The most desirable skills of a care worker and how to recruit them

When recruiting a new member of a care working team, there are a number of key attributes that may not be initially considered but can help carers find the best person for the role. These include being able to relate to people from a variety of backgrounds, patience and a sense of humour.

These are vital skills of a care worker because staff spend a lot of time with the same clients. For some of these clients, they will have little or no contact with anyone else most days, so a good working relationship is crucial.

Core Skills

There are no mandatory qualifications for care workers. However, all new care workers should be inducted using:

• The Care Certificate in England
• The SSSC codes of practice in Scotland
• The All Wales Induction Framework for Health and Social Care (AWIF) in Wales
• The NISCC Induction Programme in Northern Ireland

Experience in health and social care is often the most prized asset for those seeking to employ a new care worker. It is undoubtedly important, as research in The Hidden Dynamics of Homecare has demonstrated.

However, there are many great care workers to be found in younger cohorts, and where a candidate lacks experience, using values based recruitment combined with exercises to look for the core skills below will enable you to find and hire great care workers with the right skills.  

English Skills

Although foreign languages can be extremely valuable when caring for those with none or little ability to speak English, reading and recording information and communicating with colleagues and wider teams (for example medics) requires a good level of spoken and written English.

Number Skills

Care workers will often be required to carry out basic calculations (especially when using paper rather than electronic records). For example, when recording and calculating weight or fluid intake and output.

General Employee Skills

Although we are now drifting into the territory of behaviours, skills like time management, the ability to learn from mistakes, listening and paying attention to what people are saying, responding well to challenging behaviour, stress tolerance and the ability to work well in a team are all very important skills of a care worker.

Uncovering these core-skills with exercises

These core skills can be combined into an assessment that can be used as part of your candidate selection process. For example, create a scenario that is common but challenging in care, for instance, a person is refusing to take their medication and says they have already taken it themselves in the morning.

Ask the candidate to describe how they would handle the situation. They should show how they might utilise skills in managing challenging behaviour and stress tolerance given the difficult nature of the situation.

They should also use their number skills to review the eMAR/MAR chart against how many medicines are left, to see if the person has indeed taken their medicines or is confused or not telling the truth.

They should then be able to suggest or guess (depending on their experience) suitable actions, such as trying to reason with the person to take their medicines, stressing why it is important that they do so and ideally recording an incident note. The latter will demonstrate their written English communication skills.

The overall way in which the person responds to both the task and your prompts/directions you give as they work through the task will also reveal how much they pay attention and listen. Although this might sound like a low-level skill it is rare to find people who base their actions fully or mostly on what another person is telling them.

Paying attention to this degree can firstly help carer workers avoid making mistakes - assuming the instructions they are given are correct! It will also help them identify hidden issues a person in their care may be having.

Using scenario based tasks like this can help you to understand to what extent a candidate has both the values and the skills they need to deliver safe, compassionate, high quality care for the people your organisation cares for. 

Recruiters must be able to spot the following skills in candidates for them to be able to be moved forwards in the process:

• A natural passion for care. Some days the job may be challenging, and care workers tend to work long shifts, so even on bad days, they should still be passionate about the service they provide.
• A good work ethic. A good attitude to working in general is vital in care roles. Whether that means working an extra hour or two to complete admin tasks, or to pick up extra shifts if a colleague is unwell, a drive for working is very important in this industry.
• The ability to manage time effectively. Working in care often means having a number of things ‘on the go’ at any one time. Thankfully, with software, like that offered from The Access Group, appointments and rostering can be automated, meaning that difficult time management scenarios can be easily resolved.
• The ability to understand policies and procedures. In the care sector particularly, it is vitally important that policies are followed. This keeps the working environment for both carer and client safe and compliant. Staff must be able to adapt as quickly as changes are made. This applies to CQC guidelines too, and staff must be willing to learn on the job in order to practice safely.

How do you recruit the right care worker?

Social media has become a powerful tool and is arguably now the best way to recruit candidates who already live or work in a particular local area.

Beyond that, identifying pull factors which will appeal to potential recruits is also critical, such as providing quality training as standard. Appealing to an energised, hard-working group will help to improve the quality and quantity of applicants for open posts. Along with positive working conditions, flexible working and competitive pay rates can encourage potential candidates to enquire.

While experience is of course valuable, it may not directly translate to diligence and skills if it has been accrued without a passion for caring. Although skills are important, they can be taught on the job. When recruiting, employers should look for individuals that have a clear passion and ideally an understanding of the importance of professional standards in healthcare.

How to provide a boost to retention?

Innovative care providers are now looking for alternative ways to attract and retain talent in the sector. When recruiting a care worker, employers can now opt for a ‘self-selection’ approach - this is where potential candidates, including people that have never worked in care before can ‘look in and see’ to find out what a role in care is like and what qualities they might need in order to be successful.

Sunrise Senior Living UK and Gracewell Healthcare have taken this approach, with the overriding aim of improving retention. As we discussed in more detail in a previous blog, employers can look at re-balancing the candidate selection process, in favour of greater emphasis on people’s behaviours and values and aligning this with organisational culture and expectations. One of the most important benefits to this new approach is that it helps filter out unsuitable candidates prior to the application stage.

According to 61% of employers using the approach, it improves the performance and motivation of newly hired team members providing a real boost for social care recruitment teams.

Employers also need to ensure that their organisational culture, expectations and any employee benefits are clearly communicated at the interview process so they can assess whether applicants will be a good fit. If these factors are considered in the early stages of the recruitment process, then it is more likely that care providers will recruit and retain the staff that can help them to deliver an outstanding service.

Using software that makes gives carers more time to actually care can also help recruit and retain the best care staff. 

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