Five things the Elderly Care hiring market told us in July

Every conversation our consultants have with a candidate or a client is a small piece of market intelligence. Most months that intelligence sits in our heads and shapes how we advise the next call. This month we decided to write it down instead, because the same five patterns kept surfacing across residential, nursing, home care and later living, and each one has a direct, practical consequence for the way you hire or the way you look for your next role.

1. Turnaround experience is now the most valuable line on a CV

The strongest candidates we spoke to this month were individuals who had taken on services in trouble and put them right.

One regional manager described inheriting five services in one go, two of them under local authority embargo, one going through a large scale safeguarding enquiry, and one with occupancy so low it stood out even within that group. One of those homes had no manager at all for three months while she covered it herself. Twelve months after coming out of embargo, that home was awarded the highest quality banding its local authority gives.

That is a harder skill to find than a manager who has run a stable, well rated home for a decade, and it is rarely what a job specification actually asks for. If you are recruiting into a service that needs fixing, write the brief for someone who has done it before rather than for someone with an unblemished inspection record. The two are rarely the same person. If you are a candidate with that kind of story on your CV, it is worth more than you might think, even if it does not look tidy on paper.

2. An inspection rating rarely tells you what actually happened

We spent time this month with a residential home currently rated Inadequate, and the detail behind the rating changes the picture considerably. The failure was not clinical. The home scored Good in caring, effective and responsive, and was rated Inadequate in safe and well led.

The root cause was a fallout between two groups of staff that escalated into a fabricated safeguarding allegation, and a manager who did not get a grip on it early enough. The provider self reported ahead of a due inspection rather than risk the regulator arriving unannounced, and the inspection landed hard. Our consultants visited the home in person. It did not feel like an Inadequate service.

There are two audiences for this. If you are a candidate, an Inadequate rating on a service you are considering is worth interrogating rather than avoiding outright. If you are hiring, the manager who can handle interpersonal conflict and employee relations is protecting your rating just as much as the one who knows the clinical standards inside out.

3. Later living is starting to look outside its own sector for leaders

We have had a run of conversations this month with chief executives and senior leaders across integrated retirement communities and retirement villages, and the same question keeps coming up: where does the next generation of operational leadership actually come from.

Traditionally the answer has been care or hospitality, care for the regulatory grounding and hospitality for the guest experience thinking. What is being tested now is whether private hospital leadership transfers into the sector instead. We put that question to a senior operator from the independent hospital sector, and his view was that it does, for specific reasons: a heavily regulated environment, strong commercial accountability, a customer facing culture, multidisciplinary teams. The bases are the same. The one real difference he identified was length of relationship, since his patients stay for three to five days and a resident stays for years.

If you are building a later living operational team, the independent hospital market is a credible and largely untapped pool. Candidates from that background are open to the move once it is properly explained, and most of them have never been approached about it.

4. Bed count is setting salary expectations more rigidly than it should

We ran two home manager searches for the same provider this month, one for a 39 bed service and one for a 78 bed service. Several experienced managers ruled out the smaller home immediately, and the reason was not the work itself. It was the assumption that a smaller home automatically means a materially lower salary.

One manager currently running a 68 bed service told us the smaller role would not suit her, purely on that basis, before she had even heard what the package was.

The effect is that good managers are self selecting out of smaller services, at a time when there are a lot of high quality smaller homes in the market. If you operate smaller services and pay competitively, say the number early. The assumption is working against you, and it is being made before your role gets a fair hearing.

5. Domiciliary managers are a live route into residential, and some clients are already there

One provider we are working with is now explicitly open to home manager candidates coming from a domiciliary background. Their reasoning, put to us directly, is that a registered manager running two or three thousand hours of care a week across a dispersed community is handling more operational complexity than the manager of a 24 bed residential service.

Domiciliary managers themselves are less convinced this door is open. One we spoke with told us she had already tried to move into residential and found providers were not interested.

There is a real gap between what some clients will now consider and what candidates believe is available to them. If you are struggling to fill residential manager roles, widening your search to domiciliary backgrounds opens a pool that almost nobody else is competing for. If you are a domiciliary manager who has been told no before, it may be worth asking again. The market has moved.

The thread running through all five

Every one of these conversations points to the same underlying shift: the market is rewarding judgement, resilience and adaptability over a spotless track record, and the organisations and candidates who recognise that first will have the advantage over the ones who are still hiring and job hunting against last year’s assumptions.

We will keep listening and keep writing this down. If any of this reflects what you are seeing in your own service, or contradicts it, we would like to hear about it.

Supporting your hiring objectives and your career growth

If you are hiring and recognise your own service in any of this, whether that is a home in need of a turnaround leader, a later living team looking beyond the usual talent pools, or a rating that does not tell the full story, get in touch with our elderly care team for a confidential conversation about how to reach the right candidates.

If you are a candidate and any of these trends changed how you see your own experience or your options, we would like to talk to you too. Whether your CV is built on turnaround work, you manage a smaller service, or you have a domiciliary background you think residential providers will not consider, contact Compass Associates to find out what is actually open to you right now.

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