Care Friends

The Care Friends app is an employee referral, recognition and reward app designed specifically for adult social care. The app overcomes the challenges of manual referral and reward schemes with a digital platform that includes:

• A mobile app that enables staff to share jobs with friends and family in just 3 taps on their mobile, with automated cash rewards at each stage of the recruitment process

• A web-based portal for recruiters and managers

• The app awards care workers points for referring their friends, with a bonus if they

are new to the care sector.

How Care Friends works

The Care Friends app makes it easy and rewarding for care workers to share their employer’s jobs with family, friends and social media connections from their phone – and earn points as their candidates’ progress. The employer can also give instant rewards – bonus points – to recognise good work, achievements or to incentivise picking up dropped calls or shifts. One point = £1 or A$1. Many care providers also use the app to give regular recognition, thereby boosting employee engagement and retention, and use the notification functionality as a regular communication channel with frontline staff.

The app uses behavioural psychology and gamification techniques, such as a leader board and incentives via notifications, to encourage many more employees to become recruiters than would be possible with a traditional employee referral scheme.

Importantly, it uses extra incentives to encourage referrals from those who are not currently care workers (‘New to Care’), thus growing workforce capacity rather than simply moving care workers between employers.

Within a sector that has traditionally been challenged with poor funding and therefore low pay rates, this provides an attractive perk to the role which can further support recruitment.

Employers load available jobs onto their Care Friends web portal then run a launch event and points incentives to encourage their employees to download the app. App users pick a job to share via SMS, email or WhatsApp directly with a friend they think would be suitable for it, or more widely via social media. They can share up to 5 or 10 times a month and earn a point each time (further shares don’t earn points.)

Employers using the app have seen large increases in referral hires – contributing from 10% to 30% of all their annual hires, with a much better retention rate (example less an a third of the churn from internet job boards in the critical first 12 weeks of employment).

Employers report that as few as five applicants are needed via the app to convert to one care worker versus an average in the UK of 83 for internet job boards, which is game-changing during a labour shortage.

In conclusion, the app provides access to a large untapped pool of high-potential candidates from the local community, hand-picked for their values and willingness to work unsocial hours in an emotionally and physically challenging role. This is especially effective in rural and remote areas, where active job seekers are sparse. This is having a direct beneficial impact on the availability and quality of care for the vulnerable in society.