitment, lived experience can mean a few different things. It might mean direct experience of using the actual service where the recruitment is needed. It might mean someone with a similar need, experience or disability acting as a ‘proxy’ for the people who use a service or will be using it. Often it includes carers.

If hundreds of people use the service, then you might need to choose some people to be representatives, or do a wide consultation or survey about the job.

Why is it important that people with lived experience are involved with recruitment?

People with lived experience shouldn't just be involved in staff recruitment. They should have the opportunity to lead and steer the process and be active in every part in the way that makes sense for them.

If the worker is going to be working in someone’s home or providing personal care, then we think every person who they'll be working with has a right to have a say in their recruitment.

Recruiting alongside people with lived experience, provides a different kind of insight into what works well and not so well. It keeps the focus about the experience and quality of life of people using the service.

Having people with a learning disability as part of the team doing the recruitment can mean that you really think hard about the whole process and the job description. Thinking about whether the job advert and description is written clearly and using plain English helps everyone, while easy read or alternative formats can send a strong message that you’re open to applications from people with disabilities and access needs.

The employer is legally responsible for employing people and sticking to all the laws around this; and they can work with people using a service to do this and take their feedback on the candidates into account.

People with disabilities are underrepresented in the workforce; by being involved, trained, and paid to do recruitment people can build up their skills themselves and do other paid work using their expertise like quality reviews and care and treatment reviews (CTRs).

When to involve people with lived experience in recruitment

This has to be at the time that’s right for them but there should be opportunities right from the very start. With reasonable adjustments right from the start the recruiting team should work in co-production to co-create job descriptions, advertisements, shortlisting, and pre interviews.

Whenever we have a vacancy it’s a chance to look at the work the person will be doing and check that it still needs to be done that way. If we decide the job should be differently, then the specification and job description needs to be changed. People who use the service or have similar lived experience can be invaluable in helping with this. Together you might realise that there are things listed that aren’t that important, and this would open the job up to more people.

What ways can people with lived experience be involved in the recruitment process?

Start by asking people what’s important in the way the worker does their job, and plan the recruitment activities to find out those things. You might need to ‘ask’ using alternative communication methods if someone doesn’t use spoken or written language.

Usually thinking creatively about ways that people can assess the candidates will also mean you’re testing the capabilities they actually need to do the job in a more realistic way.

For example, often people say the most important thing about good workers is that they listen and treat people with respect. You can’t really judge that from an application form or even an interview. You might get a better idea by asking them to come and spend time with people using the service, or by setting up a discussion exercise with a group of candidates. If a big part of the job will be about communicating, then you could ask them to come prepared to give a presentation or ask them to design and send in a poster.

This means the candidates aren’t put on the spot to answer a question but also people with lived experience can take their time to think about each candidate and score them equally, rather than having to remember each one of a series of people in repetitive interviews over the whole day.

Some people who use a service might not want to be involved in the choosing; they might want to help decide what to ask the candidates and then other people on the selection panel can ask the questions.

What do we know works well when involving people with lived experience in recruitment?

Having people involved can make the process much more of a two-way thing. People applying for a job find out much more about the job and this can help them decide if they’re right for it. This might mean people withdraw, but it’s usually better that people do this sooner rather than after they’ve got the job. It can also encourage candidates who aren’t sure if they have the right skills or knowledge or values.

All paid staff involved in recruitment need to have had training themselves so that they can work in co-production, for example, autism or learning disability training. They'll need to fully understand the Equality Act. This will help them work together with recruiters with lived experience, and also to be more inclusive in the process for candidates. Formal interviews can discriminate against people if the job doesn’t need them to be good at talking about what they do.

Everyone involved in recruitment will need some training and preparation to understand the process and the laws about how to do recruitment fairly and well; especially if they haven’t had much experience of interviews or jobs themselves. The recruitment team will need to ‘de-brief’ afterwards to see what they could do better next time, but also because the process might have raised some uncomfortable feelings and memories that they want to talk about. This will need to be done with reasonable adjustments if the person needs them.

Learning together and sharing your expertise of how to recruit people and what it’s like being cared for by them, will open your eyes.

We suggest starting with open discussions and working out the details and how to overcome barriers together creatively – you all want the process to be successful. Time spent on this is an investment that will pay dividends.

Find more recruitment support with our #BuildingYourWorkforce spotlight.

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