Internet Job Boards – friend or foe?

Care England has released a comprehensive report addressing the growingly salient role of internet job boards in recruitment for the care sector. This report is a must-read for all social care providers, offering valuable insights and practical advice to navigate the complexities of recruitment in modern adult social care.

Recruitment costs to the adult social care sector cost England’s care employers around £3bn in the last 12 months to recruit 450,000 people into adult social care. After receiving concerning feedback from a number of members in respect to the rising cost and behaviours by online recruitment portals which were not enhancing recruitment outcomes, Care England polled 85 care providers in Autumn 2024 to gauge their experiences and gather and analyse feedback from social care employers on their use of Internet job boards, including aggregators and job search engines, in the UK care sector.

Individual providers responded that digital recruitment advertising using Internet job boards is a significant and growing expense for them and that the experience can often be poor. There is little or no sector-wide shared understanding of how much is spent by other employers and the levels of satisfaction experienced across the sector.

Key Findings:

• Sector spending on Internet job boards is significant: It is estimated that the sector may spend more than £100m per annum on digital job posting. 
• Poor Applicant Quality: Providers said they were ‘always’ or ‘very often’ suffering with poor applicant quality (78%), too many applicants (71%) and high levels of interview no-shows (71%) when using Internet job boards.
• Indeed is the dominant player: Indeed emerged as the sector’s primary online job board/job search engine, with 86% of respondents saying it was their primary online job posting tool.
• Low Satisfaction Levels: almost half (48%) of responding organisations rated their likelihood of recommending their primary job board as low, with almost 1 in 5 (19%) giving the lowest possible rating, citing rising costs and diminishing returns. 
• Most employers do not measure internet job board (or any major sourcing channel) performance: Less than a third of employers (31%) confirmed they measure the quality or tenure of employees hired from their major recruitment channels, with 54% not tracking performance of those hired by source at all.

Professor Martin Green OBE, Chief Executive of Care England, stated,

This report not only exposes the flaws in the current system but also offers practical solutions, from diversifying hiring strategies to demanding greater transparency and accountability from job boards, so that every pound spent genuinely helps providers find and keep the staff they need.

And time is running out. With new visa restrictions and government pressure to reduce migration, international recruitment can no longer be relied upon to plug workforce gaps. For now, displaced workers are masking the full extent of the crisis, but that will not last. If we fail to fix domestic recruitment now, we risk an even greater workforce emergency in the years ahead.

To read the full report entitled Internet Job Boards – friend or foe?, click here