It’s essential for housing associations to hire (and keep) the right people, to continue providing support for some of the UK’s most vulnerable people. But social housing recruitment is tough.
Inside Housing report that 44% of housing associations found it harder to recruit into frontline roles in 2023 compared to 2022, for example. And at the same time, concern about turnover is increasing and budget pressure keeps purse-strings tight.
The Affordable Homes Programme is good news when it comes to tackling our vast social housing deficits — but this, and programmes like it, rely on having the right people to make it happen.
Here are the nine biggest challenges facing social housing recruiters right now – and practical suggestions to help solve them.
Let’s do this 💪🏻
9 challenges facing social housing
1 – Worsening skills shortage
Skills shortages are one of the biggest challenges facing the social housing sector. Social housing intelligence experts Mobysoft identify skills shortages as “the sector’s most pervasive obstacle”, for instance.
Mobysoft Strategic Director Julie Lorraine points out:
“People, with the experience and passion they bring to the table, are a housing provider’s greatest asset. Yet the sector faces a skills deficit like never before, with demand for talent increasing at every level from entry level positions to senior leadership roles.”
The report finds that talent shortages are the biggest barrier to successful social housing recruitment, with 40% of recruiters identifying this as their major hurdle.
It’s the perfect storm, with fewer people joining the social housing sector, more people aging out, and increasingly complex roles demanding a huge breadth of expertise.
The right talent tech is critical to help housing recruiters understand, identify, target, assess, and then fast-track their ideal candidates. Plus, to prioritise the candidate experience so you’re not losing great people and making your own problems worse.
2 – Tightening Budgets
Social housing recruiters are no strangers to budget constraints. But over the past several years, those constraints have been tightening like a boa constrictor.
Add the growing complexities finding talent and you’re stuck in a seemingly unwinnable race to do more with less. All while losing talent because you’re struggling to compete on salary with other sectors.
That’s partially an employer branding challenge. If you can ‘sell’ your brand and the sector effectively, salary becomes less important.
And it’s partially a process challenge. If your function isn’t efficient, your recruitment costs become unsustainable and you’re pulled into endless firefighting. More and more stress; fewer and fewer positive results. Not the right way around.
The right recruitment software can go a long way to help you become more efficient and effective in how you hire, to get the most from the budget you have. Look for lots of automation, a smooth, speedy experience, and great reporting so you can spot improvements.
3 – Spiralling agency spend
Adding fuel to the budget fire, most social housing recruiters find themselves spending ever-more with agencies to attempt to plug people gaps.
It’s an endless cycle of sunk spend that’s patching short-term problems but making life harder long-term.
Breaking the cycle means switching that mindset. The most successful social housing recruitment teams operate almost as an internal agency themselves, attracting talent and nurturing relationships longer-term.
Honestly, getting here usually means accepting some short-term pain for long-term gain. You’ll probably need to take a step back and evaluate your processes and recruitment technology, to make sure your recruitment’s really delivering long-term ROI.
For example:
- Are you limited by a basic all-in-one HR tool with a lacklustre recruitment add-on, or is your tech optimised for today’s challenges?
- Does your tech include great CRM functionality so you can actively nurture relationships?
4 – Pressure to improve diversity
The social housing sector faces continued pressure to become more diverse and inclusive, to better represent the communities you serve.
Plus, Mobysoft find that candidates’ perception that social housing isn’t diverse and inclusive is another major barrier to better recruitment (for 31% of recruiters surveyed).
Housing association recruiters must focus on broadening talent pools, attracting a more diverse group of candidates into the organisation, and ensuring diverse talent flows through the recruitment process fairly.
ED&I-forward recruitment software can help build a diverse talent pipeline, remove unconscious bias and provide end-to-end diversity reporting, so you can spot where you need to improve.
5 – Adapting to remote hiring
Although many roles across social housing demand in-person presence, the sector isn’t immune from the shift towards remote work.
And the sector certainly isn’t immune from the demand for remote work from potential hires, which risks exacerbating talent shortages by pushing candidates to other remote-friendly sectors.
