POINT 06/100 — Is Your Recruitment Plan Actually a Plan?
THE 100-POINT FOSTER CARER RECRUITMENT REVIEW
POINT 06/100 — Is Your Recruitment Plan Actually a Plan?
Stage One: Strategy & Leadership
Most fostering providers have a Foster Carer Recruitment plan.
Or at least something called one.
But if I asked to see yours tomorrow, what would I actually find?
Would I see a coherent explanation of:
what fostering capacity the organisation needs,
who it needs to recruit,
where those people are likely to be,
why they might choose your organisation,
how you intend to reach them,
how they will move through the recruitment journey,
and what the organisation must do to convert that interest into approvals?
Or would I see:
Facebook advertising.
Google advertising.
Foster Care Fortnight.
Information evenings.
Social media posts.
Community events.
Leaflets.
A monthly content calendar.
A budget.
And perhaps an annual target at the top.
All of those activities may be perfectly sensible.
But collectively they do not automatically make a recruitment plan.
They may simply make a list of things you intend to do.
That is the distinction behind Point 06 of the 100-Point Foster Carer Recruitment Review.
A marketing calendar is not a recruitment strategy
This is one of the easiest traps to fall into.
Marketing activity is highly visible.
It has dates.
Budgets.
Campaign names.
Creative assets.
Events.
Outputs.
That makes it feel like a plan.
But Foster Carer Recruitment is not the same thing as Foster Carer Recruitment marketing.
Marketing is one part of the system.
The recruitment plan needs to explain how marketing contributes to a much larger outcome.
This distinction is increasingly visible in national policy.
The Department for Education's current end-to-end fostering model expects coordinated marketing, a single recruitment pathway, full pipeline tracking, measurable targets and integration across enquiry, assessment and approval. The model explicitly says that effective recruitment requires the organisation to have influence over the entire recruitment process rather than simply the front end.
That is much closer to a recruitment strategy than an advertising schedule.
Start with the requirement
Points 01–05 of this Review have deliberately built towards this.
Before designing a recruitment plan, the organisation should already have considered:
Is Foster Carer Recruitment genuinely strategic?
What fostering capacity do we actually need?
What does the recruitment funnel need to produce?
Who owns the outcome?
What does success actually mean?
Only now do we arrive at:
What are we actually going to do about it?
The plan should therefore begin with the requirement.
Not the campaign.
For example:
We need 20 additional fostering households.
That still isn't enough.
Twenty households where?
Able to foster whom?
Replacing how much expected attrition?
By when?
The clearer the requirement, the more intelligent the recruitment plan can become.
The plan needs an audience
The next question is:
Who are you trying to recruit?
“We are looking for people interested in fostering” is too broad to be particularly useful.
You may have several audiences.
People with previous caring experience.
People considering a career change.
People whose children have left home.
People already working with children.
Single applicants.
Families.
People from communities underrepresented within your current fostering population.
People living in specific areas.
People potentially able to foster teenagers.
People with room for siblings.
The important point isn't that every provider should pursue the same audiences.
It is that the target audience should emerge from the capacity requirement.
If your greatest shortage is foster carers able to support teenagers, but your campaign imagery, stories and proposition speak almost entirely about young children, there may be a strategic disconnect.
Geography should be intentional
The same applies to location.
Point 02 explored why fostering capacity is geographically sensitive.
That should now appear in the plan.
If the service particularly needs carers in three parts of its catchment area, does the recruitment plan reflect that?
Are budgets geographically weighted?
Is community activity concentrated there?
Does search visibility support those areas?
Are local relationships being developed?
Does the website demonstrate genuine local presence?
Or is recruitment activity simply spread evenly because that is easier administratively?
A recruitment plan should be able to explain why activity is happening where it is happening.
Then comes the proposition
This is one of the most important parts of recruitment strategy.
Why should somebody foster with you?
Not:
Why should they foster?
That is a different question.
The sector is very good at explaining why fostering matters.
Changing a child's life.
Making a difference.
Providing stability.
Giving something back.
All of those motivations are important.
But every fostering provider can say them.
The prospective foster carer also has another question:
Why you?
What will their experience be?
What support will they receive?
What type of fostering will they undertake?
What training is available?
What community will they join?
What happens when things become difficult?
How will their experience differ from the provider down the road?
That is your recruitment proposition.
And it should influence every channel used to attract prospective carers.
Only then should we talk about channels
Now Facebook becomes relevant.
Google becomes relevant.
Community engagement becomes relevant.
Events become relevant.
SEO becomes relevant.
Video becomes relevant.
Existing foster carer referrals become relevant.
PR becomes relevant.
Local partnerships become relevant.
But the question is no longer:
“Should we advertise on Facebook?”
It becomes:
“Is Facebook an effective way to reach this audience, in this location, with this proposition, to create the capacity we require?”
That is a much better strategic question.
