“It’s now a new PR piece of why do you want to stay in the sector? What can we offer? How can we attract people to the sector?” – Chloé Foster, People Director to the Valorum Care Group, explains how they shifted their recruitment strategy to deal with the social care exodus and the recruitment crisis.
As part of our commitment to support candidates in developing fulfilling careers, we’ve invited HR Leaders from a wide variety of organisations to share their insights on building a career, the challenges they face and what advice they would share with those hoping to follow their footsteps.
This week, we had a great conversation with Chloé Foster, the People Director of Valorum Care Group. Chloé’s 24-year career is quite interesting, as she initially studied Fashion Styling Hair and Make–up. But after courageously conquering opportunities that came one after another, Chloé eventually found that her passion lies in carrying out HR functions and being of service to the people.
While she catered to multiple industries and a wide range of companies, from big corporations to SMEs, Chloé realised that her heart was in social care services. This was a career path she never planned, but one that has given her much fulfilment and satisfaction.
Can you share with us what made you decide to pursue a career in HR?
From a young age, I’ve always had an interest in the business. But for my actual career, I started as a makeup artist. And I loved it. Being in London back in the late nineties, you had the option where you could almost jump jobs overnight and guarantee yourself the job.
So I initially became a secretary, then grew to be an executive assistant at Barclays in London. A couple of years in, my boss said, you are a great EA, but you’re going to get bored. Why don’t you join the HR team? So I did and went through their HR internal program. I was just so in love with it. I realised that the reason why I loved doing all of the previous things that I did was that people absolutely fascinate me. I loved learning about people, what makes them tick and about bringing the best out of people.
So HR was something that found me rather than I found HR.
In 2007, I moved locations, and it was a culture shock. Career-wise, I went from a corporate giant such as Barclays to little family-run style businesses. I would say even smaller than what you would class as an SME, but very entrepreneurial. And for the next 10 years, that’s where my HR career really flew.
I joined small companies and became their only HR personnel, while still in the executive assistant function. I supported the businesses to incredible growth, to mergers or to acquisitions. There were specific reasons for me joining a company. But all of them gave me an enormous breadth of knowledge and somewhat threw me in the deep end because on day one, I was literally the only person in HR, so I had to be able to cover everything enabling me to become a real HR generalist.
Initially, I never viewed myself as an HR person, although I had an HR job title. But then I worked for a fantastic company called CN creative, and they were one of the first UK designers of e-cigarettes. We were sold to a big FTSE 50 company and this company that acquired us mapped our roles. I was actually mapped as an HR manager, and I thought, so I’m really doing this now. I was no longer just this organisational person that came and did everything and was given whatever job title. I was a real HR manager at that time.
What challenges are you currently facing?
I don’t think it’s just the social care sector. But specifically for the social care sector, it’s the hardest recruitment crisis we’ve ever had to face. Along with that, there is a big issue with retention, I call it the leaky bucket. People are burnt out after the pandemic, which is why they are leaving the sector.
In the beginning, in all honesty, COVID was our best PR agent ever because social care and the NHS were two of the most recognized sectors where you could get a job and any overtime you wanted during this period. We had floods of people coming in, and we thought it was great. Looking back, yes, people were joining us because they wanted to make a difference. But also, we were one of the only people offering jobs.
So once the world reopened and the other industries such as retail, tourism and hospitality offered jobs again, we saw mass exits in the sector. It’s now a new PR piece of why you want to stay in the sector. What can we offer? How can we attract people to the sector?
From a recruitment perspective, if you ask someone who does not work in the sector, they would not be able to tell you the difference between health or social care. And we are trying to educate about what social care is. We are also emphasising that it may not be the best-paid job in the world, but the satisfaction and the rewards would be difficult to come by elsewhere.
Also, there are amazing career opportunities. Our current CEO started as a volunteer. We’ve got regional ops managers who started as care workers and are now in senior management. So we’re doing that education piece externally to encourage people to be able to make a difference.
I’ve also worked heavily on an internal academy. The goal was to provide career opportunities for anybody in the social care sector. One can develop their social care career or pursue an operational or management role, which is also a brilliant career opportunity.
One of the things we did was to honestly and openly review our recruitment campaign. Obviously, I wouldn’t have stopped to look at any of what we were doing because it was boring.
So we changed all of our imagery to real people. Every picture that we recruit for is actually an employee and someone we support. And that’s a huge difference because the value base of someone joining social care is someone who has emotions. When you see a gorgeous smile on a real human being’s face, that is a big factor because it shows so much of what we are doing.
What advice would you give to those planning to pursue an HR career?
Having a generalist background has been absolutely amazing. I’m not an HR specialist, but I know a little bit of a lot of things so I can support businesses and then I can recruit to support my weaknesses.
When I became a director, I did struggle a bit with imposter syndrome, in all honesty, because I thought I just got here by chance. So I went and did my CIPD. It really taught me the strategic side and the right words to use. Just having that bit of paper boosted me that I did know what I was talking about.
So try a little bit of everything in HR. Try doing employee relations, organisational design, recruitment, try everything. If you struggle with stepping into that next role, having a bit of paper or some form of training will reinforce what you know. Also, join networking sites. You start to share knowledge and you realise you’re not the only one struggling, so it is not something that only you were doing wrong. We are all together.
I think those are the things that have really helped me to be able to keep positive and actually still love my career.
Chloé joined the Valorum Care Group in September 2020 as its HR Director reporting to the CEO. It was in 2017 when she found this niche in the social care industry when she was hired to be the HR Director for the National Care Group Limited. The next exciting step in Chloé’s career is a move to be the People and OD Director at Horizon Care and Education Group to wider her social care experience to support children and young people