UK 
United States
Community Integrated Care is one of Britain’s biggest and most successful social care charities, providing life-enhancing support to people with a diverse range of care needs, including: learning disabilities, mental health concerns, autism and age-related needs.
With world-class care delivered to over 3,500 people they support; the past few months have provided its fair share of changes to how they operate. Through a combination of hard work, passion and commitment from colleagues both in caring roles and the many departments that assist their frontline teams, this insight asks Teresa Exelby, Chief People Officer at Community Integrated Care how the charity has adapted and delivered.
What has been your focus over the last few months at Community Integrated Care?
“Significant changes have been made across our Recruitment, HR & Learning & Development departments, all of which were made quickly to address the volume shortage we had to prepare for in our sector at the start of the Covid-19 crisis.
“We swiftly assessed and understood our resource pinch points and changed these to handle the increase in capacity, whether for bank recruitment or permanent. Our bank recruitment model provides colleagues with the flexibility to choose the hours they can work – with these colleagues then being available, trained and ready to go. This model was a key focus early on.”
The human touch. How did your teams adapt?
“We have seen a huge collaborative team effort. Our teams have been asked to work in very different ways, adapting with new processes that were rolled out to obtain successful candidates, all of which they’ve done effectively, minimising any impact for the charity. For example, our Learning & Development team has delivered an entirely new online E-Learning programme that is carried out alongside onboarding to get candidates ready to join us.
“The recruitment programme has been hugely successful in terms of the number of applicants we have received and the speed at which candidates were onboarded due to interim DBS changes. It’s flipped recruitment and HR on its head! Our sector is all about the empathetic nature of candidates and how they will build relationships with people in their roles. When you take away the face-to-face engagement of getting to know candidates it presents a sterile model. The shift we have made to counteract this has seen the introduction of calls, Zoom videos and engagement through technology to carry out personal contact in a new way.”
Getting to know candidates - beyond the CV
“A streamlined and efficient recruitment model is something many aspire to, being productive and looking at ways to automate and achieve the optimum process. Over the last few months, we have had the opportunity to evaluate how we recruit. Often a CV is the starting point of an application but doesn’t always obviously promote the people traits or values you are looking for from a potential candidate. For example, can you tell from a CV that someone has an upbeat positive manner, energy and drive, or a genuine passion for supporting people? This is an area we intend to explore further.
“It will be interesting to see how the interim DBS changes, and other legislative requirements, that have eased the situation the care sector faces in placing candidates quickly, can be adapted to become more efficient on a long term basis, supporting the sector as a whole.
You can read more about Community Integrated Care and what it’s like to work for them and their range of careers here.
“Community Integrated Care was named Charity of the Year 2019/2020 by Charity Times and has opportunities at all levels for people who share their values and seek to transform the lives of the people they support.”
Eploy and Community Integrated Care
The Eploy implementation team worked alongside Community Integrated Care to implement the Eploy e-recruitment software platform and dedicated portals for candidates and hiring managers. This provided the Recruitment Team and approximately 360 Community Integrated Care hiring managers with the autonomy and tools to address the recruitment challenges being experienced in a consistent way to support the future strategy. It is now facilitating connectivity of the teams with a transparent view of accountability and a purpose to the role each collectively play.
