The Recruiting Challenge for Care Providers

There has rarely been a more challenging time for care providers when it comes to recruiting new talent.

Care providers generally agree that Brexit, Covid and the cost of living crisis have all made recruiting harder. Covid has changed workforce attitudes and there is some evidence that some experienced carers retired earlier than previously planned. Now a cost of living crisis puts moderate salaries in the care sector under greater pressure than ever before.

All care leaders know these issues, but care providers must nevertheless sustain or grow their services despite difficult economic headwinds.

Recruiting able staff is the lifeblood of care.

According to Skills for Care, the turnover rate for directly employed staff across the care sector was 29% during 2022. That means a typical care provider must replace almost one third of its employees annually just to stand still. Attracting and carefully selecting capable people who stay in post longer is vital if care providers are to reduce staff turnover. As a supplement to the headline figure:

• Turnover rates amongst under 20s was 52.6%.

• Care workers with less than one year of experience show a much higher turnover rate (43.5%) when compared with care workers who have at least ten years of experience (15.3%).

Marginal differences in turnover rates are associated with factors like contract type. For example whether or not a contract is a zero-hours contract resulted in a 3.1% difference in overall staff turnover rates. The larger factors were:

• Leadership experience – Registered Managers in post for less than a year experienced turnover of 32.7% versus 23.2% for those in post for at least 20 years.

• Travel - Workers that travelled further were more likely to leave their role. Those travelling less than 1km evidenced a turnover of 30.7% versus 38.4% for those travelling more than 20km.

What can we take from these figures? Recruiting in the care sector is a constant challenge. Careful selection is important, but understanding that leadership experience and travel distances make a difference may help with attraction and retention.

The ongoing cost of recruiting stands out as a big concern for most care providers. Those costs depend upon external recruiting fees, jobsite fees, background check fees, employee time associated with recruiting and more. However, most seem to agree that external recruiting fees is the largest avoidable cost when recruiting. Whichever approach is used, recruiting budgets are under pressure.