Not many companies can truly demonstrate that they’re leading the way in revolutionising recruitment processes. Barchester Healthcare is one such organisation. Barchester has more than 250 care homes, six independent hospitals, and 17,000+ employees, providing exceptional standards of care on a massive scale. It launches 10 new care homes every year. So, how does Barchester remain at the forefront of the UK’s private healthcare sector while maintaining an excellent staff acquisition and retention track record? We interviewed client Mitchell Liddell, Director of Recruitment, Barchester, for Untapped, to discover exactly how Barchester is approaching talent acquisition at scale.
What brought you to the recruitment industry in the first place? Very much like many people, I kind of fell into recruitment. Most of my time was spent as a consultant in multiple sectors. I’ve worked in oil and gas, and I’ve worked from different locations – including Hong Kong and Spain. But for the last nine years or so I’ve been in the healthcare sector, working both agency-side and in-house.
What attracted you to working with Barchester in particular? Barchester is sector-leading in so many ways. It’s a really big driver of change. When I joined, the recruitment outfit was quite small and performed an administrative function. It was very heavily agency-led, which was ultimately unsustainable in the long run. The challenge came from moving away from that.
We wanted to make Barchester the employer of choice within the health and social care sector and ensure that both candidates and residents receive the very best levels of care. And that (from my perspective) comes from ensuring we’re appropriately staffed. The team has grown exponentially, with now just shy of 60 staff. You couldn’t ask for a better intercompany relationship: the recruitment team is integral to the rest of the business.
With the organisation continuously growing, does that bring its own challenges?
One hundred per cent. The business is growing; acquiring homes and running a new build programme as well. That in itself brings exciting challenges, because we’re breaking new ground.
What are the key challenges when recruiting for Barchester?
I think the key challenge is the sector, which ultimately is one that doesn’t have enough people to meet demand and that is also suffering from massive competition. With that increased competition tends to come increased costs. As with anywhere within the healthcare sector, we need to be cost-conscious, but also diversify how we attract candidates and develop understanding about where the best candidates come from. It’s ultimately about how we invest our money to get a strong return-on-investment.
How do you overcome these challenges?
We were a really early adopter of understanding that more doesn’t always mean better. Instead, we tried to drive some key relevancy criteria: what does that candidate mean to us and what kind of person are we looking for? Because there was no viable tech solution on the market we did it manually at the start. We’d basically go back to suppliers within the job market and say: ‘This is what we’re looking for. If you can do X, we will pay Y’ so they would pursue the right kind of candidates rather than just sending more.
That’s where our mindset originally started, with a programmatic strategy to intelligently buy where we were going rather than just spending more. Once we were able to understand what we wanted to achieve, we came away from the volume game and started to focus on relevancy instead. We have worked with many suppliers to build programmatic platforms and new ways of working that are tailored to a modern talent acquisition approach and focused on delivering a relevant cost per application model. I have built a fantastic knowledge of how to structure recruitment strategy to best meet specific demands.
It goes back to your point of being a driver of change – leading the way in doing things a little bit differently…
It’s the Barchester way. It’s not about just following suit. If there’s a better way or the right way to do it, let’s go and do that rather than just following everybody else.
In your experience, what role does a positive employer brand play in attracting candidates?
For me, employer brand is becoming more prevalent within the market. With competition growing, it’s key to have a strong brand that entices workers who want long-term careers. We rebranded from Barchester Jobs to Barchester Careers, with the viewpoint of enticing individuals who want to come and grow with the business. And that’s something that we can evidence: through every level of the organisation you can see individuals that have progressed right through. We’re really trying to break the mould of the care sector and show people that fundamentally you can have an exceptionally rewarding career with us.
Did you have to make choices that were going against the grain?
The application is the vanity of it all, while the actual hire is the sanity. We’ve had to make some exceptionally bold decisions. It was all about just challenging the data. More isn’t always better. You ultimately need to know what you want to achieve in order to know where to start. There’s always that fear within the healthcare sector that you can’t stop doing certain things because it will have an impact on volume, yet we would pivot quite dramatically in terms of spend and direction. That’s progressed and matured to where we are at the moment.
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