The right tech can help with remote hiring processes – like video interviewing and digital onboarding. But there’s an employer branding and EVP conversation here too. What are the benefits of working on-site? How could you accommodate more flexibility, if not total remote work?
6 – A weighty compliance burden
Understandably, the social housing sector has a heavy regulatory burden to make sure you’re keeping the people you serve safe. Nobody’s arguing that compliance isn’t critical. But it’s also often a major pain point for social housing recruitment.
Compliance often adds a huge amount of admin for your already-stretched team, causing lengthy delays, disrupted processes, and ultimately, lost candidates.
The right recruitment tech can make an enormous difference here, automating checks and maintaining the right records. So you know you’re compliant and your people (and the organisation) are safe.
7 – High churn
According to Inside Housing, 36% of housing associations reported that turnover had increased over the 12-month period from 2022 to 2023.
It can be challenging to prioritise spending to boost retention when there are one-thousand-and-one other things screaming for attention. But ultimately it makes far better financial sense to retain existing staff than recruit new people.
Mobysoft identify the need for social housing providers to focus on learning and development, internal mobility, and upskilling as a priority. Best-practice onboarding is also critical, given the proven impact on retention and productivity.
If your organisation’s a leaky bucket, recruitment is always going to be under uncomfortable pressure.
8 – Slow hiring managers
When you work with lots of spread-out hiring managers, getting them on-side to help not hinder hiring can be challenging. They’re probably flat-out already, often using their mobile, and rarely appreciate why being fast, efficient and consistent matters.
But poor hiring manager collaboration creates a whole heap of issues that make hiring harder, when it’s already hard enough. Social housing recruiters need to prioritise processes and technology that work with, not against, hiring managers.
Are you taking as much work off managers’ plate as possible? That’s stuff like:
- Sending them pre-qualified candidates, not spray-and-praying
- Using mobile-friendly recruitment tools that are super simple to use
- Providing automated reminders when they need to do stuff
- Giving them dashboards for at-a-glance summaries so they know what’s what
- Letting them jump into reviewing as applications come in, not all at once
9 – Unsexy sector reputation
Social housing skills shortages are exacerbated by poor inflow of early careers talent. One of the biggest problems here is the sector’s reputation. For many younger people, social housing providers are slow, bureaucratic, undiverse, poorly paid and offer little career progression.
That’s often not true at all. Working in social housing can be extremely rewarding, but it’s recruiters’ job to communicate that. Think about what makes the sector special – and more specifically, what makes working with your organisation special.
Read more: Four steps to world-class employer branding
Changing the social housing recruitment narrative
We’re not saying social housing recruitment is easy. We know it’s not. There are profound challenges facing the sector as a whole; challenges that no individual housing association can fix.
But there’s a lot recruiters can do:
- Strengthen your employer branding
- Communicate a clear, differentiated employee value proposition
- Map career paths and enhance visibility to attract talent
- Improve representation through inclusive recruitment
- Choose recruitment tech that makes your process effective and efficient
- Prioritise candidate experience to protect against dropouts (and your rep!)
- Make data-driven recruitment decisions, not gut feel decisions
- Understand and improve the employee experience to protect against churn
- Integrate AI (sensibly) to make your processes smoother
- Map your collaboration processes and set SLAs with hiring managers
- Build talent pools and nurture long-term relationships, to fill your pipeline
- Consider compliance partners that make checks and balances easier
Taking a step back to work on some of this stuff can feel impossible, if not actively counterintuitive. (You need less on your plate not more, right?) But starting to implement some of these changes can make a huge difference to your association’s hiring, making recruitment fairer, faster, and better for everyone.
Let’s talk about making that happen… 👀
What’s next?
Ready to hear more about Tribepad and how our tech can solve your biggest hiring headaches in social housing?
Find out all about our products, and who we’re already working with to make recruitment fairer, faster and better in housing.
As an official NHF supplier, we’re trusted by major UK housing groups including Gleeson, Notting Hill Genesis, Yorkshire Housing, and the Wrekin Housing Group.
