Social Care Recruitment at Scale and Pace

Social Care Recruitment
at Scale and Pace

The challenge

According to the King’s Fund* there was 165,000 social care vacancies across the UK in 2022 having increased by 50% from 2021, the highest level in a decade.

Domiciliary care is a critical staff group in the NHS, playing an important role in the patient flow from hospitals as well as preventing admissions by providing high-quality care in patients’ own homes.

As at May 2023, the Southern Health and Social Care Trust, one of five NHS Trusts in Northern Ireland had approximately 600 care packages outstanding, each package representing a patient and a hospital bed.

The solution

The goal was to fill more of the domiciliary care vacancies to discharge more patients. The objective was to attract more people into the occupation that otherwise would never have considered it. The strategy was to broaden the base of potential applicants by communicating more effectively with our target audience.

The tactic was recruit at scale and pace with the mechanism to host three large-scale recruitment open days targeting the Trust’s main localities.

The Trust identified that it needed to try different, but they also had insufficient in-house resources to execute the campaign successfully, and therefore partnered with Healthdaq.

Given the scale of the vacancies and the urgent need to accelerate recruitment, a series of open days were planned across the Trust’s three sites with a focus on being a one-stop-shop e.g., walk into the venue and complete all stages of the process; application, shortlisting, interview and pre-employment checks as well as pre-booking mandatory training sessions.

The Healthdaq team planned and managed all the advertising campaign across both radio and digital that included a branded campaign microsite with expression of interest (EOI) form. Healthdaq Cloud technology simplified the application, selection and onboarding process for candidates and the Trust’s HR/Resourcing Team.