The registered manager at a home care provider on the south coast was so swamped by compliance and day-to-day operations that the plan to grow the service kept slipping to next month.
Her own answer was a sensible one. The service needed a deputy manager, someone who could carry part of the load and leave her free to build the business. They asked us to find that person.
A service that can't grow rarely fails in any dramatic way. The manager's attention goes to whatever is most urgent that day, the longer-term plans wait behind it, and nobody is doing anything wrong. Which is why it's hard to spot. The job is simply bigger than one person.
A job that sounds simpler than it is
On paper, a deputy manager's role in home care is easy to describe. They support the registered manager, keep the team running and cover when the manager is elsewhere. But the person also has to earn the respect of care staff who spend their days in other people's homes, and know enough about compliance to take real work off the manager's desk.
That's a small group of people. Hire a deputy who still needs the job explained and the manager has swapped one overstretched person for two.
Starting with the people already doing the work
We began by drawing up a list of domiciliary care companies in the area. Then we approached their care managers and deputy managers directly, to ask whether they were interested or knew somebody who might be. People doing this job well in another service rarely have a CV ready. An advert might never reach them, but a phone call from someone who understands the work often does.
Managers and deputies in neighbouring services also know who's good, and when you ask them for a name they'll often have one. So the calls were never only about whether the person on the end of the line wanted the job. They were also a way of finding out who else we should be talking to.
One strong candidate within 3 weeks
Within 3 weeks we'd found, assessed and sent across a strong, experienced candidate.
It was a single name, not a shortlist of several. We'd rather put forward one person we're sure about than pad out a list, and this time that was enough. The client thought the candidate was perfect for the role.
It also took less of the registered manager's time, because reading through a pile of applications and working out which ones had real experience in care was exactly the sort of job she had no room for.
What the care questions told us
The assessment is where knowing the sector paid off, and it's the part a client can't see from the outside. Our questions were about care, not about management in general, and the answers showed who had done this work and who had only been near it.
A generalist recruiter can match a CV to a job title, but can't easily tell whether someone's management experience is the kind a home care provider needs, because they don't know what to ask. Asking the right questions about care is how we matched and assessed properly.
The result was what the registered manager had wanted from the start. She got a deputy who could take on the compliance and operational work. And that left her free to go back to the thing she'd been trying to find time for, which was growing the service.
Of the roles we take on across our business, 79% get filled.
If your registered manager is buried in compliance and you need a deputy who can lift it off them, book a call and tell us which parts of the job you most need covered. Or use the green Tell Us About Your Role button to send us the role in about a minute, and we'll come back to you within 20 minutes during UK office hours.
