HOW TO CONQUER EVEREST
Exploring recruitment & retention basecamps to reach the social care summit
Neil Eastwood is author of Amazon #1 Bestseller Saving Social Care: How to find more of the best frontline care employees and keep the ones you have. He is also founder of Sticky People Ltd and an international speaker, blogger, researcher and commentator on care worker recruitment and retention.
Care providers in Northern Ireland, like much of the UK and internationally, are experiencing a perfect storm of workforce challenges which have left mainstay methods of recruitment, like internet job board advertising, struggling to deliver against a backdrop of worsening staff turnover.
The good news is that this pressure is revealing a range of unsung, under-used methods, which increasingly outperform popular recruitment sources. In most cases, they cost little and have delivered impressive results across a wide range of settings in every country of the world where I have measured them. Triple digit growth, 70% falls in agency staff costs and a halving of vacancies are just a few examples.
But fresh sources are only part of the story, social care has been slow to match the slick candidate experience and employer branding efforts of substitute careers such as hospitality and retail, even though, for the right people, there is so much more intrinsic reward awaiting them here. This is another opportunity, as we have discovered that simple changes can uplift applications by over 20%.
To complete the picture, I have tested a range of quick, simple and no-cost methods to reduce unnecessary frontline staff loss many of which you can implement and get the benefit from the same day.
So, by changing our approach to how we attract potential caring staff – what we say and how we say it – as well as looking in the right places for candidates, not just those seeking any job, and applying new retention approaches, care employers in Northern Ireland will see a big improvement in their workforce prospects.
So, why not join me at the ARC NI Conference on 17th May, where I will share these secrets in Northern Ireland for the first time and help you see your workforce challenge as much more foothill than Everest.