In March, LIIA hosted a joint workshop with Children’s Services Practice Leaders, Principal Social Workers, Recruitment and HR Leads delivered collaboratively by four London Authorities; Wandsworth, Harrow, Camden and Newham. They shared their permanent recruitment experiences and learnings from recent campaigns in a challenging and fast paced market.
Over 60 colleagues attended, contributing to lively discussions on 4 core themes: Retention First, Strengthening Digital, Learning from International Recruitment and putting Practice Models at the Heart of Recruitment. Many expressed the benefit of coming together, with a powerful recognition that relationship based recruitment practices win out, because ultimately recruitment ‘is a heart game’.
Retention First
- ·Focus on career progression opportunities and faster recruitment processes.
- Whatever the reason, we as employers need to be proactive and flexible in order to retain our talent.
- •We must understand the needs and preferences of the existing workforce and those of the talented candidates we want to attract.
- •Adapt what you offer in terms of pay, benefits, training and development, culture and ways of working to create an employee experience that puts you higher than organisations who compete for high-performance talent.
Strengthening Digital
- ·Maximise social media. Plan it and measure the success so you know what you’re doing.
- Remember that posts should be real and personal, not corporate. Great, Get your team and leadership involved too.
- ·Focus on the content your target audience wants. Make it easy way for them to interact with you. .
Learning from International Recruitment
- ·It can be beneficial to look at international recruitment. People are still with us and are moving through to management positions. It’s worth the investment, but it’s important to get the basics right.
- •Everything that you need to do in settling people and bringing people into the organisation when they’ve come in an international context really needs to be well thought through.
- •All of the basics need to be taken care of to allow staff to focus on learning social work in the UK. There are numerous ways in which you can be creative about how you induct people.
- •People will be bringing all sorts of fantastic transferable skills. They will be the leaders of the future, but you need to invest in that at the start.
Practice Models at the Heart of Recruitment
- ·Have a clear vision of creating change and making sure that there’s focus on getting to the heart of why people want to do work in the profession, and not just the corporate package. Let that shine through in recruitment campaigns, events and language.
- •Although there are different practice frameworks across London, the principles are the same and that can be celebrated and used in recruitment events to make sure it’s at the heart of engagement with candidates at the earliest opportunity.
- •Live up to the practice framework and be able to evidence it. It has to come from the top down and felt in daily working life.
- •Leadership must talk about and promote your practice model so that it’s at the heart of everything and that anybody coming in can see and feel that around them.