Recruitment Initiatives
Three initiatives to support your recruitment of staff
1.Bradford SkillsHouse offers a free recruitment service, matching those seeking work with local employers. The SkillsHouse team help to select, recruit and train suitable care workers or other staff (business administration, domestics, catering). You can have as much or little involvement within the process as you want, and the only ask is that you guarantee to interview those potential workers who have successfully completed a 2 – 4 week training programme (you can be involved in the planning of the training programme, but generally it includes aspects of the Care Certificate, such as food hygiene, moving and handling, health and safety). Contact SkillsHouse on: https://www.skillshouse.co.uk/ or 01274 437373.
There is also the opportunity to recruit casual staff through SkillsHouse Bradford, please see the flyer HERE.
2.Care Friends App is a newly launched employee referral App to help you find more high quality care staff. Finding the right quality of care staff is a major challenge, but current employees can be the best and most successful recruiters. Employee referral programmes can be a hassle to administer and as a result, they often only deliver a fraction of their true potential.
The Care Friends app has been developed by Neil Eastwood, author of Saving Social Care, and has been piloted with over 2,500 care workers since 2018. Key pilot stats are:
- Interview no-shows drop to just 1 in 10
- 90% of app-generated interviews are successful
- Workers hired are 20% more likely to reach 3 months in post
Care providers buy an annual licence to use and provide the app to their staff, for those with under 250 employees this is £12+VAT per employee per year. Larger providers can get in touch for a quote.
Further information at: www.carefriends.co.uk
3.Apprenticeship Grants for Employers - Government backed schemes just launched, which provide additional funding to the employer if you take on an apprentice from August 2020 to January 2021. Any firm that hires a new young apprentice aged 16 to 24 years will receive £2,000, while those that hire new apprentices aged 25 and over will be paid £1,500.
Generally, if you don’t pay the Apprenticeship Levy as an employer then you would need to provide 5% of the cost of the apprenticeship (e.g. in social care at L2 or L3 = £150). There are exceptions to this, if you are a small business employing less than 50 staff then the 5% contribution is waived. Apprenticeships are a way of developing and training staff, but are employed by businesses on the same terms and conditions as other employees. You have to pay an apprentice at the minimum wage for the age of the apprentice.
Our local Colleges in Bradford, Keighley and Shipley have apprenticeship funding and offer a range of apprenticeships, as do larger training providers, like GP Strategies (a Skills for Care Endorsed Training Provider at https://www.skillsforcare.org.uk/Learning-development/Find-an-endorsed-provider/Find-an-endorsed-provider.aspx )
