Location: Donard, Knockbracken Healthcare Park
Directorate: Workforce, Learning and Development Service
Contract and hours: Permanent / Full-Time
Closing date: 4:00pm, 28 August 2025
Interviews are planned for week beginning 15 September 2025
Job summary
The post holder will be responsible for contributing to the delivery of strategic actions aimed at improving the attraction, recruitment and retention of social workers in both Adults and Children Services. The post holder will be required to work closely with Trust colleagues in Human Resources, Corporate Communications, Operational Managers and regional stakeholders including counterparts in other Trusts and the Office of Social Services, DoH. The aim of this collaborative work will be to deliver innovative and flexible approaches to support the attraction of high quality social work staff, within a very competitive employment market, and to help to support and retain our current social work workforce.
The duties of this post include undertaking tasks aimed at building HSC employer profile, playing a key role in the recruitment process, leading a programme of work that supports induction and practice development for all new social workers, and focusing on how we can retain social work staff and celebrate their success and achievements. In summary, the post holder will make a significant contribution to ensuring that we have a highly skilled, resilient and well-motivated social work workforce for the future.
Main responsibilities
Contribute to the development and implementation of a social work workforce recruitment and retention strategy for the Trust
Attraction
- Work in conjunction with other stakeholders on campaigns , for the social work workforce to attract new staff into the Trust.
Recruitment
- Work with managers and human resources colleagues to identify projected vacancies and to quickly progress these posts through the recruitment process.
- Work with regional colleagues to implement and support regional recruitment initiatives.
- Scope and track the use of temporary social work posts in the Trust and work with service leads to develop into permanent posts where possible to improve workforce stability.
- Support managers to develop attraction and retention strategies for those services or teams with consistently high vacancy rates.
Retention
Lead on a programme of work using an evidence base to plan and deliver retention interventions that support social workers to remain in the organisation.
- Identify teams with high absence and sickness levels, identify factors that may be contributing to those high rates and work with service leads to develop strategies to support and improve.
- Identify teams with consistently low retention levels, identify factors that may be contributing to retention levels and work with service leads to develop strategies to support and improve those teams.
- Design, plan, implement and evaluate training initiatives to support retention of the social work workforce.
- Have a key role in initiatives that support the implementation of Safer Staffing in social work guidance standards.
- Contribute to the provision of career pathways, careers guidance and specialisms advice and support for social workers in the Trust.
- Champion and contribute to initiatives that support social worker well-being.
- Promote/develop the use of mentoring/coaching within the Trust so early career social workers can learn from later career social workers.
- Participate in shared learning events on how best to support the social work workforce.
For complete details view the full job description in the Additional Information section below.
