STEP 1: A strong employer brand is key to talent attraction and retention

The starting off point for attracting and retaining the best staff – whether that’s carers or support staff – is your employer brand, or employer reputation. Research by Glassdoor found that 92% of people would consider changing jobs if offered a role with a company with an excellent reputation. This is particularly relevant in the care sector, where carers often move between providers. If you want to be the care home that carers in your local area want to join – rather than being the one they are looking to leave – your employer brand is crucial.

So what is your employer brand? It’s the value of your brand to current staff and potential recruits, which means it’s all elements of your brand and how your care home is perceived within your community as an employer.

This means it’s vital that your brand is authentic and resonates with the staff you are looking to recruit. If you’re an established care home, the chances are you already have a brand. Going through the steps below will help you identify whether it aligns with the ideal staff you want to recruit; if it doesn't, you may need to rethink your brand.

If you’re confident you can demonstrate your care home is a really great employer, but no-one knows about you, you’ve got the starting blocks, but you haven’t yet got an effective employer brand. How your brand is communicated and understood by your target audiences will be through your marketing strategy, therefore your recruitment marketing strategy, your marketing strategy and your employer brand all need to be aligned and pulling in the same direction to reinforce one another.

We’ve already pulled together tips on how to create an effective marketing strategy for your care home; if you haven’t already got one in place, then reading our tips will help you make sure your brand is known within your community for the right reasons, which will spread your employer brand reputation and help attract the right candidates to your care home.

STEP 2: Know who you are trying to recruit

Before you begin your recruitment marketing strategy, you need to know who you are targeting. An effective way to do this is to build an avatar of the persona you want to attract. We recommend brainstorming this with your management team, as well as some of your senior carers. The questions to ask yourself about your ideal candidate include:

• How old are they?
• Where do they live? (Area, type of house, rented or owned?)
• What’s their education? Their professional history? 
• Are they married? Do they have children? How old are the children? Where do they go to school?
• Where do they shop?
• How do they get their news?
• What car do they drive?
• How often do they go on holiday? Where do they go? What do they do?
• What hobbies do they have?
• What research do they do before taking a major decision? Online? Ask for recommendations? Official ratings?

STEP 3: Bring your ideal carer avatar to life

When you have answered all these questions, give your avatar a name and paint their narrative.

Your ideal carer avatar might be Chloe, 33, mum of two. Chloe’s husband, Darren, is a fireman. They both grew up and went to school locally; neither went to university. They live in a semi-detached house on the outskirts of town.

Chloe used to be an executive assistant but hasn’t worked since having her children; she wants to earn a bit of money for herself, now that both children are in regular school/day care.

As a mum at the school gates, Cloe is very connected to the local community – and this sense of community is important to her. You’ll always find her at the school fete and local community events, such as quiz nights.

When she’s not busy looking after her family and home, Chloe likes to go to yoga and Zumba, and going out for drinks with her girlfriends. At the weekend, Darren plays in a local 5-aside football team, sponsored by a local business. The children go to swimming and gym classes and the oldest has just joined the local football club.

During her past as an executive assistant, Chloe has learned to be detailed and vigilant with everything she does, so will conduct thorough research before making any major decisions. Due to her broad network of friends and acquaintances, she prefers a mutual recommendation but will conduct in-depth online research if this is not possible. Chloe is a member of several Facebook community groups and gets lots of her recommendations from there.

STEP 4: Talk to your existing employees

Consider undergoing an internal audit to find out what drove your employees to join your care home and to ask questions about your brand and how this was perceived, as well as why they stay with you. Exit interviews with staff who are leaving can also provide invaluable information. Your aim is to find out what you’re doing well, what could be improved and what can be done to increase retention?

For example, audit questions could include:

• Why did staff join your care home – what influenced them?
• What do they like/dislike about working in your care home?
• What makes them stay?
• Would they recommend your care home to a friend looking for a job? What would they say to them?
• How did they find job vacancies for your care home?
• What prompted them to want to work in the care sector?
• What were the most important factors for them when considering a new job?
• What was the application process like for them? Is there any way you could make it easier/ is there anything they would improve about the application process?
• What questions did they have prior to starting work? Is there any way you could get these questions answered?

