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We’ve published a new guide that aims to support social care employers in Wales to improve recruitment and retention.

The guide is free to download and includes advice about things like how best to attract people to work in the sector and make staff feel valued once they’ve joined.

We’ve created the guide as part of a wider piece of research that explored how we can address the workforce challenges facing social care in Wales.

We worked with an organisation called Urban Foresight to carry out that research, which also focused on the important role WeCare Wales has played and will play in the future.

Advice in the guide includes:

Attraction

Raise awareness of what the work involves, the variety of roles available and the value of the work.
Make sure job adverts are targeted, clear and appealing.
Collaborate with local organisations like schools and job centres.
Provide incentives for joining.

Recruitment

Make it easier to apply by doing things like offering flexible interview times at weekends or evenings.
Spend time supporting applicants to understand the realities of the job and maintain contact during the period between the job offer and start date.
Be open to a wider pool of applicants by offering flexible working patterns or considering applicants with no experience.
Apply ‘user personas’ to understand who might be interested in a career in social care and childcare. You can find out more about user personas below.

Retention

Prepare new recruits for the role and provide appropriate training so that there are no surprises when they start the work.
Make sure employees feel valued and supported by doing things like putting support systems in place or celebrating their achievements. You can find health and well-being advice and resources by visiting our dedicated page.

As well as the guide, we’ve also produced a user personas toolkit.

User personas are usually fictional characters that represent a target audience or service user. They often include things like demographic information, personality traits, goals and objectives, behavioural information and scenarios to create a picture of a target audience or service user’s needs.

The toolkit describes how user personas can be used to support jobseekers in the social care sector, with several example personas.

Both resources are free to download.

Download the resources

Download the resources by clicking on the following links.

Attraction, recruitment and retention – a guide for employers.

User personas toolkit.

Read the research

These resources were produced as part of wider research into how workforce challenges in social care and early years and childcare can be addressed.

As well as the two resources, the research produced a series of reports about attraction, recruitment and retention in the sector.

If you’d like to read the reports, you can download them from our new Insight Collective service.

We launched the Insight Collective at the beginning of May and it provides access to the latest social care research and data, guidance on training, opportunities to work together, and advice on the available support.

Find out more

To find out more about the resources or the research, please contact WeCare Wales on contact@wecare.wales.

WeCare Wales offers a free jobs portal for all care employers in Wales to promote their vacancies. Simply register here to access this resource.

To learn more about the WeCare Wales programme and how it can help you, please visit wecare.wales.