Care homes · 6 min read
Care home careers pages: filling shifts as well as beds
Most care home websites are built to do one job: persuade families to enquire. That's the right priority, but it leaves a second audience almost completely ignored. Every home we talk to is short of carers, and every one of them is spending money on job boards and agencies. Meanwhile their own website — the one place that could tell a candidate what it's actually like to work there — has a careers page that says "we're always looking for great people, send us your CV" and nothing else. That page is costing you staff. Here's how to fix it.
Understand who's looking, and how
A carer looking for a job is not sitting at a desk with a CV open. They're on a phone, probably between shifts, often comparing three or four local homes at once. They have a short list of questions: what's the hourly rate, what are the shifts, is it near me, and will I be treated decently? If your page answers those in the first screen, you're in the running. If it makes them dig, or asks them to fill in six pages of form before it tells them anything, they're back on Indeed within seconds.
This shapes everything that follows. Your careers page needs to be built for a phone, it needs to lead with the facts, and it needs to make the first step tiny.
Say what you pay
This is the one that homes resist most, and the one that matters most. Candidates already know what the going rate is in your area, because every job board shows it. Leaving it off your page doesn't create mystery; it creates the assumption that you pay less than the home down the road that does publish it. State the rate or a clear range. Then add the things the job boards can't easily show: enhancements for nights and weekends, whether you pay for training time, whether there's a bonus for a Level 2 or 3 qualification, and whether you top up for bank shifts. If you pay above the Real Living Wage, say so plainly. It's one of the strongest lines you can put on the page.
Be honest about the shifts
The second question is always the rota. Tell people what your shift patterns look like, whether you offer part-time and bank work, and how much notice they get. A home that says "we run 12-hour shifts, 7 to 7, three or four a week, and we'll try to fix your days" will attract people who want exactly that. Vague "flexible hours" wording attracts everyone and suits nobody, and it leads to interviews that go nowhere.
Show the place and the people
Families choose a home on how it feels. So do staff. A short paragraph from the manager about how the team works, two or three real photos of actual staff on shift, and a couple of honest quotes from carers who've been there a while will do more than any list of benefits. If you have a member of staff who started as a domestic and is now a senior, tell that story — it's the most persuasive thing you own. This is the same principle that makes a good care home website work for families, applied to a different reader.
Make applying take two minutes
The biggest leak on care home careers pages is the application itself. A compulsory CV upload knocks out a large share of candidates on the spot, because most carers don't have a current CV on their phone. A long form does the same thing more slowly.
What works is a short form: name, phone number, the role they're interested in, and one optional box for a line about their experience. That's enough to pick up the phone. Everything else — right to work, references, DBS history — can be gathered once you've spoken to them and they're interested. Add a "call us" button with your actual number for the people who would rather just ring, and make sure whoever answers knows to expect job enquiries. If you're using a care website built recently, this kind of form should route straight to the manager or recruiter by email or text the moment it's submitted, not sit in an inbox nobody checks until Monday.
Give every vacancy its own page
A single careers page listing everything in one block is easy to maintain but nearly invisible to search. Google's jobs listings pull from individual vacancy pages that carry JobPosting structured data — the title, location, pay, hours and closing date marked up in a way search engines can read. Each role you're recruiting for should have a page of its own with that markup in place, and it should come down when the vacancy is filled. For a group of several homes, this is exactly the sort of repetitive task that a small piece of custom software can handle, so the manager fills in a form and the vacancy page, the markup and the listing all appear and disappear together.
Answer the questions candidates are too polite to ask
A short FAQ section at the bottom of the page catches the things that otherwise stop people applying. Do you sponsor visas? Is there parking, and is there a bus? Do you provide uniform? What's the induction like, and is it paid? Can someone with no care experience apply? Each of these is a reason someone quietly closes the tab, and each takes one sentence to answer.
Keep it current
A careers page that still advertises a role filled in March tells candidates nobody is looking after the site — and by extension makes them wonder who's looking after the residents. Someone needs to own the page. Check it monthly, retire filled roles, refresh the pay figures whenever they change, and swap the photos every so often so the same three faces aren't there for five years. If your site is on a care plan, ask whether the careers page is part of what gets checked.
None of this is complicated. It's the difference between a page that exists because a website is supposed to have one, and a page that treats a carer's time with the same respect you'd give a family's. Do that, and the site you already pay for starts filling shifts as well as beds.
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