Use insights from these interviews to help refine your avatar and identify which channels you will market on.

STEP 5: Create testimonials from your existing staff

Personal testimony is a valuable resource for promoting your care home’s brand and in turn to recruit. Here are some key points to remember when trying to source testimonials:

Make sure you have as much information about the referee as possible. A more authentic and candid testimonial holds more weight. Details about your employee’s name, age and how long they have worked for you are all important in ensuring their testimonials hold merit.

Timing is everything. You’ll know as well as anyone that your employees are busy people. Making sure you have set enough time for them to give a thorough testimonial is key. Setting up a meeting or giving employees an assigned time out of their workday will ensure that they can devote all their time to their testimonial and will help to assure that any statements you receive are of good quality.

Many staff may feel nervous about writing a testimonial, especially if their job doesn’t often require them to stare at a blank computer screen and conjure up words. Therefore you may have more success if you have a chat with them asking them questions, which you can record on a mobile phone, and then either ask them to use that as a basis to script their testimonial or transcribe it yourself and work it into a coherent testimonial for them to review.

If this seems awkward, calling in a third party, such as a marketing agency or copywriter, can be a simple way of making the process easier for all concerned.

STEP 6: Create your Employee Value Proposition

Steps two to five will help you shape your Employee Value Proposition (EVP) for potential recruits. This is the unique set of benefits that your care home offers staff in return for the skills, experience and commitment that they will bring to your care home. There are several templates online that can help you develop this, or you could work with a recruitment company, ideally one experienced in finding recruits for the care sector.

STEP 7: Work out which channels your recruitment marketing will be on

From the work that you’ve conducted to create and refine your avatar, you should be able to identify which media channels will be most successful for your recruitment search.

Social media such as Facebook, Instagram and twitter, or careers sites such as Indeed, Glassdoor and LinkedIn are great methods of direct advertising. Since most people are on social media nowadays, the potential reach of this method is immense. Additionally, recruitment marketing in this way will also increase recognition of your care home in general, so may serve to bring in potential clients.

However, there are some health warnings with these channels.

·         Job sites can be costly and the ease with which applications can be submitted means that you may receive a large quantity of applications, not necessarily of great quality, or be met with timewasters. It’s worthwhile creating some hurdles for candidates to jump over to sift out those who are firing off random applications and those who are really interested in potentially joining your care home. This could be as simple as asking them to email you a list of the top qualities they think a carer should have.

·         On social media, there is always the chance that your reach is too broad, and you find the perfect candidate, but they live too far away or cannot commute. It is for this reason that you need to define your audiences and geographic reach carefully for your adverts. It's also worthwhile posting in local Facebook groups (subject to moderator rules) as the members tend to be very local; print marketing in local newspapers or advertising in local shops, community areas or even in your own care home can also get your vacancies in front of a targeted, local audience.

By the same measure, word of mouth, internal referrals and recommendations are tried-and-tested methods. Your staff may have friends in a similar demographic, who therefore are likely to be appropriate candidates for your team.

Recruitment and staffing agencies are a great option if your current staff are already busy and there are not enough resources to dedicate to recruitment. These agencies will undoubtedly be able to find the perfect candidate but are costly, so should only be used if you have excess capital and a lack of time or human resources. Recruitment agency fees are often negotiable, especially if you agree to work with one agency exclusively.

STEP 8: Create your recruitment marketing strategy

Once you know exactly the candidates you are trying to reach and have decided the best marketing channel or channels for your care home, you need to pull your recruitment marketing strategy together.

No matter which of the above channels you choose, there is some basic ground that needs to be covered:

·         Ensuring a polished and user-friendly website: Whichever method you choose to spread the message about your recruitment, you will most likely have candidates visit your website. Making sure your website has all the relevant information for both clients and employees, whilst projecting the image and values of your care home, is key to making sure you keep candidates engaged with and excited about their application process. You can help to guide candidates to your website by linking it to any social media posts and on job search sites, asking recruiting agencies to guide applicants towards it and putting a QR code on physical advertisements. All of this will make it easier for potential candidates to find out more about your care home and apply. (It will also have wider benefits for your brand, as a website that provides an engaging user experience for candidates is likely to tick a lot of boxes for potential residents as well.)

