Earlier this month my client Wellbeing Teams and love2care won the Skills for Care Award for Best Recruitment Initiative, awarded to them for the work are doing to recruit new care workers who share their values. The initiative covers the whole process, from the recruitment communications to the format of their innovative recruitment workshops.

In this post I’ll share a few ways that I worked with them on these award-winning recruitment communications, and in doing so have attracted fab new care workers who share their values. These were all created as part of a dynamic, collaborative relationship between my client and I alongside values specialist Jackie Le Fevre – a real team effort that’s helped us to approach homecare recruitment differently.

Here are seven ways we did it.

1) Copywriting

We based our copy around questions that would resonate with the kind of person we’re hoping to recruit.

Instead of using standard job ad wording (e.g. ‘Care workers required in Wigan’), we want to appeal to people who share our values on an emotional level.

We do this by using questions such as ‘Would you like a rewarding job?’; combined with supporting copy that communicates our other key messages – that Wellbeing Teams is an opportunity to make a difference to your community, and that our team members’ wellbeing matters too. And, of course, our values are all explicitly written on our collateral to show their importance to us.

 

2) Social videos

We created shareable video content that focuses on our values, whilst also covering the practicalities of the roles. This is an engaging, social-media ready way to share our recruitment messages – our Wigan recruitment video has reached 1500 views and our introduction to Wellbeing Teams a fantastic 8000.

3) Referral cards

Based on Neil Eastwood’s idea from his bestselling book ‘Saving Social Care’, these are designed to spread our reach organically through personal connections.

We are keen to attract people from all walks of life – not just people with care experience – so our referral cards are designed for our team members to give out to people who provide them with great customer service in another setting. For example, if someone who works for Wellbeing Teams gets great service from a waiter or a shop assistant, they can give them a referral card to let them know that we think they’d make a great addition to our team. Even if they don’t choose to follow it up, we’ve brightened their day and shared information about our brand; so it’s a win-win situation!

4) Promises

Promises and guarantees are a proven way to build trust with an audience, and recruiting potential colleagues is no exception. We created 10 promises to team members, use these throughout our communications – on social media, on our website, and in our recruitment packs. Feedback from people who have gone on to take a role with Wellbeing Teams has shown these promises to have been a particularly effective piece of communication, as it effectively creates an informal contract about a range of benefits that we offer.

5) Team recruitment toolkit

Wellbeing Teams are self-organising teams, meaning that after the first team has been recruited in an area, the teams themselves are expected to take a lead on recruiting future team members. The recruitment toolkit contains pre-written social media content, branded images for Twitter and Facebook, recruitment videos, written copy, and printable collateral; making it easy for them to recruit effectively. It also includes images specifically around each of our values, such as this:

In addition, the toolkit contains a range of templates for the app ‘Wordswag’ so Wellbeing Workers can create branded quotes based on testimonials from people they support and their families, right from their phone – and share them on social media (with permission of course).

6) Website

Our website brings together all the key information about working for us in a single careers hub. This includes colleague stories, information about all the key roles in Wellbeing Teams, our purpose and values, our 10 promises, and, of course, a list of current opportunities.

Currently we are working on a downloadable recruitment brochure for the website, for which people need to leave us their email address. This adds them to a mailing list drip campaign which delivers information about working to us every month to potential team members’ inboxes, giving them regular reminders to check our website for current opportunities.

7) A more human application process

Wellbeing Teams doesn’t just talk about values, we live them. That means that the whole application process needs to reflect those values.

One simple way we do this is through how people make first contact with us when applying for a role. Instead of filling in a form or sending a CV, we ask them to book time for a quick phone call with one of our team. They can see who the team member is on our website, and find out a little more about them by taking a look at their one-page profile.

This makes the whole application process more human, which matches the way Wellbeing Teams work day-to-day too. It also means that Wellbeing Teams get a feel for the person through a natural conversation, instead of starting to judge people first and foremost by how well they construct a CV – which makes sense, because being able to have natural conversations with others is much more important.

Find out more

If you’d like to talk more about creating effective communications for recruitment, just drop me a line via LinkedIn or email adam@hopeworksbranding.com.