Recruitment? Don’t make me laugh. Seriously.

I am passionate about recruitment – it is one job we really have to get right, so crucial it squeaks. Without the right people in the right places we might as well fold and go home. And the time and effort we have to put in if we get it too wrong is unbearable. After laughing until I also squeaked about a recent interview experience of my chum  – to be described at various points in this blog but briefly it was a bit 1970s sitcom awful – I drifted off into a daydream about what it is that makes recruitment go well. So here goes.

I have worked with too many organisations who don’t actually know what they want in a candidate, or even in a role, but plough on anyway perhaps thinking they know or perhaps not knowing what knowing and not knowing looks like. Bear with.  Looking in from outside, understanding where the organisation has come from and where it is now (which happens because of conversations that are had….), without the emotional investment in the place that people often develop, I can often see a different picture. Organisation A thinks they want a process driven go-getter with bells and whistles to grow the business – what they really need is a relationship builder who will warm up the group and grow friends for them and grow it that way. What organisation B thinks they need is a chummy friend to get the best out of people – what they actually need is a ballsy battleaxe who will weed out those irksome poorly practicing people and replace them with the right ones so that the good ones are enabled and retained. All without a damp eye but with definite precision and skill. On the inside it can be difficult to see clearly for all the fog of commitment, fear, pressures, emotional baggage, time constraints. From the outside none of those things impact and the clear air allows a forensic view to be taken. So often, before we even get as far as a JD PS and advertisement we are on the wrong tracks.

Tip one: be rigorously clear about what is needed and before you can do that, be rigorously clear about why you are recruiting. What outcome do you actually need rather than what kind of person do you think you want?

So, we have decided what we want. Now we set about finding the who.

My chums sitcom style interview (if only that had been intentional……) was such a hoot he was almost left lost for words. Props: a desk, some chairs, people with double sided A4 pages covered in pre-set questions (probably taken off t’internet) who were congenitally unable to deviate from script. Questions that seemed unrelated to the job itself (asking someone if they can perform a certain task, apart from begging an affirmative – who says they are crap at things during interview?! – relies on that task being relevant to the job ) demonstrate very clearly the interviewers own lack of skill and understanding. It was almost as weird as asking someone interviewing for a job as an HGV driver if they can ski or  bake bread. A bit WTF.

Interviews, which only occur after a bit of screening, should be a conversation, not a set of boxes that get ticked. Those boxes will tick themselves if you talk in the right way. Sitting behind a desk asking a series of usually pretty meaningless questions (“describe your management style” “well pretty shite really, I am a bully and I hate my colleagues”……..) is the death knell for relationship building. We talk endlessly about networking, the how why and wherefore, and in reality interviews are the budding start of a working relationship and an opportunity to connect. Wasted if we just sit there asking if someone knows which piece of legislation goes where, but so so useful if we chat about experience and knowledge and see the person. A personality unfolds in front of us, we share stuff, we connect. Even if that person isn’t the right one for this job that relationship is started, and who knows where you might all end up. There are lots of bits of research, practice guidance, training courses, manuals, that all try to teach people about interviewing and recruitment, but at heart, once you know what you are looking for and  realise you might find it in an unexpected place, having a conversation is the best way to find the right person. The rest follows.

So, Tip two: throw away the bog standard question-and-answer nonsense. Have a nice conversation that everyone can enjoy being sure to incorporate those requirements without making a big fat hairy deal of them. Be interested in the candidate, who is, after all, a person, and one with background, experiences, views, skills and probably a nice sense of humour and some pictures of their kids/grandkids that would be nice to see, possibly some Out There hobbies that would grab you, maybe even a great recipe for soda bread (yes, I blagged a really good soda bread recipe during an interview – it was brilliant).

Finally, if someone has taken the trouble to apply for a job, has had a detailed conversation with a recruiter or similar about it and has been put forward, courtesy kind of tells you that a quick email or phone call with the outcome would be appreciated. It would be good manners. It would be kind. Not, as happened recently, the candidate following up and receiving an email by return that simply said “This position is no longer available”. Nothing else, nada, zip, tumbleweed. In what realm is that ok? Even just in terms of relationship management – presumably that candidate will remember that recruiter in the future, perhaps when recruiting to positions themselves. But really just common courtesy, which after all oils the wheels of relationships.

And I guess that is really where I am heading with this. Our whole journey is about relationships. Trust, courtesy, honesty, purpose. If what we are doing is a barrier to that rather than a bridge we are doing it wrong. If we are doing it wrong, it will not go well for us.

So……have a chat, make some coffee and get out the good biscuits, make sure there are enough cushions and the room is warm without being oppressive. And if you are recruiting to a social care or health care post, make sure the people that will be on the receiving end are at the heart of it – not a boltontokenpopinboxtickingshallow here-we-are-with-some-punters-aren’t-we-inclusive-and-personcentred-and-lovely effort, but a genuine involvement with proper engagement and listening to the people with the lived experience and then using that and showing it working alongside each other.

