Discovering Shared Lives: a recruiter’s perspective

Over the past ten years I have worked as a recruiter in the Health and Social Care sector, starting out in agency recruitment and moving into internal recruitment roles.  During that time, I worked with all types of care organisations, from residential homes to mental health hospitals, looking for support workers right up to clinical directors, across the country.  

It is fair to say I have experience recruiting all kinds of roles within the care sector, and from both sides of the fence. However, despite a decade of experience, I quickly realised that Shared Lives was a completely different ball game!  

You might expect that after ten years in the sector, I would have encountered Shared Lives earlier, but this was not the case. I first learned about Shared Lives when I started my role as Strategic Carer Recruitment Communications Manager at Shared Lives Plus in July 2024. The more I learned about Shared Lives, the more I understood the positive life-changing impact and outcomes it offers in comparison to traditional care options. This raised the question, why isn’t Shared Lives better known and why had I not encountered it before? 

My first task was to meet with the schemes who had recently received government funding through the Accelerating Reform Fund (ARF), that was granted to promote and innovate in adult social care. It quickly became clear that until this point, in many places, there has not been any funding or focus to promote Shared Lives, locally and certainly not regionally or nationally. Combined with the fact that Shared Lives carers are self-employed, and recruitment had often taken a back seat to recruiting other permanent roles.   

This was both a challenge and an opportunity.  

• The challenge was that we had to start from the bottom up, working on awareness raising as well as recruitment and attraction.  

• The opportunity was that we had a blank canvas, and a fresh injection of funding, focus and enthusiasm to make an impact.  

This was a challenge I was keen to get my teeth in to.  

After building my knowledge meeting with key stakeholders and scheme staff, and speaking to carers, it was clear to see there were common themes. Recruitment was difficult due to a few things: 

• Awareness – Shared Lives was a fresh concept to most, without visibility potential carers weren’t hearing about the opportunity 

• Capacity – To date, there was no one looking after the recruitment and with no consistent activity, people simply aren’t hearing about the opportunity 

• Legacy Culture – Most schemes had recruited carers the same way for years and had not looked outside of the ‘traditional’ carer. This meant certain ideas of what a carer looked like and who and how we attract had to change 

• Budget constraints – Schemes did not have allocated recruitment budgets and were mostly recruiting via word of mouth. We needed to get creative!  

Different locations had their own local barriers, but the overarching issues were the same. So, we got to work thinking of ways to overcome some of these barriers and how to maximise on this opportunity with the ARF. Many schemes have seen that the biggest impact came when they invested in dedicated recruitment roles in their teams to focus on attracting and engaging potential Shared Lives carers. Without the dedicated resource, the results they achieved would not have been possible; some schemes saw more applications in six months then they had seen in previous years. It allowed them the time to focus on process and attraction working together for the best possible results.  

It’s fair to say that some of the schemes had healthy scepticism to begin with. It’s always hard changing long-established recruitment approaches if you have not known anything different. However, working on the various projects, this opinion quickly changed. With the support of Shared Lives Plus, schemes began discovering new ways to recruit and were reaching completely new potential carers from all walks of life.  

Barnsley was one of the schemes who created a role to focus on the growth and we supported closely. This was hugely successful from a referral and recruitment perspective with them establishing relationships with internal teams and finding new potential carers. This helped to raise the profile of Shared Lives as well as attract new carers, including a carer who was dual registered with both the local fostering service, as well as Shared Lives, a first for Barnsley Shared Lives. 

When asked what the biggest impact was from working with Shared Lives Plus on the ARF project, they said the following: 

“The new role we created gave us the opportunity to explore what we wouldn’t before, including things we were ‘scared of’.  The project allowed us to think outside of the box. It helped with having a more open-minded approach to potential carers and gave us the confidence to approach new people and be open to something aside from the ‘general’ carer we are used to.  

“It reignited the passion locally and underscored the importance that we have a strategy for recruiting carers and can see the need for investment to grow further. Having a new member of staff to drive the activity and push the message allowed more word of mouth to happen as well as the opening up of other recruitment options and more ‘types’ of potential carers.” 

Barnsley is just one of the many successes from ARF projects. However, all demonstrated to me that although the challenge was totally different to other healthcare roles, with some focused effort, we were able to start recruiting in new ways, attracting different types of people to the role – both growing and increasing the diversity of Shared Lives carers – which can only be good for people seeking support. The more schemes I work with, the more I see the impact of the work that has been done. I can see the change happening and it is so exciting to see the results across the UK. But I’m not stopping there! We have lots more exciting activity taking place in the future, and I am looking forward to where we will be a year from now.  

Keep your eyes peeled for more Shared Lives… 

To find out more about how Shared Lives Plus is supporting local areas through the ARF  and our consultancy offer, visit our recent activity page.

Ready to discuss how we can help you establish, grow, or diversify Shared Lives? Email us at consultancy@sharedlivesplus.org.uk