The UK has seen widespread job losses, particularly hospitality and retail, and, according to statistics from McKinsey, approximately 24% of the UK workforce (around 7.6 million jobs) were put at risk by the COVID-19 related lockdowns.
This means there’s now an abundance of workers looking for new jobs, which presents the social care sector with an opportunity to tap into new pools of social care talent.
But this also presents a challenge. How can care providers find and engage with people whose skills are needed, but who may not be actively seeking a role in care, or even have considered care as a career option?
If care providers can overcome this challenge they will be able to reach into new, untapped pools of potential care talent.
In this blog post, we look at 5 tips to reach this untapped pool of talent and hire more staff.
Many care providers utilise job boards like ‘Indeed’ for advertising their vacancies. Job boards, however, work best when someone is actively seeking a specific type of role, so this will not be an effective strategy for reaching the untapped pool of potential care candidates not actively seeking a role in care.
While job boards can be effective for communicating the benefits of a role to someone actively seeking that role, job boards do not provide an ideal platform for selling the idea, and the rewards, of a career in care, to someone who may not have considered it.
If you want to reach and engage with untapped social care talent, you’re likely to find most of them on Facebook. With nearly 2.45 billion monthly active users, Facebook is the most used online social media platform in the world. There are 40 million + active Facebook users in UK alone, that’s 71% of the UK adult population.
Facebook also offers advertisers advanced targeting options, so you can create targeted campaigns based on location, interests, education and qualifications and more, to get your message in front of the right people.
Location targeting is the critical factor when reaching social care candidates, as care staff will need to live within a realistic distance from your care service. Recruitomate data indicates that 6-10 miles is the ideal radius around a care service for targeting purposes.
Even the best Facebook targeting in the world won’t motivate people to register their interest in your roles. Capturing the attention of your target audience and selling the idea of a career in care and working for your business is critical, and Facebook offers a range of advertising formats to help you do this very effectively.
Use high quality copy, beyond the usual list of ‘duties and responsibilities’, to engage the emotions of your target audience. The rewards of a career in care go beyond an hourly rate – it’s about changing lives, making a difference and the satisfaction of helping others.
Good copy, coupled with high quality and relatable images or video, will sell the rewards of a career in care and the benefits of joining your team.
Once a candidate lead has responded to your Facebook campaign, it’s vitally important to reach out to them as soon as possible, as speed of response is directly related to your chances of getting the candidate to the next stage of the hiring process.
According to a 2007 Kellogg/MIT study by Dr. James Oldroyd, the odds of converting a lead generated online drop drastically within the first hour of someone registering their interest.
If you are able to call a new candidate within the first five minutes of registration, you will improve your conversion rates by almost 400%. After that, the longer you wait the less likely you are to schedule an interview with a candidate.
Recruitomate data shows that 50% of candidate sign-ups take place after 5pm, which presents something of a challenge when it comes to responding quickly.
At the very least, candidates registering after business hours should receive an automated email and text message thanking them for registering, and explaining next steps.
One of the many challenges of hiring social care staff is the work involved in filtering out those candidates that are not suitable, particularly if you are reaching out to people who have not worked in care before.
Therefore it’s critical to have an efficient system in place for pre-screening and pre-qualifying candidates, so that only the candidates who are really interested and suitable will filter through to the next stage of the hiring process.
A great strategy for pre-screening and pre-qualifying candidates efficiently is to design a set of quickly answered questions, specific to the role you are hiring for, that will quickly determine whether a candidate is suitable enough to be telephoned or asked to complete a full application form.
You don’t even have to have a real human being asking the questions. These days, chatbot technology has evolved so much that you can use an automated bot to ask your candidates questions and gather all the information you need to move them to the next step in the hiring process.
Again, speed is important. Book an interview with interested candidates as soon as possible – as they may get snapped up by another employer because they are applying to multiple jobs.
However, one of the frustrations of hiring social care staff, not least those new to care, is scheduling interviews only to find no-one turns up – some simply forget, others just aren’t interested, some have been offered a job but don’t think to tell you.
But this leads to hours of wasted time waiting, chasing candidates and re-scheduling interviews.
However, Recruitomate data shows that candidates who book their own interview time, and are reminded at least twice (including on the day) of their upcoming interview, are significantly more likely to show up.
So provide your candidates with a means of selecting their own time for an interview, and set up automated reminders that go out at least the day before and on the day of the interview itself to improve your interview show-up rate.
The impact of COVID-19 on employment has been significant, which means a large pool of new potential recruits for your social care provider business. In order to take best possible advantage of this, it’s important to have the right strategy.
With concise, targeted campaigns on Facebook, a system for quickly and efficiently pre-qualifying candidate leads and a smooth interview booking process – you can turn potential candidates into great hires.
If this seems like a lot of work, the good news is that you don’t have to do it alone. If you don’t have the time or resources to implement this on your own, Recruitomate offers a full custom built candidate generation system, available month-to-month with no contracts.
If you would you like to recruit more permanent staff for your social care team and streamline your recruitment process, click the button below to book a 20 minute call and find out how you start to hire more staff in as little as 10 days.
