National Inclusion Week - Impact Matters

Our inclusive recruitment approach has been in place for over 18 months, which gives us a great opportunity to reflect on what we have been doing, what’s working well and more importantly what impact it is having! 

As part of National Inclusion Week, where this year’s theme is Impact Matters, we took the opportunity to speak to Laura Wolstenholme, head of people and communication, about Persona’s approach to inclusion.

Why did Persona change their approach to recruitment?

Recruitment had been challenging for us as in recent years, as it had been for many in the health and social care sector. We were struggling to attract people to our roles, which meant recruitment was just a constant cycle of advertising and interviewing. Over time this was really having an impact on the services we deliver as our vacancy levels increased, we were using agency staff more regularly, staff were working lots of additional hours, managers were spending lots of their time covering shifts and we were receiving feedback that recruitment was really challenging for our teams. So we knew we needed to do something differently.

What were the first steps that you took in addressing the challenges?

We already knew from other projects that we were involved in that, as an organisation, we had an ageing workforce and that we were under-represented in terms of our staff demographics in comparison to the sector and local community, particularly around the age and race of our staff. We set up a project group to look at our current situation and to design a new process that we hoped would help us to address the challenges we were facing. Input and feedback from outside of the organisation was key to designing our new approach. Through other projects we were involved in, we had been meeting some great people who really shared our organisational values and we had been encouraging them to apply for our roles, but when we tracked their success through the recruitment process, we were seeing that some people were not making it through to interview stage, so we arranged to meet with them to understand recruitment from their point of view, which was really insightful.

What were the changes that you made to recruitment?

After listening to the feedback from a variety of people, we made our key focus removing potential barriers to recruitment, so the new approach included:

• removal of application forms from the start of the recruitment process
• asking candidates to apply by providing their name and contact details, so a member of the team could call them back to discuss their application
• interviews set up on a weekly basis, so we were able to offer timely interviews
• introducing observations as part of the assessment process
• involving people we support in the interview and assessment process
• opportunity to view interview questions in advance
• interview questions that focussed on our organisational values, rather than the candidates' experience
• where we saw that candidates had potential, but we weren’t able to offer them a role at that time, we offered them the opportunity to come and volunteer with us
• regular communication with candidates throughout the recruitment check stage, to help them feel a part of the team as soon as possible
• ensuring that interview questions weren’t directly or indirectly implying that candidates needed to have prior work experience in care

We also wanted to understand more about the demographics of candidates applying for roles, so now we ask about this when someone applies to join us. This allows us to identify any gaps or any challenges at any stage of the recruitment process so that we can make changes to improve the process.

Has the new approach made an impact?

Yes, since we implemented the new approach back in January 2023 we have seen a big increase in the number of candidates applying for our vacancies, being successful at interview and starting as new staff members at Persona. This in turn means there are fewer vacancies and gaps in the rotas that need to be covered. Don’t get me wrong, not everything has gone smoothly; we are not getting it right every time and we have had to make some tweaks and changes along the way as we have learnt what is and isn’t working well. Also, there are still some areas of the organisation where we have recruitment challenges and we are working with these teams to improve this, but overall, we are now seeing good, quality candidates apply, join us and stay with us at Persona, which is a better position than we were in 2 years ago.

We have also looked at how collecting the demographic data of candidates and new starters has impacted on us as an organisation, and the analysis of this tells us:

• the average age of our workforce overall has decreased from 48.5 (Dec 2022) to 47.9 (Jun 2024). If we hadn’t made these recruitment changes, the average age would have increased during that time
• we are attracting younger people to the organisation with 26% of new starters so far in 2024 being under the age of 30, in comparison to 20% of new starters under the age of 30 in 2023.
• the number of people employed by Persona who are from ethnic minorities has increased from 9.35% (Dec 2022) to 14.39% (June 2024)

The data has also identified areas where we need to look at doing things differently, such as encouraging more males to work in social care.

What’s next?

There are several things we need to do to keep the momentum going, these have been captured in our new strategy 2024-2027 for Persona and include:

• continuing to monitor the impact the inclusive recruitment approach is having; adapt and change the process where this is needed
• monitoring our data to identify any gaps so that we can make any changes to the process
• ensure that we are consistent in our approach across all teams
• developing a clear pathway for early careers by strengthening our work experience and placement opportunities, linking in with schools and colleges and promoting social care as a career choice 
• ensuring that our inclusive approaches are embedded across all areas of the organisation

What does inclusion mean to you?

For me inclusion is about a few things:

• people feeling they can be themselves and share (if they wish to) things about themselves without worries of any consequences in doing so 
• a sense of belonging, feeling that you are part of something and that you have people around you to support you
• knowing that you can have a view and opinions on things that are happening, that your views and opinions are listened to and that they are just as important as everyone else's
• respecting that everyone has strengths that they can bring to work and that this adds richness and value to the organisation

Interested in working with us in care? Click here for links to staff's stories and to sign up to our vacancies email list.

Want to find out more about inclusion? Click here to read our articles on inclusive language.

Did you know?

In 2023 we became a member of the Greater Manchester Good Employment Charter and we also won the Most Improved Award. In 2024 we won the award 'Best for Inclusion - Large'.