Recruiting during the pandemic

Recruiting new workers can be challenging at any time, but during the COVID-19 pandemic this challenge has been even greater.

In these unprecedented times, it’s important that the safety and wellbeing of people who need care and support remains a priority.

We’ve developed some guiding principles for safe and rapid recruitment that employers of all sizes may find useful to address their additional workforce recruitment challenges.

Values are at the heart of good quality care and support, so it’s crucial to recruit people with the right values to work in care. Missing out this vital step could expose vulnerable people and place even more pressure on existing staff.

We're developing a new series of interactive workshops taking HR professionals and hiring managers through the whole values-based recruitment and retention journey. Register your interest here.

Sharing recruitment solutions

The sector has developed some innovative solutions over the past few months to make sure they have the right staff in the right place at the right time.

We’ve worked together with the Local Government Association (LGA), the Care Provider Alliance and the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services (ADASS) to share some examples of local recruitment initiatives that could help you think about solutions that could work for you. Take a look at the examples.

Skills for Care, LGA and ADASS will be running some webinars in February to showcase some of the local recruitment initiatives in more detail and share their learning to date. Watch out for the details in the New Year, we’ll be promoting them in our fortnightly enews.

Meeting and supporting winter staffing needs 2020/21

To help ensure that high-quality, safe and timely care is provided to everyone who needs it this winter, we’re sharing best practice examples of how providers and local authorities across the country are building and supporting their workforce capacity

Each case study includes what they did, who they worked with and what was achieved to help you establish your own measures.

See the case studies.

Care Friends

Care Friends, the innovative employee referral app developed in partnership with Skills for Care, now has over 10,000 users.

The Care Friends app has been designed to help employers with their recruitment and retention challenges by using existing staff to attract high-quality employees.

Employee referral programmes are the proven best source of finding quality staff. Care Friends overcomes the limitations of traditional manual employee referral schemes by:

• enabling staff to share jobs with their friends and contacts straight from their mobiles, earning cash instantly at each stage of the referral process
• minimising referral scheme admin with automated points awards, tracking and cash-ins.

“Care Friends is consistently delivering high quality candidates who share our company values.” Caren Burton, Majesticare, residential care provider

Find out more at carefriends.co.uk and make employee referrals your most successful channel for sourcing quality staff.

Sharing effective references and conduct information

Gathering effective references for staff working in social care settings has always been an essential element of safe and fair recruitment, but many employers experience barriers and challenges obtaining or providing them.

The temporary arrangements put in place due to COVID-19 have resulted in an increased need for satisfactory social care references and evidence of conduct, particularly as current guidance allows staff working in COVID-19 eligible roles to start employment prior to receipt of an enhanced DBS certificate.

We’re working with the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS), Reed Screening, Dominic Headley and Associates and VBA Consulting, to create some guidance and tools to help employers share effective references and conduct information.

To support this work, we’re asking organisations within the social care and health sector to take part in a short survey, which focuses on how they currently obtain and provide references and their understanding of references and the part they play within recruitment.

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