·         Having a strong social media presence is always beneficial in our digital age. Posting when positions become open is useful, but regular posting will help to build up a following which can lead to more people seeing your posts, and target people who will be most interested in your services. It may also mean that you get applications even when not explicitly hiring. Social media allows potential recruits to find out information they wouldn’t normally obtain from the website. It’s a solid way to build relationships with applicants, recruiters and agencies, whilst helping you get the best candidates possible.

·         Ensuring applicants receive fast responses to any questions or to their applications will again help to build up relations. Making sure someone regularly checks DMs and emails means you don’t risk losing out on potentially the perfect candidate.

·         Use all the above points and anything else that works for you to streamline the application process. Whether an applicant has been referred by a current employee, has seen an advert in a paper or follows your social media accounts, you want to make it as easy as possible for candidates to apply and progress through your recruitment process.

 STEP 9: Review and refine 

The likelihood is that you’ll now have a large amount of content, testimonials and ideas floating around and it can be tempting to just throw everything out there. However, imagine for a moment a Venn diagram with your brand image, your values and what you look for in a recruit on one side, and your applicant avatar and their values on the other. A good recruitment marketing strategy will find the overlap and centre point, ensuring not only that you are happy with the new recruit but that they will be happy working with you.

STEP 10: Retention is key

The most cost-effective recruitment strategy is to retain current staff. Most obviously it reduces recruitment and training costs. But ignoring high levels of employee turnover can be very costly in other, less direct, ways; it lowers internal morale and could harm your external reputation, diminishing your all-important employer brand. So, understanding the importance of staff retention is vital.  

·         It's true what they say: hire right or hire twice. The reason we were so detailed about choosing and developing the best recruitment marketing strategy is because all these steps will help you to target the best candidate for your care home’s vacancies. Remember that Venn diagram from earlier? It's all focussed around making sure that your employees not only tick all the boxes in terms of skill sets but also ensuring that they will fit in with and enjoy the culture of your workplace.

·         Talk and engage with your employees. You can utilise the testimonial collecting stage of the recruitment process to find out if your employees would like to make changes and what could be improved or enhanced in the workplace. One of the best ways to reduce staff churn is by valuing employees’ needs and requests, whether they have been with you for two months or two years. A few ways that this can be achieved are:

o   Working hard to create a positive environment: Particularly in a care home, employees are busy and take on critical work for the elderly, so even finding the time to voice concerns about issues at work can be hard. If you set up an easy-to-use and efficient system where employees can address any concerns, it will help them to feel heard. This could be through an online form, a discrete letter box, or even just through constant reiteration that there is someone to talk to.

o   Keeping staff motivated is one of the best ways to reduce staff churn. As with anything in life, if you feel passionate and motivated to excel, you are going to put a large amount of drive and determination into making a task or project a success and to a sufficient standard. Incentives such as trips, treats or maybe even an extra day or two off will motivate staff to always try their best. In addition, creating a culture whereby employees can move up the ladder within your organisation will help you to retain staff for longer. Say, for example, you’ve just spent all this time creating a recruitment marketing strategy to hire a new manager. Wouldn’t it be easier if you could work to train your current staff with the end goal of being promoted to a managerial position? Not only will this keep employees motivated, but it will also mean you have the perfect candidate right on your doorstep with no need to train them in your care home’s culture or operational systems!

o   Make sure the grass is never greener on the other side: Consider your competition: why should your employees stay working for you, if they could do the same job somewhere elsewhere, perhaps for a better salary? What makes your care home a great place to work? Do other organisations offer more perks? Consider Chloe from earlier; does she need special considerations so that she can be around for her kids? Perhaps you could join forces with a local after-school childcare provider so that she can work evenings for you. Does she need the reassurance that she can be flexible with her schedule in case her kids get sick? Is there any work she might be able to do from home on those days? How can you make her work/life balance easier?

o   Focus on things other than work: Do your employees have any hobbies? Are there any charities they are passionate about? What can you do to support these external passions within the workplace?

o   Lastly, always remember that transparency from management is key to building trust and loyalty with staff: Always remain open with your staff, believe in them and encourage them.