Leicestershire County Council: Developing team values, conducting values-based assessments, and showcasing values in advertising materials

• The council focused on improving retention across its external providers, as many workers were leaving after only a few months.
• Provider teams are supported to understand and articulate their values, before embedding them into job adverts, marketing materials and all aspects of the recruitment process.
• The council has worked with schools, colleges, retailers and job centres to appeal to people’s sense of values.

Leicestershire has a population of around 700,000. It is one of the 20 per cent least deprived counties, however about 11 per cent of children live in low-income families. Life expectancy for both men and women is higher than the England average.

Compared with England, the population of Leicestershire is older, with higher proportions of the population aged 40-64 (33 per cent in the county compared with 32.1 per cent in England) and 65 and over (20.7 per cent compared with 18.4 per cent for England).

Leicestershire County Council’s work on values-based recruitment began after identifying a challenge with retention. They discovered an increasingly high turnover of staff (34 per cent in 2022) across their external providers, with people often only staying for three or four months before leaving. This resulted in high costs for providers due to the constant need for induction, shadowing and training.

The council’s work on VBR is funded through the improved Better Care Fund (iBCF). The iBCF provides grant funding to support local systems to integrate health and care services. It is health funded, in recognition of the benefit to patients and the health system of having sufficient social care workers:

...if you haven’t got the staff in the independent sector, you can’t release the patients from hospital into care.” A council representative

Defining the values

The team regularly runs a values-based interviewing and recruitment topic conference for their independent sector providers. A first piece of advice they give is to put time aside to discuss, understand and describe their values at the team or service level. They also support in-house council teams with developing their values:

…so we’ve done a massive push on values in recent years because, we want to check they’re getting the right people with the right values, because the rest of it is trainable.” A council representative

They run a Clone a Care Professional exercise with providers. The exercise helps teams to think about their model employee, their motivations, where they have come from and where they want to be. This helps to build a target demographic and inform future advertising methods and practices. The outputs can also be used in every aspect of the recruitment process, from adverts to job descriptions.

Making advertising ‘real’

The team has successfully changed how both the council and providers advertise for roles, to make them ‘more personal and values-based, which is much more appealing to people’. Providers are encouraged to use social media, but to replace stock images with photos of genuine people and care workers. They also encourage providers to highlight their charitable work, so that people can ‘get to know the company beyond the logo’.

Websites are seen as the ‘window into the company’, both for families with care needs as well as jobseekers. They encourage providers to feature workers from a range of roles, including middle-management, so visitors to the website can see how long they have been there, what attracted them to the company, and what motivates them.

Improving the recruitment process

The team supports providers to update their recruitment processes. This helps them to better understand candidates’ values, particularly where jobseekers haven’t worked in the sector before:

A lot of providers will use the standard questions for interviewing, like what is safeguarding, what is confidentiality, and so on, but if someone hasn’t worked in social care before, they won’t know…” A council representative

Part of the process is to use a values-based situational judgement test, which is tailored using the Curious about Care platform. Candidates are invited to complete a quiz in response to range of scenarios relevant to the service they are applying for. The quiz can be used for shortlisting and pre-interview preparation, as well as induction purposes.

Given the changing retail landscape nationally and locally, the team has understood the benefits of recruiting from this and other industries. For example, they ran a session for Wilko employees around the time of its closure:

People don’t always realise they have transferable skills, some people worked there [Wilko] for 20 or 30 years, and so the fact that we’re a values-based industry really appealed to them.” A council representative

The council worked closely with job centre employment coaches to promote care as a values-based industry, to people who may not have considered a role in care before.

They worked with schools and colleges to promote a career in care as an option for students who find the pressure of exams difficult. The team highlight how the values and attitudes of students will be considered as more relevant factors than exam results.

Using the free level one Pathway to Care course, the career quiz and case studies on the Inspired to Care website, they were able to demonstrate the varied roles and careers there are available for candidates.

The council has seen the difference in terms of interview performance, where the more conversational and scenario-based interviews bring the best out of candidates, and enable them to fit into the team more easily when they join.

They are seeing better job performance and retention levels for candidates who have no direct experience of care, but were able to demonstrate their values and fit to the provider: 

The staff I took on that had no experience, but I just had a really good feel for them, and I felt like they had the right values, were the ones that stayed and made really good carers because we were able to mould them into the carers we wanted them to be.” A council representative

Work with schools, colleges and Job Centres between April 2023 and January 2024, generated 970 potential future candidates who are interested in a career in social care.

• Creating resources: The team has produced a values-based interviewing guide to help providers develop interview questions, score answers and understand interviewer skill sets. They have also produced a 90-day induction toolkit for managers and employees to ensure the values continue into employment.
• Being persistent: To overcome the high turnover of staff and managers and to keep the methods fresh in people’s minds, the team has found it important to educate and inform as many people as possible as frequently as possible.
• Putting in the work: The council has seen that the in-house teams and providers with the lowest turnover rates are the ones that ‘walk the walk’ when it comes to living their values. This is why they place so much emphasis on developing the right ones in the first place.
• Saying thank you: Employers who take the time to say ‘thank you’, give their employees recognition for their hard work and who appreciate staff input have the lowest turnover. Staff also feel valued. Inspired to Care show their appreciation and thanks to the care professional workforce from Leicestershire by holding an annual Care Professional of the Year Awards.

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