Kent County Council: Promoting a Career in Care

Support workers make a genuine difference to real lives and Kent County Council (KCC) were finding it hard to attract the right people to fill their vacancies. They approached PeopleScout to develop a campaign to reach an audience that may not realise they had the skills and attributes to become care workers and show them they could have a meaningful career, just by ‘being you’.

SOLUTION HIGHLIGHTS

• RAISING AWARENESS OF MISUNDERSTOOD ROLES
• REACHING AN UNAWARE TARGET AUDIENCE
• CREATING STAND-OUT FROM THE CROWD

CANDIDATE SOURCING

SCOPE AND SCALE

Kent County Council, along with over 1,400 partner organisations, are committed to providing essential care and support, working with some of the most vulnerable members of the community. Their need to recruit was based on the requirement to alleviate pressure on nursing homes and hospitals by providing care in the clients’ own homes, therefore freeing up valuable beds elsewhere. Enabling clients to remain at home (when it is suitable) has been proven to be a good solution in healthcare pathways.

It was also important to demonstrate to the wider Kent population that KCC was taking positive and supportive action in what was a high profile and often criticised area for all local authorities.

SITUATION

With vacancies that aren’t clearly defined by specific skills or experience, it’s often challenging to convince potential recruits that a role is right for them. With ‘unskilled’ (in terms of qualifications) positions such
as these, the lure of other opportunities, including retail, is often more appealing and the lack of visibility or explanation of support roles alongside a misunderstanding of what is entailed, compounds this issue.
In addition to this, there was a lack of clarity about the genuine career potential that these jobs could offer potential candidates. KCC’saim was to raise the profile of the work they do in an area that is both sensitive and one that touches most people at some stage in their lives.

THE SOLUTION

To fully understand why existing support workers do what they do, we ran a focus group to investigate the motivators and to hear real life stories. Our creative team then set to work to produce a personal and  appropriate creative identity; one that would put the empathy and natural caring skills needed for these roles, at the very heart of the campaign. We concluded the best way to communicate this was by film, showing everyday situations where people made a difference, doing everyday things and how this translated into a care workers job.

This was driven by the central campaign message of “You’d be surprised how qualified you are to be a support worker – just by being you’’. With a small promotion budget and to ensure that the power of the film’s visuals were maximised, we used our Social Media product, SNAP, to push the film out to the target audience; using geographic and behavioural targeting methods.

RESULTS

The SNAP campaign ran for just over 2 weeks and in that time delivered over 51,000 impressions, converting to over 1,000 ‘clickthroughs’ – an impressive rate of 2.1%. Equally impressive, YouTube delivered almost 172,000 impressions and over 75,000 views.