RECRUITING SUCCESSES

The Kent Autistic Trust

The Kent Autistic Trust was formed by parents of autistic children in 1985. It opened its first small living service in 1989 and has grown to provide supported living and day vocational services to over 100 people in Kent. The Trust offers year-round support to people in their own homes. It also offers single or shared accommodation to those who require it.

The Kent Autistic Trust is a professional and wellconsidered organisation with a solid track record of taking a person-centric approach. Some of its homes have been graded Outstanding by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) and that is a credit to the people the Trust chooses to hire.

Donna Newell is Head of HR. She and her team have many years of experience in both HR and recruitment and they are all too familiar with the challenges faced by care providers. Donna states “recruitment in adult social care sector has been one of our greatest challenges over the last few years with high staff turnover and vacancy rates. Although our turnover has remained low compared to the adult social care average, the scarcity of new workers since the height of the pandemic means we find ourselves competing with many other sectors for new staff.”

The Kent Autistic Trust concedes that recruiting is generally made difficult because of perceived low pay, training requirements and poor in-work support across adult social care. Most will agree that being responsible for some of the most vulnerable adults in society is a demanding job. Donna believes that care staff are expected to take on significant responsibilities when compared to front line staff in retail and warehousing for instance.

Donna says that “these challenges mean that we are now faced with recruiting in volume. Handling a volume of vacancies means that our processes must be effective and streamlined. With 16 separate services across Kent, we also need to ensure recruitment is transparent and allows for multiple people to be involved in the recruitment process within our business.”

Donna goes on to say “CVMinder has proven to be an excellent management tool to ensure that we can track our vacancies and also that we are being responsive to applicants and the demands of our managers. Having a one stop shop ensures that we can post and update jobs at the touch of a button. Receiving all applications online and using filter questions enables our recruiters to shortlist batches of applicants swiftly. When we take to the road to hold open recruitment events, we use CVMinder to generate an applicant contact list. We use that to target applicants who have expressed interest in our company over a period of time in geographical area. This has been very successful and has considerably improved footfall at all our events.”

What is a product without service? Donna concludes “importantly, the CVMinder Team provides excellent support and a sounding board for our needs. I can say with certainty that they are the most responsive software provider we work with.”