CASE STUDY

Recruiting talented and commercial managers for a leading care provider.

The Challenge: substantial growth and an acute shortage of managers to lead it.

We were approached by a globally successful care home company to assist in their recruitment programme. A $700m investment programme was going to generate upwards of twenty key roles at senior and unit management level in a sector where there was already an acute shortage of managers with the balance of competencies sought.

The ideal was and is managers who can balance attention to detail, the ability to sell and manage a complex PLC profit and loss account with exceptional interpersonal skills in an environment where there is a particular need to remain cool under pressure. This had to sit with a more intangible commitment to the very strong and well defined values of the business.

Such a skill set is a rare balance of abilities. To find it in the care home sector at a time when the sector was experiencing huge consolidation and change was going to be difficult. After all people tend to pursue careers in care because they care not because they want a commercial challenge. The commercially minded managers are sector trained specialists, the best of who held highly rewarded and heavily long term incentivised positions with a small number of providers.

The Approach:

It was decided to combine two approaches to market:

Firstly a targeted head hunt of talented individuals in the care sector.

And secondly advertised selection of those whose job searches were taking them away from their roles but who had not necessarily established a firm idea of where their ambitions could be satisfied. Many sectors have very talented executives who feel that while they are successful they do not necessarily feel fulfilled by their roles any more.

In this way applicants could be both evaluated for competency and also presented with a close look at the values of the company to see whether they felt comfortable with those values.

As such not only did the candidates have to convince that they had the ability to do the job but also the client and Ardea had to convince the candidate that a move to the client would be the right thing to do.

The Process and the Result:

To achieve this result a detailed and extensive recruitment programme was devised.

In preparation the competencies sought were identified and agreed and a core set of common questions for all candidates was defined. A detailed brief was prepared and from the beginning the whole recruitment process was detailed in the brief.

Neither the name of the company nor the sector was directly identified in the advertising. The company is a market leader but it is not well known to the wider world. The care sector has a very low profile image and what image it has tends to be negative. To ensure no good candidates self selected out at this early stage the advertisements emphasised the skills sought, the nature of the challenge and the values of the company.

With the advertisements placed in the national press applications came in from a huge variety of backgrounds and sectors.

It was now up to Ardea to identify the candidates who had the key skills sought and to carefully overcome the objections people had to working in a new sector and a role they would have to understand from a standing start.

Expectations for all candidates were managed in a direct and candid manner. Candidates were given the opportunity to see for themselves the nature of the role and the advantages and disadvantages.

In this way the candidates felt they were equals in a process. A decision to join would be as much their decision as the clients. Of the positions to be filled nearly 80% were recruited in this way.