The current landscape of recruitment is an interesting puzzle. In my 9 years in the sector, I’ve witnessed recruitment from both sides of the aisle. 4½ years as a Headhunter and Consultant and the last 4½ helping Stepping Stones Care grow from 7 employees to the more than 120 we are today.
In this blog I’d like to take a little look at the current challenges we face and explore a couple of philosophical takes on Recruitment.
Recruiting qualified and dedicated staff in the Children’s Residential Sector presents unique challenges, both ethically and operationally. We all know just how difficult the recruitment landscape is and has been for a number of years. Especially for a Company like ours, where we put a huge emphasis on the Therapeutic Care we deliver in our homes. The personality-type and skillset required means our potential candidate pool is squeezed tighter each day. With good people leaving the sector on what feels like a daily basis, we are all fighting an uphill battle to attract and retain the people who are the heart of our businesses.
The current climate mixed with our Company’s growth offers three distinct problems that we have to address and overcome.
1. How do we attract and retain the best people to look after our children?
There is a common misconception in recruitment is that you must attract the top talent in order to be successful. This often means hiring those with the best on paper experience and the best qualifications. I’ve found this is often one of the worst mistakes you can make within the hiring process for Children’s homes.
We acknowledge that it is our responsibility as employers to give our employees all the tools they need to offer the best care possible. So we put our recruitment emphasis on finding the right type of person, putting less weight in their background, experience or other traditional determining factors, and heavily factoring their personality, approach and openness to therapeutic care. By doing that, we can focus on training and moulding our new hires into the superstar adults that our children need and deserve.
2. How do we deal with losing staff?
At Stepping Stones, we put a huge amount of effort into ensuring our employees are happy in their roles. But inevitably, when we lose employees to other Companies, our mindset is to do everything we can to create a positive departure.
We want to wish them the best and hope that they take as good care of the Children in their new homes as they did ours. We want to make their final days and weeks with us a happy time in the hope that the positive departures carry into our homes and our children aren’t disrupted by the loss of an adult in their home.
My hope is for more companies to adopt a “positive departures” approach.
3. The ethical dilemma of poaching staff from other Companies
This is a dilemma that will always be present in the sector. Ethically, no-one wants to poach. It causes disruption to Children and can destroy a home. Therefore, we are compelled to prioritise internal growth and development, ensuring that our teams are nurtured and prepared to advance within our organisation.
There is an inevitability that we will need to hire Qualified, Senior staff from other Companies within the sector, but we want to do all that we can to ensure we are producing as small a wave as possible when this happens.
A common scenario we run into is when we hire someone from another Children’s Home is their wanting to refer a number of staff from their previous Company. We limit this to just one referral in the first six months. Doing so minimises the loss for the other Company but most importantly, the Children in that Company.
As a Care Provider, we should want to care for our employees as much as we care for our young people. But we also need to think about the impact we have on the wider sector.
I’ll leave you with a quote from the ever relevant Winnie the Pooh.
“A little consideration, a little thought for others, makes all the difference.”
