RMBC Residential Recruitment

Our new contract covered three recruitment sprints to recruit 2-8 roles each. We knew that with high turnover rates across the residential sector, we needed to guarantee engagement with the candidates and offer a high level of recruitment service. We also needed to streamline the recruitment process to avoid drop off due to long periods of consideration, which left candidates open to offers from other employers.

To combat this, we developed a form to document the minimum requirements for the practitioner role, known as a vacancy consultation form. This was walked through in a meeting with RMBC’s service managers. We found this meeting format worked best to populate the vacancy consultation form, as it allowed us to discuss multiple scenarios based on previous CVs we’d seen and had to dismiss for minimum criteria filtering. Instead, we had positive conversations about the equivalent qualifications or experience that could qualify a quality candidate. In the campaign itself, our team was then able to best advocate for candidates who showed relevant experience that was external to a traditional children’s residential setting (e.g. extra-curricular support for children with additional needs, specialist school placements or relevant healthcare/therapeutic settings).

Another improvement we picked up was the introduction of additional questions into our screening call procedure. Previously our recruitment process included a screening call, which we would use to check minimum requirements such as years of experience, access to a car and right to work. An issue RMBC had encountered was that screened candidates weren’t articulate at interview, or couldn’t answer some questions about industry best practice. We started to incorporate more evidence-based questions into screening calls, allowing candidates to showcase their training knowledge, and scenario-based hypothetical questions that helped to ground the candidates’ knowledge in an applied sense. By doing this, we could identify candidates who were “great on paper” but whose knowledge base was limited. Similarly, we could better advocate for candidates whose CVs may not have showcased their wealth of experience.

RMBC previously held fixed interview dates on a monthly basis led to a high drop off rate and low engagement with candidates. We recommended RMBC introduce rolling interviews and candidate review sessions on a weekly basis. After this, the client saw a noted increase in interview attendance. The weekly review also allowed for increased communication between us and RMBC. This meant we could implement active improvements to our screening call approach as each campaign was still live.