Neil Eastwood is looking to tackle the care sector’s workforce crisis. Not only does his app offer a novel solution, but his experience as a former carer and care group director gives him a fascinating perspective on where employers are going wrong.

“I hear a lot of providers saying recruitment is fine, but retention is awful,” he says, “Those two things are directly connected, and they exacerbate their problems by using the wrong methods to recruit staff, and just generally having a very poor applicant experience.”

His company is Care Friends, a care workers referral app, which Eastwood leads as the founder and CEO. He explains: “It is primarily focused on getting the workforce in adult social care to become recruiters. Many of those hired through Care Friends are not currently in the social care sector and are not currently looking for work, so it’s a way to find excellent passive applicants in the local community – especially as those who know a care worker are more likely to want to work in care themselves.

“This is going back to basics, using the oldest and most effective method of recruiting – word-of-mouth. I think we’ve lost our way, first with newspaper adverts and most spectacularly with internet job boards. Sometimes the old ways are best, and I think this is one of those times.”

The app encourages referrals by gamifying the process with a points system. Points can be exchanged for money, and Eastwood says £6m has been awarded to the app’s 72,000 users since it launched in 2020. The interface shows users vacancies at their own places of work – “a walled garden” of opportunities as Eastwood puts it – and they can share these vacancies either directly or on social media platforms.

Through each step of the employment process the app user gains points. They are awarded additional points if the person they are recruiting is not already working in the care sector: “We do have a bad habit of eating ourselves in the sector, playing a zero-sum game of recruiting exisiting carers and so creating a problem for their current employer. If you join from outside the sector, you’ve added capacity to the workforce for the benefit of everyone.

“There’s also a bit of a problem with recruiting people who already work in care – if you’ve walked away from your current clients or residents to get another job I’d love to know why. For me, I question that perhaps they’re doing it for the wrong reasons. Maybe you’ve got a genuinely terrible boss, or maybe they’re happy to see the back of you.”

If referral schemes are such a silver bullet, why doesn’t everyone use them? Eastwood says referral schemes can often create unnecessary friction, with staff members forgetting the scheme and employers forgetting to pay them. He says that Care Friends helps keep employers accountable and makes the process easier for carers.

Eastwood has a deep experience within the sector. He tells the Caring Times that in 1977 he became a paid care worker. “I was a vicar’s son and had this idea drummed into me “what are you doing for everyone else”? So that was really the genesis of my care career.” He was then a director of a large home care group, and took on the task of finding a solution to their high turnover rate: “I was trying to solve that problem and looking at the data I saw those recruited through internet job boards delivered 180 hours of care before leaving the company on average. Meanwhile those recruited through referral schemes delivered 4,500 hours of care.”

However, he also observes that metrics do not fully explain the problem care groups face: “There are 101 common reasons why a carer leaves and about a third of these come down to who you hire in the first place. Social care really relies on goodwill and people giving beyond the job description. And that explanation makes sense with a job role that is frankly poorly paid with unsocial hours and is also emotionally and physically challenging.

“A lot of carers will carry on even if they have a poor employer, because they have a calling and commitment for care. They have an actual love for their clients and get these psychological intrinsic rewards for caring for them.

“You can see this in the huge correlation between those who work in paid care roles and those who care for a family member at home. More than half of care workers in New Zealand have a family care responsibility, and around 48% of workers aged 51-65 in NHS community trusts are the same.”

This family care link is especially true for younger care workers. Eastwood says in many instances it’s “illogical” for a younger carer to have an interest in becoming a care worker, particularly for the elderly who are of a different generation. However those who have caring responsibilities at home are likely to make a success of it. This is due to the added emotional maturity which comes with a caring responsibility.

He adds: “That’s obviously not to say you’re wasting your time if you’re looking for young employees for care roles, but you do need to find the ones who actually suit the job. And employers should ask about this more, because people almost never put family care experience on their CV. It’s almost seen as embarrassing, which is a real shame as it’s a good way of identifying people who would be high performers in the role.”

The unsuitability of many young people for a job in care may also explain why internet job boards, which target a younger demographic, are not yielding the desired results for many care groups. Eastwood says research from the US home care market shows the ideal age for a care worker is 55 years old.

He explains: “They have lower turnover than younger people, which seems really counterintuitive as you’d expect most of them to retire at 65. But that’s what the data shows.”

This also means that, in Eastwood’s view, paying more is by no means the be-all and end-all of care recruitment. This is especially true as care groups compete for employees with the hospitality sector, who are better placed to raise wages and pass on the associated costs to consumers.

Care Friends is also expanding into foster care and shared lives (the adult equivalent of foster care). It has launched a pilot testing a dual-language version of the app given to 250 Wales-based foster carers to see how they recruit possible fosterers from their own networks.

He says: “We’re at the stage where the first cohort has reached panel approval, so the final step, but it’s still too early to say lots about it. But we seem to be having success. Ofsted think the conversion rate from enquiry to final approval to become a foster carer is 12% for local authorities and 4% for independent agencies. It looks like our conversion rate will be a multiple of that as things stand.”

Eastwood also points out that foster carers are reporting the referral fees earned by them via the app are being spent on treats for the children – a much better destination for the marketing spend than to external media companies. Foster carers also say the in-app digital placement ‘adverts’, being written by social workers, give them ‘permission’ to share fostering opportunities without concerns that they may say something wrong.

Care Friends has over £1m ARR (annual recurring revenue). It operates in 2,500 care settings (i.e. individual homes or home care branches, not businesses) and is growing in Australia as well.