Recruiting social care workers with the right values

A new recruitment toolkit aims to help employers select the right candidates, by Debbie Sorkin
As Camilla Cavendish noted in her review of practice among healthcare assistants and care support workers published last week: “To get the right quality of care, it is vital that the right people are recruited to caring roles.”

If we’re really going to transform social care, we all – employers, people using services, relatives, unpaid carers and commissioners – need to have faith that we have the right people in the job, doing the right thing in the right way. And recruiting people with the right values and behaviours in sufficient numbers to support a growing sector is a real issue in social care.

According to Skills for Care, the number of adult social care jobs is projected to grow from just under 2 million to more than 3 million by 2025. At the moment, there are shortfalls in filling vacancies and high levels of staff turnover in some areas.

This has implications for care quality. Shortfalls in the workforce are an expression of unmet social care need. High turnover rates, particularly in the first few weeks following appointment, are often an indication that people do not have the right values to sustain them in these roles.

High turnover and churn rates lead to lack of continuity – a factor that counts highly with service users. And there is a risk (or fear?) that employers will take on candidates without the right social care values, with potentially profound implications for the care of vulnerable people.

We also know that recruitment is a cost for all employers. One figure that is commonly used is that, including people’s time, it costs around £3.5k to recruit and complete induction for a social care post.

So what to do? Well, one way is to make it easier for employers to recruit for social care values like empathy, a sense of how to treat people with dignity and respect, commitment to care and the courage to stand up for quality and safety.

And you can do this. There are tools, widely used in other sectors and already used by some larger social care employers, that help them recruit for values, especially at senior level. These approaches have been shown to bring clear benefits. Apart from anything else, they are an excellent way for a provider to demonstrate the quality of their service.

But most social care employers are relatively small. They won’t always be familiar with, or have the resources to support, values-based approaches to recruitment. Most staff, whether they work in residential or in homecare, work on the frontline, not the senior level. And there are increasing numbers of personal employers looking to employ personal assistants.

To support them, the National Skills Academy for Social Care, together with Skills for Care and MacIntyre, has developed a values-based recruitment model for adult social care. We’ve brought together different aspects of values-based recruitment in an online toolkit that is being launched on Wednesday.

The toolkit aims to bring values-based approaches within everyone’s reach. It includes guidance in plain English on how employers can recruit and select for social care values, examples of draft job advertisements and interview questions, a simple online personality profiling tool that employers can use with candidates, links to the Skills Academy’s leadership qualities framework with an explanation of how it can help in recruiting for values, and signposting to other sources of information, such as Finders, Keepers: Skills for Care’s recruitment toolkit for employers.

Employers don’t have to use all of these at once; they can select the ones that are useful to them at any particular time. We believe this is a really important step for the sector – a workable model in support of values-based recruitment, especially of frontline staff and first-line managers. Fundamentally, it’s about leadership in social care. If it works, it will mean better outcomes for people being supported and for workforce retention. And with Camilla Cavendish’s renewed call for values to be put back at the heart of social care, it couldn’t be more timely.

Debbie Sorkin is chief executive at the National Skills Academy for Social Care. For more information, contact [email protected]