Hiring: Are we doing the Wrong Things?
By James Moran, Head of People
Most interviews for residential childcare roles follow the same pattern. Tell me about a time you dealt with a challenging young person. What does good safeguarding look like? Walk me through your experience.
These are reasonable questions. But they might not be the most useful.
The problem isn't that we ask about experience. Experience matters. The problem is that we as humans have a tendency to conflate "has done the job before" with "can do this job well."
They're not the same thing.
What determines whether someone thrives in residential care specifically isn't their knowledge of care plans or their years of service. It's whether they can regulate their own emotions when a young person is going through a tough time and is shows this through action over words. Whether they know their own triggers. Whether they can go home after a difficult shift and come back the next day without carrying it with them. Whether they are, fundamentally, a warm and patient person.
Those qualities aren't taught in induction. They're built over time, through specific kinds of experience. And they can come from almost anywhere.
The unexpected places
What I’ve come to learn, over more than a decade in the sector, is some of the strongest candidates on paper weren't the best people in the job. And some of the best hires I've made came from backgrounds that had nothing to do with the role they were applying for.
People who thrive in a Children’s Care setting tend to share a common theme: they've spent significant time in situations where emotional regulation wasn't optional. Not because someone trained them in it, but because they had no choice.
Market traders, customer-facing workers. People who've spent ten+ hours a day dealing with the full range of human behaviour, staying positive when they don't feel it, absorbing frustration without reacting to it, treating the next person with the same warmth as the first. That patience isn't performed, it has been repeated so much that it’s now habitual.
Nursery and early years workers. Those who have the fundamentals of patience, kindness, playfulness and the ability to meet a child where they are. The skill set for managing older young people with complex needs is different, but those foundational qualities are real and almost impossible to teach.
Hospitality workers. Long shifts, emotionally demanding customers, no room to react badly. The ability to de-escalate quietly and keep things moving is a skill this sector constantly undervalues.
None of these people may have ever worked in residential care. But they've all been tested repeatedly in emotionally demanding situations they couldn't just walk away from. That's worth more than most CVs give it credit for.
What does this means for how we hire?
I'm not arguing experience doesn't matter. It does. But in a sector with a more than 30% average staff turnover and real, ongoing recruitment pressure, we can't expect to always hire experienced candidates and survive by poaching staff back and forth with other local providers.
If our job adverts only attract people who've already worked in care, we’re competing with every other provider for the same candidates. Opening up our thinking and being genuinely curious about what someone's background has built in them, gives us access to a talent pool outside of the norm. With that diversification comes a new wave of residential support workers who, over time, will be the next seniors, the next deputies and the next registered managers.
It also changes how we interview. Rather than asking what someone would do if a young person was dysregulated - a question most people know the expected answer to by now - we need to start asking things that reveal how someone is actually put together.
Tell me about a time you had to stay calm when you really didn't feel it.
What do you do after a genuinely hard day?
What do you know about your own reactions under pressure?
We’re not testing care knowledge. We’re looking for self-awareness, honesty, and the kind of warmth that doesn't depend on being liked in return.
The best people we’ve hired haven't always come from the most obvious places. What they had in common was that they were good human beings whose experiences had built resilience and patience as a by-product of life experience.