Pioneering a new path in social care recruitment
Recruiting people into social care is hard. We’re working against a history of an undervalued and underpaid profession. Despite these challenges, at BelleVie we’re disrupting traditional recruitment practices to create a society that values fulfilling careers in care. We’re doing this by reimagining the recruitment process and encouraging new people into the sector. Because we know there are extraordinary people out there waiting for the right opportunity to use their compassion and empathy.
Recruiting the right people
When recruiting, we’re not worried about qualifications or CVs. The most important thing to us is what matters to the individual; what their values are. We get to know people by finding out about their passions and interests, and their motivations for getting into care.
We look for people whose values chime with ours and the personalities that will excel. It’s this compassion and hidden talent you wouldn’t put on a CV that are the exact skills that make people perfect for care. We see the value in the things others often overlook, like warm, kind people who embrace their local community spirit. The values-based approach we take means we look much wider than the usual pool of care recruits. If we are to support more people to thrive at home, not just survive, we need to bring new blood into the sector to consider a role in care.
More than half of our care workers, or Wellbeing Support Workers as we call them, come from outside of care. We’ve employed people from retail, hairdressers and taxi drivers. And they’re all from the local communities we serve which helps to build trusted relationships. Right from the start of the recruitment process, from as early as the job advert, we talk about the difference they can make to people’s lives. We highlight that with the right support, people in their local community will be able to lead the lives they love in the comfort of their own homes.
The BelleVie recruitment approach
Instead of a manager interviewing candidates, we’ve replaced this with workshops where a group of applicants work together. We present them with some challenges to see how they handle different situations and how they come together as a team. They also get to hear more about us and how our innovative self-managed teams make their own decisions about the people they support, all based in their local community.
We’ve even developed our own online tool, called ‘Me and BelleVie’ to help assess peoples’ values and personality. Candidates answer three sets of questions on their phone by quickly swiping agree or disagree. It covers things they enjoy doing, assesses imagination and creativity, and interprets their empathy for others. The results of this accurately reveal whether someone’s values align with ours.
If we think someone has the right values, we offer them the chance to shadow someone on the team. This gives them first-hand experience of the role with someone who can answer any questions. Particularly if they’ve never worked in care before, shadowing allows people to work out whether it’s for them or not.
Self-managing teams aren’t for everyone because you have to take responsibility and problem-solve. We look for people with creativity and passion, those who take ownership and take pride in what they do. These kinds of people make fantastic care workers. And if people want to learn and grow, we’ll help them to get a qualification.
The brilliant people we’ve got in our organisation give us a renewed sense of hope that by recruiting on values, we can redefine care work, recruit the right people and create a different future for our sector.
