Key Consortia Interviews

Interviews with the consortia members – COTA Qld, Skills Hubs and Skills Gen occurred 3 times throughout the project. Early, mid, then final insights capture the evolution of the program as it gathered momentum.

Early Key Insights:

• There is a need for a cultural shift in employers regarding recruitment, emphasising the importance of speed to market, and prioritising values such as intrinsic motivation and reliability over superficial factors such as personal grooming.
• Employers need to improve staff retention, with a focus on training, workplace culture, flexibility, predictable hours, fair compensation, and meaningful workplace supports.
• A better understanding is required of the motivations and intentions in becoming a care worker and how this may correlate with attrition rates.
• Recognising the confronting nature of care work is crucial. Those lacking support may experience increased stress and emotional fatigue, impacting reliability and performance.
• It should be considered how care workers can integrate more effectively into multidisciplinary teams instead of being isolated, to provide clients with more comprehensive health support. 
• Individuals with lived experience as informal carers may represent an untapped resource with the right disposition and expertise to bolster the home care workforce.
• It may be valuable to comprehend care workers’ understanding of person-centered care and assess whether they perceive themselves capable of applying it in their own work.

Mid Key Insights:

• The myth of a lack of interest in working in the sector needs debunking, as there is a significant pool of potential candidates being deterred by obstacles that could be addressed.
• Following the pandemic, there appears to be a rise of younger individuals pursuing careers as care workers. While positive, these candidates may encounter obstacles such as life experience and the need of a full drivers licence, posing challenges for recruitment.
• A combination of proactive and reactive recruitment strategies are being trialled being to attract fresh talent to the HCWSP pool. These strategies encompass traditional methods such as job ads on platforms such as SEEK, Indeed, and Facebook, in addition to proactive approaches such as mining recruitment website databases.
• Employers must update their recruitment and retention strategies to match the changing workforce landscape to enhance their competitiveness in retaining employees.

Final Key Insights:

• The HCWSP team have explored organisation partnerships to access untapped candidates.
• Most individuals interviewed believed that employers’ approaches towards improving speed to market for competitive hiring have shifted noticeably. However, several felt that implementation often proves short-lived, stalling due to resource shortages or compliance constraints. Some HCWSP staff provided specific examples of employers on improving speed to market by rethinking methods, such as optional reference checking or automated HR systems.
• Consistent with previous consortia interviews, several individuals reiterated the sentiment that the HCWSP helped to bust myths in the sector, namely that no one wants to work in aged care.
• The role of HCWSP in providing accessibility to information about the aged care sector was discussed. It offered a low-pressure environment for individuals to gain knowledge about the job realities from a third party, without the need to approach an employer directly.
• Rural and remote training programs provide a solution for addressing skills gaps in regions lacking care service providers. While class sizes may be small, their impact on the local community has significant potential.
• RWCs continue to play a crucial role by facilitating communication between employers and candidates. Additionally, they leverage their local contacts and knowledge to offer advice to candidates on overcoming barriers to employment. In some regions, the HCWSP team became an integral part of the community.
• The support of the HCWSP helped employers step out of crisis mode, brought on by challenges in attracting staff, in part, due to the COVID pandemic.
• Some HCWSP staff felt the program helped broaden the mind of employers in terms of how they recruit staff, looking beyond traditional methods of SEEK advertising, and consider more novel approaches such as staff referrals, and partnerships with other organisations (i.e. RTOs).
• Several interviewees expressed disappointment at the program’s conclusion, highlighting the significant progress achieved by the HCWSP in the market. They noted that the program had only begun to gain momentum and establish trust with organisations, successfully overcoming various barriers to provide valuable resources to both employers and candidates. There was concern that the insights and knowledge gained from this program might not be carried forward
  into the next one, potentially resulting in their loss. 
• When it comes to opportunities and support for training, some individuals perceived it to be in its early stages compared to its potential impact. Organisations that took longer to engage with
  HCWSP are now realising the benefits of the program, but it’s too late for them to capitalise.
• One of the significant insights from HCWSP was its initiative to broaden providers’ perspectives on the importance of lived experience and redefine the notion of the ideal caregiver. It emphasised that caregivers come from various backgrounds and that resilience is paramount. It also highlighted the significance of having a diverse workforce, to meet diversity of the clients.
• Several members of the HCWSP team mentioned specific organisations expressing disappointment over the program’s conclusion. These organisations had come to depend on the program to assist in fulfilling their  recruitment needs and stabilising their workforce. This insight was shared by others with the concern that some organisations may have fallen behind in the recruitment market due to over reliance on HCWSP.