As I go round the country meeting social care workers in different settings, I am always struck by the obvious dedication and compassion they show, as they do some of the most demanding jobs you can imagine.
Good staff and employers understand that at the heart of good care lies a strong set of values and behaviours which can be demonstrated day in and day out, ensuring those who need care and support have access to the high quality provision that is their right.
One of our most urgent tasks is to make sure the public understands that while working in social care can be tough it can also be incredibly rewarding, with most workers reporting real personal satisfaction in their jobs. But once we have attracted people’s interest in working in care and support, how do we make sure they have the right values and behaviours to benefit the sector?
There is no magic solution here but I am very encouraged by a new partnership between the National Skills Academy for Social Care, Skills for Care and MacIntyre who have joined forces to pilot a values-based recruitment toolkit for social care employers. The new toolkit has a range of resources to assist employers to recruit on the basis of a set of appropriate values. These resources include draft adverts, interview questions and a personality profiling tool to assist values-based recruitment. It is a really smart idea to pilot this sort of intelligent psychometric testing which already works in other sectors, but is infrequently used in social care.
The toolkit will help employers get a real sense of whether their potential new recruit has the right values and behaviours to work in the care and support sector. We at DH are supporting this because we believe it will help employers improve care, reduce the cost of recruitment by reducing sector churn and lead to more consistent service delivery.
The pilot will run over the next 12 months and allow us to test the appetite for such tools and fine tune what I believe will become a very useful addition to how social care employers recruit and retain quality staff. The new online resource was launched by our Care and Support Minister, Norman Lamb MP, on 17 July. He and I will watch its progress with great interest
I am confident we will learn a lot from this pilot and I certainly commend the approach to you.
