A discovery project about calculating the costs of adult social care recruitment for Skills for Care

We were asked by Skills for Care to deliver a short discovery project to gain insight into the user needs of adult social care employers when calculating the costs of recruiting new staff.

Skills for Care offers a range of tools and resources to help adult social care employers recruit and retain staff for their organisations.

One of these is a document listing typical recruitment activities and encouraging adult social care employers to determine their estimated costs.

We spoke with business owners, company directors and registered managers, as well as HR and finance professionals about the ways they calculate recruitment costs, and the existing resource. We also engaged with adult social care recruitment specialists and individual employers who offered a unique insight about their experiences of recruiting in the sector.

Through one-to-one interviews and remote observations, we developed a backlog of 25 user needs which was prioritised by the Skills for Care team. 

We then facilitated a co-design workshop with user representatives and Skills for Care team members to explore potential solutions that could better support adult social care employers to calculate their recruitment costs.

Our research also highlighted a demand for a more holistic approach to recruitment guidance and support, rather than additional standalone tools.

We concluded this project with the prioritised backlog of user needs, a set of proto-personas, our key research findings, and recommendations supported by some low-fidelity concept prototypes to visually demonstrate potential directions for Skills for Care’s recruitment support.

“It’s been an absolute pleasure working with Lagom. They have a tried and tested approach to how they manage projects which works exceptionally well and it’s been great to benefit from their extensive experience and expertise. I highly recommend their services and hope we have the opportunity to work together again in the future.”

Jeanine Willoughby, Project Manager – Capacity and Transformation