Recruiting from your local community can be hugely beneficial in helping you tackle your workforce supply challenges.
By making sure your recruitment is as open and accessible as possible, you can recruit a diverse, innovative and creative workforce and help tackle a broad range of workforce supply issues.
Additionally, you can help secure your future talent pipeline and have a positive impact in the local community, offering economic stability and a variety of career opportunities.
Widening your recruitment to better reflect the community you serve is a key message of the NHS Five Year Forward View. The benefits of establishing and maintaining a diverse workforce are well understood. Teams are more innovative and creative, and, specifically important to the NHS, it is found that patients have better experiences of care when the workforce mirrors the patient population. It is now widely understood that within healthcare, a diverse workforce can ensure a better understanding of patients' needs which is crucial for the delivery of joined up, personalised care.
NHS Employers were commissioned by HEE to deliver a suite of tools, resources and guidance to support NHS organisations to engage with, and better recruit from, their local community in order to strengthen workforce supply.
How to begin
Our digital tool will help you compare your workforce data with your local community to identify the underrepresented groups in your local area.
Your results will then lead you to our guidance, good practice and resources which will help you understand how you can attract, recruit and retain individuals from those groups and across your local community.