By Jo Edwards, Senior Director
You can see recruitment in care as just an HR problem or you can see it as a marketing challenge, and I think the difference has a major impact difference in the success of your initiatives.
However you see it, recruitment is a major issue for the care sector and rising demand isn’t making life any easier.
71 per cent of providers say recruitment is challenging and 37 per cent are worried about maintaining services in the face of it (Department of Health and Social Care, April 2025).
The key point to recognise here is that your marketing is not aimed at potential clients but at potential candidates.
Your job adverts are your marketing campaigns which are competing for attention with all the other care (and non-care) jobs in your sphere of influence.
So, if you can’t increase your salaries, how can you increase your recruitment prospects?
Define your ideal candidate like a customer persona
In B2B marketing, we define our ideal customer persona (ICP) during branding and strategy exercises.
The same is true for recruitment campaigns where I often find myself helping clients to define their ideal employee persona (IEP).
The point is that we no longer target any-old-candidate and instead aim at targeted prospects who are more likely to stay longer and have a greater impact within the workforce.
We try to explore motivations (like flexible hours, meaningful work, job security or local work) from the perspective of our IEP and then we cover demographics, life stage, pain points and goals.
Finally, the task is to tailor the campaign’s messaging depending on who we’re trying to attract to the job role.
Building an employer brand is your biggest recruitment tool
An employer brand is essentially what it feels like to work for a company and the message you put out around that topic.
To build an employer brand, the exercise you go through should cover:
· Company culture
· Company values
· The support you offer to employees (including training and leadership)
· Where you stand in the market compared to your competitors
You’ll want to explore (and then implement) how these should appear on your website and consider the use of social proof.
For this, you need to use testimonials, photos of real staff and stories from their daily work.
In addition, awards can go a long way to showing that you’re a great employer.
Retention is the other half of recruitment
Once you have done the above you might think you’re ready to recruit hundreds of carers in a short time.
However, the marketing promises must match reality.
If you make promises you can’t (or won’t keep), you’ll be found out and word will spread of the negative working environment that you have created.
Remember that your ex-employees can leave reviews on the likes of Indeed.com and LinkedIn as to the kind of employer you are just like your clients can.
Your onboarding, support, supervision and recognition should all live up to what you’ve offered your candidates.
Unhappy staff will damage future recruitment through word of mouth and reviews.
Attend an employer branding session
I have been working with care providers to improve their marketing for over 25 years and the team at JE Consulting are genuine experts in your sector.
We can help you run a branding session or listen to your employees through various media so that you’re equipped for your next recruitment drive.
We’ll even help you gather testimonials and stories from your team so that you can focus on interviewing and promoting your job advertisements.
If you’d like to have a branding session or speak to an expert about recruitment campaigns, please get in touch.