Are you hearing the passion, that real passion I have for recruiting? Well, if you are recruiting and you don’t feel that passion you might want to get someone else to do it for you………….I mean it kindly. xx

 

 

The damn book

One more martini, spoken, not slurred

One last anecdote, edges slightly blurred

Got to go home now, that next drink is deferred

Leave while ahead, now, dignity preferred.

 

Weave up the stairs now, miss the last one

Hit the sack before morning, avoiding the sun

Drink a pint of water, has to be done

What pain we endure just to have fun.

 

Wake with a headache, fumble for pills

Damn birds and their chatter, squawks and shrills

Move slowly, look down, give up, lose the will

Lie back wait for sanity, try to be still

 

Another one this evening, no way not to go

The party is for me and it matters, I know

The books out this week and we have to make a show

It’s what they expect: go, be that braggadocio

 

Just take the damn Milk Thistle.

 

Audit, Inspection and Scrutiny: the three ugly sisters?

This popped into my inbox today:

“The need to drive up the quality of care for patients, whilst delivering efficiency and productivity, is a key principle for the NHS. As pressure on NHS finances continues to build, UKAS accreditation is increasingly being used as an effective way for purchasers and commissioners to demonstrate that they can achieve ‘more for less’.”

I felt a stirring of irritation. This blog is the result……….

I know organisations have to behave commercially and tick boxes in order to thrive. I spend part of my working life encouraging and supporting charities and NFPs to do exactly that, but without losing their heart and soul to it. It is possible. But as an old nurse (registered about a century ago) and vehement supporter of the NHS original principles of free at the point of need and paid for by the entire community I am increasingly dismayed by the passionless, sterile performance of the people tasked with – and paid handsomely for – managing “public” health services. I have seen patients become the enemy, clinical standards side-lined in favour of improvement on the balance sheet, kindness become irrelevant, and buzzwords and trends take the place of clinical and compassionate behaviour. Health and social services are scrutinised, inspected, audited, governed, examined, professionalised more than ever before and we still have Winterbourne, elder abuse, Southern Health (pauses to spit), frequent reports of casual abuse and cruelty (that we know of), and we will all know those “care” homes with a good CQC rating which pong and employ people you would not want to sit next to on the bus. We will all know of supported living services that are little more than one person institutions with little or no meaningful activity and engagement – or to put it another way, that warehouse people in units of one, creating the illusion of choice and a Life but deliver isolation and fear. We have seen Southern Health reduce victims and loving families to statistics and irrelevancies, destroying people in order to prop up a system that sucks and protect the very people who allowed and encouraged the system that killed people and fixed the blame on others, with lies, obfuscation and bluster.

Some inspection agencies, several tiers of consultancy and management and many more are too often yet another layer of “approval” or box ticking to chuck at organisations. Along with services like 111 –  a dangerous irrelevance that often removes much needed funding from frontline services for the return of reduced standards and increased risk –  they also create a cash cow for canny providers without delivering any improvement in clinical outcomes, or supporting real people with the very real challenges of everyday ill health. We seem to simply carry on increasing layers of approval, fresh hoops to leap through (some with fire) rather than examine very basic factors. Often the people creating those hoops are not clinical and have little understanding of how  things actually work in the real world. I keep hearing that we need more funding for this that and the other – I keep seeing a variety of groups being blamed for an ever increasing number of failures and deficits: currently GPs are getting a hammering despite being possibly the last group of professionals who should be blamed and who, along with dedicated skilled nurses have kept things going against the odds. Commissioning services is clunky, inappropriately targeted, poorly contracted and badly managed, which is a criticism of the process –  again often created by people who do not understand the real workings – and not the people who have to work with it. The competition itself reduces the capacity to develop and really grow health and social care support services because contracts are not only badly drawn and managed but are up for renewal so frequently it is impossible to invest in services and also make that holy grail of profit. Profit is not going to be the first thing to go.

I firmly believe in a skilled and educated workforce well managed and led and supported with career choices and pathways. I also firmly believe in holding organisations and individuals to account. I believe those can be delivered without the huge self-propagating self- perpetuating roundabout of new mandatory qualifications and accreditations, incompetent inspections, and without the workshops, consultancies, projects, papers, enquiries, processes, requirements and bottom feeding organisations that have sprung up around services that are actually intended to protect, care for and nurture us.

There comes a time when the volcano erupts, the boil is lanced, the pus drains and healing can take place. We need to recognise that the privatisation experiment which was trumpeted as the way to increase choice and competition which were equally being promoted as in our interests – I am pausing for the laugh here –  is a failure, delivering little more than profits for largely incompetent organisations and draining the body of the NHS of resources and talent. Choice is not what sick people want, overall – they want skilled professional care, close to home, delivered kindly by people they trust and with their involvement in the process. And answers if something goes wrong, with a meaningful apology attached. Dividing professionals and organisations with “competition”, asking for innovation when compassion is good enough, blaming good people for systemic failures and expecting mountains of assessments, graphs, justifications, and hounding good people for honest mistakes does not result in decent health and social support.

Have a look at this: Laugh and then weep.