With the recent increase in International Recruitment amongst the social care sector, it's important to understand how to best manage such a changing and diverse workforce.  Our partner, BA Healthcare, provide intelligent, ethical strategic international personnel solutions built on thousands of successful placements and decades of experience.  Therefore, they are experts when it comes to understanding the challenges facing care providers when recruiting staff from overseas.

Rick Canavan, UK Director at BA Healthcare has put together some useful information below for care providers.

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The social care workforce has always been a diverse one but in the last few years it has become even more so with thousands of new workers arriving from South Asia and West Africa in particular. 

The recent wave of international recruitment has allowed providers to not only diversify their teams but also to make them more sustainable, and in many cases to expand and invest in service improvement. For many providers, the effect has been a transformation. 

But does it come with challenges and how can you overcome these?

Managing a diverse workforce, especially where overseas team members are new to the UK can often mean providing help, support and care above and beyond what would usually be needed. It can mean being a point of contact to help people find their feet, get used to the weather, or connect with community. 

Managing a diverse workforce also means listening, getting to know people and where they’ve come from, their culture and motivations for working in social care. At a basic level that could just be listening to someone’s preferences about where they want to work certain shifts, what they need your help with. It’s also about understanding their qualifications and experience properly and understanding how to make the most of them but also identifying skills gaps so they can be filled with appropriate training, and that training then incorporated into induction and on-boarding. 

Managers should try and build their own understanding of where their international colleagues have come from too. Understand what social care looks like in the countries they recruit from, how training is delivered, and also thinking more widely – understanding working cultures and importantly, what is the culture around care and how it is given?  Managers can then communicate this to the existing team, which helps with integration and cohesion. 

CQC, service users and residents are looking much more closely at providers’ international recruitment. They all want to see real diversity, not just recruitment from one or two countries, and they expect international recruitment to be ethical recruitment. It is important that providers take active steps to attract candidates from a range of countries and show they are recruiting ethically. This commitment to diversity and quality international recruitment should filter down through the organisation. It should be reflected in policies and procedures but also recognised and celebrated in the day-to-day life of the organisation and the people it provides for. 

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With our partnership with BA Healthcare, WMCA are able to offer our members discounted rates on recruiting staff from abroad, through BA Healthcare's programme.

If you have questions about international recruitment or would like to find out how it could work for your organisation, contact BA Healthcare for free, expert advice. 

BA Healthcare – the sector-leading choice in international recruitment for 24 years.

BA Healthcare (ba-healthcare.org)