Discovery’s resourcing team wins silver

The Discovery Resourcing Team has won a Silver award from In-house Recruitment, the largest community for in-house recruiters.

The team has doubled in size with dedicated positions to handle separate parts of the recruitment process. This covers everything from finding candidates to pre-employment checks and a dedicated compliance expert to quality check candidate files and ensure that everything meets the high standards required by Discovery and the Care Quality Commission.

Community engagement

The team has reached out to the community and attends careers days at schools and colleges to raise the profile of social care as a great career path for students. The resourcing team has been running sessions for students studying health and social care with talks by locality managers, support workers and the people we support; so they have an insight into what it’s like to work in the sector.

Job Centre Plus

Discovery has also begun working with Job Centre Plus in towns across Somerset including Taunton and Bridgwater. Resourcing consultants have also offered employability courses for people who had been out of work for a while, and given talks to the work coaches at Job Centre Plus to explain the benefits of working for Discovery. As a result of these activities, the team has begun to receive referrals. It has also made strides towards becoming a disability confident employer and aims to achieve leader status. Resourcing Manager, Helen Acland said:

“It was a great event which we watched live as a team (all virtually) – everyone was over the moon and super proud when we found out we were Silver Winners in our category. Such an achievement! It gave everyone a huge boost after what has been a crazy year in social care. The team really deserve it, they are stars!”

Locality manager involvement

Another major change that has helped the success of the team, is that locality managers now have direct control over the hiring process. A new easy-to-use careers web page and ATS/recruitment process, has also been introduced. This has simplified the creation and posting of job adverts, and clear management of candidates through the entire applicant process. Hiring managers are more engaged in their recruitment than ever before and they consult the recruitment team regularly.

As a result of these changes, Discovery has made a significant saving in agency staff fees, and is increasingly focussed on developing its own colleagues. Congratulations to the team!