What is it?

Skills for Care supports adult social care employers at every step of their recruitment and retention process.

Finding and keeping workers is an online toolkit of guides, websites, case studies and videos to help adult social care and health employers attract, take on and keep the right people for their organisation.

Recruiting the right people at the beginning, who know what it means to deliver high quality care and support, can save time and wasted resources in recruiting the wrong people. Taking a values-based approach to your recruitment can help you do this and Skills for Care has practical tools, templates and seminars to help.

This approach involves identifying your workplace values (i.e. what's most important to your organisation) and ensuring that the values of your staff align with them. In practice this means looking past people's qualifications and experience to explore what they're like as a person - it could involve including values in your job adverts, conducting values-based interviews, and including values in induction and ongoing supervision.

Why do it?

Demand for care and support continues to grow and Skills for Care estimates there are around 345,000 people leaving their jobs every year - that's over 900 every day - and there are approximately 90,000 vacancies at any one time. This means the sector needs to increase the size and skills of the workforce, and stem the flow of wasted resources on recruiting people who aren't going to stay.

With decreasing unemployment and increased competition from other sectors, adult social care employers need to think of innovative ways to recruit the right people.

Cost:

The toolkit is free to access and most of the resources are free to download. You might need to pay for some of the seminars.

How to take forward:

Visit www.skillsforcare.org.uk/finderskeepers.

Updated: September 2019