This month we were thrilled to win the Skills for Care Award 2018 for Best Recruitment Initiative, awarded to us for the unique way we focus on recruiting people who share our values.

We developed our value-based recruitment process with the leading UK expert in values, Jackie Le Fèvre, one of our Wellbeing Teams Advisors. One of the first places we used it was with our partners Love2Care in Devon.

 

What is values-based recruitment?

Values-based recruitment and retention is about finding and keeping people who have the right values, attitudes and behaviours to work in social care.

At Wellbeing Teams, we developed a recruitment process that shows our values explicitly throughout – and provides ways for potential team members to show how they ‘live them’.

Our values are compassion, responsibility, collaboration, curiosity, creativity, and flourishing. Our team members are chosen to share these values, and each has an understanding of what they mean to us, too.

 

How we recruit differently

Our values-based recruitment process is different from traditional recruitment in a number of ways, for example:

  • We don’t ask for people’s CVs first. We want to get to know them first through a chat, because it’s a much more human way of understanding what matters to people.
  • All of our recruitment communications focus on values, asking questions such as, “Would you like a job where you can make a difference?” and “Do you agree that every person deserves kindness, respect, and to be listened to?” instead of just saying ‘Looking for care workers’.
  • We use referral cards to attract people who we see living our values day-to-day in a non-care setting, such as people working in hospitality or retail who are providing great service.
  • We share information about ourselves in the recruitment packs in the form of our own one-page profiles, to demonstrate how we encourage our team to bring their whole selves to work.
  • We invite people who use care and support to be a part of our recruitment panel, so they can contribute views of people with lived experience and share what matters to them.
  • Our recruitment days have activities that enable people to show how they would put out values into practice, such as sessions where potential team members can give hand massages to each other (compassion), and exercises that involve working together (collaboration).

The judges panel said that Wellbeing Teams ‘facilitated a culture of values at the heart of what they are doing’. You can hear more from the panel in this video:

 

Learn more

We’re really proud to have won this award, and are excited to continue recruiting fab new people who share our values as we grow. Visit wellbeingteams.org/careers to find out more about working for us, or our Commissioning page if you are interested in learning more about a new model of homecare that could transform lives in your area. .