Model for Setting Up Alternative Care System: Recruitment

Part 9 of the explanation with the ToC: Once you have the data collected and analysed, have come up with a strategy and made a plan and a timeline out of that, have designed awareness-raising and advocacy campaigns and a monitoring and evaluation system to keep an eye on whether it works, you will start to find that the initial transition team is no longer able to handle all the work that needs to be done. As people are needed to run the advocacy campaign, people to run the awareness campaign, people to take care of the monitoring and evaluation, plus you have a mountain of work ahead of you with individual assessments, recruiting and training carers and so on.

In other words, it will be necessary to expand the transition team, if you do not, progress will slow down significantly. What kind of people you need to recruit, will depend very much on the level at which you are working, on the scale of what needs to be done and on what kind of professionals are already present, that can be called on to take on significant parts of the work.

For example, to do individual assessments and to select foster carers and caregivers for small group homes, you are going to need psychologists and social workers. If you are doing the transition at the grassroots level and work in an institution that employs 3 counsellors, who have established relationships with the children, then it makes sense to see if it would be possible for those counsellors to be assigned to the transition team and after receiving relevant training to take on the individual assessments. Or at a national level, individual assessments might be delegated to locally employed psychologists and social workers, without need for recruitment. These, by the way, are examples of redirecting resources, something that will be further explained at a later stage.

However, if there are no psychologists or counsellors present, or if they are too busy to be able to take on a significant second job on top of their daily duties, it will be necessary to recruit people to do this. Similarly, you may want to recruit people with a background in PR, media, or communications to run the awareness-raising campaign for you.

As mentioned before, recruitment is not a once off stage. It is something that will return again and again at points where you discover either that you need people with different backgrounds to join your team because the current members do not have the expertise needed to handle the tasks that lie ahead. Or you may find that the scale of what you are doing is growing and that the current team is overburdened, so more people are needed to do the work to keep the process moving.

The red arrows in the model give examples of points where you might need people with different skills, however, there may be other points along the line where you feel the need to recruit more staff.

When recruiting, try to avoid only recruiting newly graduated people. While this is often seen as a way to save money, because the required salaries are lower, in practice it ends up causing a lot of delays and costing far more money. It is fine to have some people involved who are just starting and whom you can train yourself, but there should also be experienced people in key positions to make sure that someone knows what is supposed to happen and that the transition manager does not end up having to hold everyone’s hand throughout the whole process.

If you would like to read the explanation with the model from the very start, you can go HERE.

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