The importance of communication and training

Kaia:
I’m Kaia, I work for Acacia Homecare. I'm the recruitment lead in the company.

Shaked:
How do you go about recruitment?

Kaia:
So we use a lot of channels to obviously bring staff in, whether it's social media going out to the community, advocating through our carers, through word of mouth, bringing them in and making them feel like that's a good enough job to stay in.

Beyond just your basic carer and we actually get a lot of refer friends, it's probably our main part of getting carers in. It’s giving them that good relationship and that good process for the whole time that they're working with us, which will then make them advocate for us.

We don't ask them to advocate for us, A lot of them just do it by themselves
because they realize carers actually like it's a great job, we're getting treated well at the moment, so let me introduce it to other people.

Shaked:
Why would they want to join your specific agency?

Kaia:
We make the promise to them that we'll always be completely honest with them.
We will always communicate with them exactly what's happening from our side in the office, which they don't see.
Also, you know, the customer side of things as well.

Shaked:
And do you use software to help you out with the recruitment process?

Kaia:
Our system Carebri, which we use, which makes it more streamlined for them to come through in the recruitment process because as you can imagine, it's quite a long journey and that's one of the hardest things, is keeping them through the recruitment process.

We want to get a feel for our carers before they start working for us, because then, by the time they have finished, you know, the induction training and DBS, we've got a clear understanding of what type of carer they'll be like, who we could fit them with.

Shaked:
What kind of strategy or actions you take in order to keep them on a retention basis?

Kaia:
We invite them into the office quite a lot about making that person building that relationship from the start.
We look after them more, if not the same as our customers. Obviously, if they're happy, the customers are happy because they're treating everyone the same.

Shaked:
If we're talking about the operational side of things, how do you also incorporate that in your approach as an agency?

Kaia:
Having that communication from the get go means that there's no hesitation from that part.
So it's making them know that they can come to us whenever and we’re never going to judge them or say anything to them without knowing the full story first.

Shaked:
How do you make sure that they're advancing in their career as well?

Kaia:
Before they go out to work they have to do an induction training, so once they're done with that
and they've passed, they've to do question papers so we can make sure that they understood fully what they learned.
Then they'd go out in the field and they do shadowing first and we normally do 2 to 3 shadow shifts, at least after that, once they're on the rosters and they're working with the customer, things always come up, whether it's mandatory training or if we're holding specialist training for another customer, we put out to all our carers, so we don't just say, “Oh, because you're not working with them, don't worry about the training.”