Recruitment, Teamwork and Individual Performance in Health and Social Care

Running head: HEALTH AND SOCIAL CARE
Health and social care
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author note

1HEALTH AND SOCIAL CARE
Introduction
Management of human resources in health and social care (HSC) is a coherent and
strategic approach towards organizational valued assets where people work together in
collaboration contributing to the achievement of goals and objectives. Armstrong and Taylor
(2014) stated that organizational management in HSC is to understand the recruitment and
designing strategies for building an effective workforce. Employment of workers in HSC is a
complex and challenging task as the workforce need to focus on the quality of healthcare
delivered to the service users. In the present case scenario of London Nursing Home, there is
need for workforce retention to have organizational improvement and identification of training
for HSC workers. There is also a need to focus on costs, time experiences, location, and number
of employees, quantity and quality of jobs, legislation, policies and organizational structure at the
nursing home. Budget is another aspect that needs focus for managing of service users’ needs
and time planning for staff recruitment, arrangement of interviews and selection (Shortell 2013).
Planning time is important for managing HR in nursing home as different organizational aspects
needs to be taken into consideration in a short span of time with accurate planning. Therefore,
the following essay involves the critical analysis of factors required for recruitment and retention
of workers at the London Nursing Home.
1.1 For the recruitment of HSC workers at the Nursing Home, planning needs to be done with a
focus on the goals and objectives of the organization. During planning, various factors need
to be taken into consideration like workforce planning, meeting of organizational needs,
analysis of skills, experience and qualifications of candidates, job description and
advertising. Workforce planning is important as it helps to select the right candidates in
providing the best quality of care and help to achieve the organizational needs. A good

2HEALTH AND SOCIAL CARE
workforce help the nursing home to be more successful and get the right people with right
skills at the right place who are able to meet the changing needs and opportunities in the
future. The nursing home need to adopt a framework that must be tailored to meet the overall
operational, strategic and legislative requirements involving the stakeholders. The framework
outlines the guiding principles that are based upon individual workforce planning actions
(Imison and Bohmer 2013).
The health and social care workers at the Nursing Home should be capable enough to
meet the needs of the population and HR should plan for right competencies and skills in
delivering these services. As the resources are limited, HR should ensure that planning
projections are affordable, sustainable and deliverable are within the existing budgets and
allocations. Workforce planning is an important factor during recruitment, as the planning
must operate within the scope of availability of supply for achieving the organizational needs
and healthcare grades (Bohmer and Imison 2013). Moreover, workforce planning at the
Nursing Home should ensure that healthcare workforce is supported through training. It must
address the healthcare service delivery and adapt to the changing skills and competencies
required for effective healthcare delivery. Apart from workforce planning, the nursing home
should be clear about the competence, skills, experience and education levels of the
individuals whom they want to recruit. Considering this, other factors include availability of
workers who can fulfil the job requirements through internal or through external recruitment
(Miller and Tucker 2013). The financial factors also need to be planned that has implications
on recruiting and training individuals for required levels and competencies. Once the
planning is done, there is need to attract the right individuals for the required roles (Melchor
2013). Advertisements specifying the job requirements can help in gathering the adequate

3HEALTH AND SOCIAL CARE
skilled workers for the London Nursing Home. This can be done through publishing the job
descriptions in the newspapers in the local job sections. The social media networking sites
can also be used to publish job vacancy, job fairs, and recruitment agencies to ensure that
HSC organizations can attract the suitable skilled workers (Florea and Badea 2013).
1.2 For the recruitment, selection and employment of individuals, various policy frameworks and
legislative acts have been enacted. These acts can help the Nursing Home to ensure fair
recruitment and selection of candidates that is not based on favouritism. These acts influence
the recruitment and selection of individuals in a more efficient and flexible manner helping
employers to make safe decisions during recruitment. Employment Rights Act 1996 is a UK
Act of Parliament under Conservative government that codify exiting law for individual
rights under UK labour law. This act guides the fair recruitment by setting out rights for
employees in situations like high rate of employee turnover, low pay, inadequate salaries and
poor working conditions. The Act will guide recruitment in a way where main terms between
employer and employee should be documented in a written statement containing particulars
(Pyper and McGuiness 2013). This document must be signed creating an enforceable
contract stating statutory rights of employment. Similarly, Data Protection Act 2010 controls
how the nursing home and government use the personal information of individuals being
recruited. Employers have the responsibility to follow legal protection act for protecting
information of employees. This Act covers data or information stored and provides a
guideline for setting up rules that selected employees need to follow. During recruitment,
employers should handle personal data of employees according to data protection rights
keeping them safe and secure (Koops 2014).

4HEALTH AND SOCIAL CARE
Recruitment and Selection Policy in UK states that recruitment and selection of right
individuals is of paramount importance ensuring that best individuals are recruited based on
merit and selection is free from discrimination and bias. According to this UK policy,
recruiting departments and employers should monitor staff recruitment and convey
information that enables appropriate monitoring of recruitment activity. With these acts and
policies, employers at the Nursing Home ensure to select right individuals who enter the
workforce and appropriate procedures that avoid exploitation and discrimination within the
workplace (Townley 2014).
1.3 Recruitment and selection is a systematic process including steps: choice of candidate,
Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS), short-listing, interviewing, and appointment of
individuals in HSC. In this process, the selection panel should comprise of interviewers who
would short-list and conduct interview. The interviewers should be balanced and unaffected
by race and gender having understanding and experience in safe recruitment and selection
process (Ventola 2014). After the closing date of vacancy advertisement, HR manager should
close the position and start short-listing the candidates. In this process, there should be
consistent and systematic approach as all applicants must be assessed equally against the
specific criteria without any variation or expectation (Melanthiou, Pavlou and Constantinou
2015). The information given in the applications should be crosschecked and skills and
personal qualities should be used in relation to experience and qualifications. The next step is
interview where the candidates should be asked to appear with their original documents like
passport, birth certificate and photograph identification (Dmitrieva et al. 2014). Face-to-face
interviews should be conducted where it must be according to employment legislation. The
questions and answers in the interview must be retained and scoring should be done

5HEALTH AND SOCIAL CARE
separately for each candidate. The evaluation of the information should be obtained and
based on that, decision should be taken to appoint candidate to a role working in HSC.
Finally, in the appointment stage, candidate must be selected based on their ability,
experiences and suitability in performing the role rather than availability or urgency of the
applicant (McGraw 2013). After this stage, appointment letter should be given to the
successful candidates that are conditional based on pre-employment checks of DBS. This
comprises of verification of medical fitness, relevant professional status, written references
and completion of probation period. These steps ensure selection of based candidates to work
at the London Nursing Home.
2.1 Various models are proposed for teamwork and one of them is Tuckman’s Stages of
Group Development (1965) that can help in building efficient teams at the London Nursing
Home. Four stages in this model pass from ‘newly formed’ to ‘high performance’ comprising
of forming, storming, norming and performance. The first step comprises of forming where
all team members in health and social care are new and learning about challenges and
opportunities that are faced in the team. In this stage, they are dependent upon their superiors
and managers for support and guidance and team bonding occurs while sharing information
and forming alliances and friendships (Raes et al. 2015). The second stage is storming where
the team members of health and social care adopt different ideas for tackling issues or
problems, although this stage may give rise to conflict as ideas competes and effective
management is required in this stage for resolving conflicts. In norming stage, team
members agree over the solutions proposed for their team. During this stage, members talk
openly regarding their opinions and gain the ability to adjust to avoid conflicts and as a
result, members agree on rules, values, methods of work and professional behaviour.