West Sussex Council
Nina Jacobs
Tuesday, April 24, 2018
South East authority turns to social media to develop an online community of potential social work staff.
- Dedicated conference for newly qualified practitioners delivers high number of applications
- Social worker vacancy rate fell by a third in the first nine months of 2017
ACTION
West Sussex County Council has developed a new recruitment and retention strategy that involves making greater use of social media platforms.
In December 2016, 19 per cent of the council's children's social worker posts were vacant compared with an England average of 17 per cent.
Gareth Pugh, the council's human resources business partner, says tried and trusted approaches to recruiting social workers - such as placing job adverts online and looking locally for candidates - were proving less effective.
"We weren't really doing any more than have a vacancy, put up a job advert and wait for people to apply," he says.
"We were placing job adverts and it wasn't clearing our vacancy gap; it did suggest that we needed to do something different," he adds.
Pugh says a main focus of the new strategy was to look at how social media channels, such as Facebook and Twitter, could be used to attract the best social workers - which might not necessarily be local applicants - to apply to work in West Sussex.
"We've generally found that social workers are almost exclusively on Facebook but [some] may not want to use it for work so Twitter is another way that we can engage with them," explains Pugh.
"We also use LinkedIn to share information," he adds. "Our service leads all have LinkedIn accounts so when material is produced it can be shared that way."
Understanding the need to not only share but create content was paramount in rolling out the new strategy successfully, according to Pugh. Social workers across children's services were invited to produce short videos explaining their roles which have been shared on West Sussex's closed Facebook group as well as on job adverts.
"With their consent, we've shared these videos made by our social workers so when you read a job advert you can click on a link to see that person or manager talking about the role," explains Pugh.
Creating such content is a vital component of building momentum among the council's social work staff which Pugh believes will improve recruitment figures.
"When we set off on our journey 12 months ago, it was a challenge to get people to support us, to get social workers to speak about their jobs or have their photo taken but now we have people volunteering to help so we're moving in the right direction," he says.
Statistically, West Sussex has a higher than average proportion of social workers with more than 20 years' service, 7.6 per cent compared with 5.2 per cent on average in England and 5.5 per cent on average in the South East.
Hosting two dedicated events for newly qualified social workers as well as a social work conference in the first quarter of 2018 - all maiden events for the council - were strategically planned to help recruit younger practitioners.
"The recruitment issue is a complicated problem that doesn't have a simple solution. Our ability to run our own events [earlier in the year] is crucial as we attend industry events in the latter quarter of the calendar," explains Pugh.
Advertising for the events via social media helped ensure they attracted visitors not only from neighbouring counties but from London boroughs.
IMPACT
Pugh says the Facebook campaign was successful in attracting attendees to the conferences.
"After the campaign went live the number of external visitors doubled who had registered to come to the social work conference so it was certainly a key channel for us to get people to attend," he says.
A similar success was achieved with the newly qualified social worker events - a step away from the council's usual attendance at career fairs - which saw 63 applications for West Sussex's 30 newly qualified social worker roles.
"We were able to shortlist 41 of those people so now we've got the challenge of trying to identify where do we get our final candidates from - that's a nice challenge to have," says Pugh.
The most recent Department for Education workforce statistics show children's social worker vacancy rates in West Sussex had fallen to 14 per cent by 30 September 2017.
