Live-in care demands particular skills from care workers, they need to be self-reliant and able to function with less supervision than a daily care worker. In 2012, The Good Care Group decided to change its approach to recruitment and profile its workforce to find out what skills, values and behaviours made a good live-in carer. Following psychometric testing and face to face interviews, it found its highest performing care workers scored highly in tenacity, resolve, self-discipline, emotional stability and resilience.
As a result, it decided these skills would be included in the recruitment process and assessed using psychometric testing, situational questions and activities that would test a candidate’s resilience.
Dominique Kent, director of operations at The Good Care Group, says: “Understanding the make-up of a live-in carer and what makes for real success in the role was critical in improving carer churn and setting up our team for success.”
Using intelligence to support recruitment
When employees leave, The Good Care Group takes time to explore why they left and how company practices might have affected this. All leavers complete an exit survey, which is analysed along with resignation letters to examine reasons for leaving.
Responses from this intelligence indicate that employees appreciate good management and support, particularly in the first three months of employment. In response, The Good Care Group altered its supervision framework to provide this.
These changes include:
- A week-long residential as part of induction for new employees, giving them the chance to complete training, meet other carers and learn new skills
- Reviews at six and 16 weeks
- An assigned manager to act as a support contact
- Access to online learning to support induction
- A 24-hour phone helpline for carers
The Good Care Group found that adjusting its regional management structure to decrease the number of clients each manager looked after meant they had more time to support workers. In a recent staff survey, nearly 90% of workers reported feeling respected and supported by their manager and appreciated improved communication and responsiveness.
Some 80% of workers said they looked forward to starting work in the morning and agreed their workload was fair and manageable, while 90% said they were proud of the service the group deliver to clients.
Using good communication to support retention
Some 90% of staff said regular communication was important to them, so The Good Care Group work hard to ensure care workers feel part of a team.
It makes sure all workers have access to the internet via their own mobile or a device provided at induction.
A weekly newsletter is read by more than 97% of care workers, and the chief executive communicates monthly to share good news stories and examples of best practice.
The future of recruitment and retention at The Good Care Group
The Good Care Group is keen to continue to innovate its recruitment and retention processes.
It hopes to give tablets to all employees and to introduce the use of Skype to aid future conversations with colleagues. It is also in the process of incentivising learning and development activities, which it hopes will encourage workers to further develop their skills and qualifications.
Further information and support
Skills for Care’s finding and keeping workers online hub has resources to support recruitment and retention, including guides about values based recruitment.
Find out more about resilience in social care here
Content on this page is produced and controlled by Skills for Care, sponsor of the Guardian Social Care Network leadership, learning and development hub
