Jill's blog of burning issues: Recruitment and retention

An insight into how we recruit and retain.

First, I want to say a big thank you to everyone for all the hard work that went into preparing for the CQC inspection. I know that you all did your best to demonstrate the high quality services we provide across the Trust, whilst also being honest about those areas where we need to improve further. Which brings me to the next – and last – of my burning issues blogs about the things that matter to staff.

This blog focusses on recruitment and retention – two issues that came up again and again at the listening events I ran earlier this year.

It will also be my last blog as Interim Chief Executive before I hand over to Dr Sara Munro when she takes up post in September.

Recruitment for nursing and support workers: The story so far…

It’s no secret that we have had a large number of vacancies across clinical services and, in particular, in nursing and support worker posts over the last few years. Despite attempts to fill these posts, we only ever managed to keep up with turnover, rather than tackling the underlying vacancies. The Trust is certainly not alone – there’s a national nursing shortage and increasing competition from the private sector.

It was clear that we needed a new and very different approach to recruitment if we were going to attract high quality talent and maintain quality and consistency for our service users. So, following feedback from applicants and looking at what was working well for other trusts and organisations, the Recruitment Team developed a new recruitment strategy.

The strategy focusses on three key areas:

• improving our recruitment processes
• improving our profile to attract candidates using social media and other recruitment platforms
• and developing more robust strategic partnerships with universities, colleges and other partners.

The team’s starting point was to target where we had the greatest number of vacancies: Band 5 and 6 nurses, and support workers. The challenge was to attract the highest calibre of staff in a market of national shortages where candidates have the pick of where they want to work. We adopted an ‘assessment centre’ approach, using literacy and numeracy testing as well as values based recruitment, where applicants demonstrate our Trust values. We also went all out on social media to spread the word, and posts about our vacancies and working for the Trust attracted more than 2000 Facebook likes, shares and comments.

Many of you will have been involved in some of these large scale recruitment events held at Elland Road earlier in the year. These events have gone a significant way to addressing some of the shortages for us. Not all of the staff involved may be aware of the impact that their efforts and participation may have had, but as a result of the two larger scale events we have been able to recruit an additional 143 clinical staff, of which 105 are nurses and 38 are health support workers.

More recently we have held some smaller events, focussed on services with hard-to-fill posts. The aim was to target experienced staff, and as an incentive we offered a recruitment and retention payment for new external candidates. This approach was very successful and we were able to recruit an additional 25 specialist and experienced staff across the Crisis Assessment Service, Community Mental Health Teams, Forensic Mental Health Services, Yorkshire Centre for Eating Disorders, Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services, and Inpatient Services.

This was in addition to all of the ‘business as usual’ recruitment, so my sincere thanks to everyone involved.

On the right track, but it’s a continuing journey!

Despite these early successes, we know there is more work to do. We still have high numbers of vacancies in some services and the Recruitment Team is working with those managers to support and develop more creative and innovative solutions to attracting candidates.

The team is also working to:

• have more inclusive, appropriate and consistent participation from service users in the new assessment process
• include bank recruitment for nurses into the new selection processes
• incorporate standardised testing and values-based assessment into our recruitment and selection methodology
• develop three or four different recruitment/assessment models which are more responsive to changing needs and based on a range of variables such as: academic year, specialist service demands, health support workers, apprenticeships etc.
• develop additional social media platforms to attract staff to the Trust
• develop a recruitment ‘talent pool’ and potential e-newsletter/bulletin
• develop closer working relationships between the recruitment and communication teams in relation to social media, profile and general engagement online
• continue to develop our partnerships with universities and colleges.

We also need to retain you…
Whilst our efforts have been on improving our recruitment processes, we know that supporting and retaining our existing workforce is an equally vital part of the solution. Over the next 12 months we’ll be improving our exit questionnaires and interviews to find out why staff leave, developing a new nursing strategy, improving staff engagement through the Your Voice Counts platform, developing a leadership course, focussing on skills development, and we’ll have a big emphasis on staff health and wellbeing.

Finally, I hope you will all join me in welcoming every one of our new recruits – particularly to the 53 newly qualified nurses who are joining us in September – and I’m sure we will all work together to give them a great start to their career with our Trust.

Jill Copeland,
Interim Chief Executive