Recruiting social workers? It isn’t like recruiting for other positions. There are some unique challenges involved in social work that impact sourcing, interviewing, training, and retention, and there isn’t an easy answer to how to address these challenges. Recruiteze is the best online ATS for small business recruiting and hiring social workers. Want a free trial? Click here!
The world has a growing demand for social work, but the number of people pursuing the profession has not increased. And budgets are strapped.
This combination of factors makes it hard for employers to find the talent they need and to keep good talent. Stretched budgets and a dearth of help create a draining workplace, a particularly draining one considering the emotional and schedule demands of social work.
Why this is so Bad
Retention is important for any employer because high turnover always impedes efficiency. With social work, high turnover doesn’t mean lower profits or customer satisfaction, it means the suffering of programs that impact, often save, the most vulnerable people’s livelihoods and lives.
The success of cases that social workers handle depends on one social worker being able to build a relationship with the people they’re serving and seeing the case through to conclusion. Unfortunately, this too infrequently happens and the results are disastrous.
A Milwaukee County child welfare turnover study found that a child with one caseworker had a 74.5% chance of successfully completing their program in a year. Having two caseworkers reduced their chances to 17.5%, and if they ended up being given six or seven caseworkers, their chances dropped to 0.1%.
Jumping to six or seven caseworkers sounds a bit extreme until you realize that it had to happen for them to have figures for it. The study looked at 679 children and had a separate figure for children with 6 caseworkers and one for 7 caseworkers.
That means some children have as many as seven caseworkers in a year. This kind of turnover greatly reduces the families’ trust in the program as it adds more stress to their lives and demonstrates an alarming lack of effectiveness. The inefficiency of starting over so many times makes it so that plans don’t get seen through.
Scott McCown, the director of the Children’s Rights Center at the University of Texas Law School said, “If you’re a caseworker, you develop a relationship with the parent and child. That’s what helps you help them. But every time there’s turnover, you start from scratch.”
High turnover increases costs as well.
The same article as quoted above, Governing.com, stated, “Constant workforce churn costs not just clients hope but governments money. Training a new social services worker costs $54,000, according to the Texas Senate Committee on Finance.”
This cost further drains the budget and leads to even higher turnover, creating a never-ending cycle of inefficiency.
Governing.com described the situation, “experienced caseworkers don’t have time to mentor new ones, caseloads increase, backlogs develop, tempers flare, pressures rise and burnout shows no signs of fading.”
Recruiting Social Workers Equals Retaining Social Workers
Fixing the challenges of recruiting social workers requires a multi-fold approach aimed at improving retention.
Choosing the Right Social Workers
Retaining social workers largely requires hiring the right ones in the first place. This involves more than examining their educational credentials.
Social workers need to have:
- proven to themselves that social work is really what they want to do
- the right values to match the program and needs of the program’s recipients
- a higher than average emotional intelligence
- a willingness to give an unusual amount of time and emotion to the job and to recipients
- dedication and courage to hold quality standards high even if pressured to do less
Employers and recruiters of social workers can begin to improve their hiring efforts with how they word job advertisements. Listing the skills and personality needed for the job informs candidates of the job requirements before wasting their time and the recruiter’s time applying. This is called self-screening and is quite helpful for selecting the right candidates and spending less time doing it. Wording the job advertisement in such a way to prepare candidates for the trials and rewards they can realistically expect also provide valuable clues to candidates that can save everyone time.
Community Care in the UK discussed ambassadors whose job is largely to turn candidates off. Katie Coombes, the head of human services at Hollybank Trust, described some of what the ambassadors would say, “It is a really hard job. The pay is not the greatest, the hours can be long and shifts don’t always fit in with your personal life, but it gives a lot. You can change people’s lives and help them to live more independently.” She went on to say, “I would rather they were put off at the beginning of the process th