Recruiting home care workers

Overview

Following the pandemic there was a shortage of staff in home care work roles, which was leading to fewer people being able to get the care and support they needed. It also meant that more people were unable to leave hospital when they were ready to go home, as they waited for care at home to be arranged.

Portsmouth City Council worked closely with home care providers in the city to develop a marketing and recruitment campaign to attract new applicants to home care roles in our city. The campaign is called ‘Care for Portsmouth’ and features current home care workers in the city.

The project aimed to:

• Increase applicants to home care worker roles with a marketing campaign featuring case studies of proud care workers
• Ease the process of applying to vacant roles with providers
• Improve public perception of home care as a valued profession, giving it the ‘key worker’ status afforded to other roles during the coronavirus pandemic

Activities included:

• Creation of a new centralised application form on the council website which feeds into a spreadsheet for providers to access
• Development of a home care jobs webpage on the council website
• A1 and A4 poster campaign across the city
• Coverage on BBC South Today
• Inclusion in local magazines including Flagship and Southsea Lifestyle
• Social media posts
• Inclusion in local e-newsletters

Feedback from one of Portsmouth care providers included:

“We’ve just hired our first applicant…so wanted to say thank you! She seems great. Have liked the spreadsheet as it’s been good for us to see where the applicant wants to work and what time, so we have not contacted those who don’t match our available hours and left them for other providers.

“It’s been great now to get someone to the point of a job offer…so just wanted to say thanks and pass on the feedback that from our point of view the spreadsheet has worked well so far!”

Further information

Our application form remains open, and we hope to re-run the marketing campaign again, with some fresh case studies.

You can find out more about home care in Portsmouth or about applying for home care work roles.

Partners involved in this project include Portsmouth City Council and Portsmouth care providers (a full list is here).