In Your Shoes - Jordan Russell

Saturday

Early start (after a late night) and away to Glasgow…but what a great day. A big part of my role involves external partnerships and relationship development, and my involvement in this initiative required zero persuasion, I can tell you.

Balhousie Care Group are focused on providing quality, innovative care across our 26 care homes, ranging from elderly care to specialist care for younger adults and we have we are just about to embark upon a truly fantastic partnership with a Scottish football club’s foundation to provide a great environment for those in need. Watch this space…

Sunday

Having been off the previous week then back to a manic week (including the first day at school for my youngest!), quite a nice, relaxed day spent in Bonnie Dundee today. Bit of fresh air in amongst the ‘summer’ part of the day (given we seem to get all 4 seasons daily) ha!

Monday

Head office in Perth today. Mondays typically have a couple of important recurring meetings, and a review of applications and interest from over the weekend before assessing where marketing can focus their recruitment support for the coming week.

There was a bit of a tech glitch affecting one of the job boards meaning I had to speak with them to resolve, and one of our more rural sites asked for help in sourcing a Chef so I set aside some time to research then proactively approached potential candidates. Always a variety of tasks to undertake!

Tuesday

Focus on nursing! There is a national (well, global) shortage of nurses and it’s important for me that we are seen as employer of choice in order to attract nurses to the business, in what is very much a candidate market. We have highly competitive salaries and benefits, as well as fantastic development and progression scope for our nurses, but the need to be even more professional yet innovative in our approach has seen a new nursing section added to our website alongside pay increases etc.

I spent some time with my colleague who heads up Marketing and we have just signed off on a great partnership with one of the leading bodies in UK nursing for a digital marketing campaign to increase brand awareness and reach new candidate streams.

Wednesday

Today was spent overseeing the installation of new signage at three of our care homes to spread the recruitment message. These signs are a great permanent billboard for us (we’re able to swap the poster inside to change the advertising message as needed).

It is always beneficial paying a visit to our homes and catching up with our staff face to face, something that was a more regular occurrence pre-covid and thankfully should become more frequent again now.

Thursday

A really busy day based at head office. Advertising a number of posts, speaking with candidates and sites to progress opportunities. I also attended a meeting to discuss strategic plans for some of our sites who have challenges in terms of staffing needs.

In addition, there was a great virtual awards ceremony to be part of after we were invited by S1 to enter their annual awards.

Given the amount of work and hugely positive changes, we decided our website merited a submission. We were delighted to have been shortlisted for the ‘Best Recruitment Website’ and ‘Best Recruitment Video’ awards! Joel Dommet hosted the event and though we didn’t win, it was great to be part of.

Friday

Great to end the week out an about again – for the second Friday in a row I was based at St Johns Shopping centre in Perth. I was meeting with local people to discuss some of the great Care and Senior Care opportunities we have at our site in the centre of Perth as well as across our various other sites in the region. The cupcakes made by one of our chefs were certainly well received.

It has been while since face-to-face activity offsite has been a real option, so it will be great to do more of this alongside virtual meetings etc. We will be doing similar in other areas over the coming weeks and months.