The Department for Education's 2026 end-to-end programme similarly describes a marketing mix encompassing digital activity, community outreach and targeted campaigns, with particular attention to under-recruited carer profiles.
The channel follows the requirement.
Not the other way around.
Every activity should have a job
This is one of the tests I would apply to a recruitment plan.
Take every significant activity and ask:
What is this supposed to achieve?
A community event might be designed to:
generate enquiries.
Or perhaps its real purpose is:
build awareness in an underrepresented area.
A foster carer video might be designed to:
increase website conversion.
A Google campaign might capture people already actively considering fostering.
A Facebook campaign might introduce fostering to people who have not yet begun searching.
A nurture email may be designed to keep a “not yet” prospective carer engaged.
Those are different jobs.
If the organisation does not know what each activity is supposed to achieve, it becomes very difficult to judge whether it worked.
A plan should connect attraction to conversion
This is where many recruitment plans become too narrow.
Imagine a plan that successfully doubles enquiries.
Excellent.
Except the organisation has done nothing to increase:
response capacity,
Initial Home Visit availability,
assessment capacity,
or the quality of the candidate journey.
The marketing plan worked.
The recruitment system may now be under greater pressure than before.
This is why Point 03 matters.
The recruitment funnel should influence the plan.
If the bottleneck is enquiry generation, the plan may need stronger attraction.
If the bottleneck is conversion after Initial Home Visit, generating another thousand people at the top may not be the priority.
The intervention should follow the diagnosis.
The candidate journey belongs in the plan
A good Foster Carer Recruitment plan should also explain what happens after the enquiry.
Not every operational detail.
But enough to demonstrate that the organisation has designed the journey intentionally.
For example:
How quickly will somebody be contacted?
Who contacts them?
What happens outside normal office hours?
How does the organisation maintain momentum?
When does an Initial Home Visit take place?
How is the handoff into assessment managed?
How are people who say “not yet” retained?
What happens when somebody becomes stuck?
Current government programme requirements similarly emphasise a timely and welcoming response, full tracking through the recruitment pipeline and a seamless experience through the recruitment journey.
The important principle is straightforward:
You cannot separate the plan for generating candidates from the plan for handling them.
The plan should contain assumptions
This is a concept I think could improve many Foster Carer Recruitment plans immediately.
Every plan contains assumptions.
The problem is that they are often invisible.
For example:
We assume this campaign will generate 80 enquiries.
We assume 40% will progress to IHV.
We assume assessment capacity can accommodate 25 new applicants.
We assume people in this location will respond to this proposition.
We assume our current website will convert the additional traffic.
Those assumptions may be entirely reasonable.
But writing them down creates something extremely valuable.
Now they can be tested.
If the plan does not work, we can ask:
Which assumption proved wrong?
That produces learning.
Without explicit assumptions, underperformance can simply generate another year of slightly altered activity.
The plan should identify dependencies
There are also things the recruitment team may not control.
Website changes.
Marketing procurement.
Assessment staffing.
Training availability.
Panel frequency.
Budget approval.
Data access.
Technology.
Community partnerships.
These are dependencies.
They do not all need to be explored in depth here — Point 07 will look specifically at whether the organisation has adequately resourced its recruitment ambition.
But a credible plan should at least acknowledge them.
A plan that depends on something the organisation has not provided is not fully deliverable.
A plan should include choices
This is perhaps the easiest way to distinguish strategy from activity.
Strategy involves choices.
If everything is a priority, nothing is.
A strong recruitment plan might explicitly say:
This year we will prioritise three geographical areas.
We will concentrate on two carer profiles.
We will reduce spend on a channel that generates poor-quality enquiries.
We will increase community engagement because we need reach beyond people already searching for fostering.
We will invest more effort in nurture because too many people are interested but not ready immediately.
Those are strategic decisions.
They also mean deciding what not to do.
That can be uncomfortable.
But continuing every historic activity because “we always do it” is not strategy.
Foster Care Fortnight is a good example
Foster Care Fortnight is important and creates national attention around fostering.
But simply putting:
“Foster Care Fortnight campaign — May”
into the annual recruitment plan does not tell us much.
What are you trying to achieve with that opportunity?
Which audience?
What proposition?
Which geography?
What content?
What response mechanism?
How will enquiries be handled?
How will you measure whether the activity contributed to your actual recruitment requirement?
The date does not create the strategy.
The decisions around it do.
The same applies to social media
A plan might say:
Post three times per week.
Why?
What should those posts achieve?
Awareness?
Trust?
Education?
Proof?
Recruitment enquiries?
Website traffic?
Community engagement?
Existing carer advocacy?
Different content has different jobs.
Posting consistently can be useful.
But consistency itself is not a recruitment outcome.
A one-page test
I think senior managers should be able to understand the core recruitment plan on one page.
Not every operational detail.
But the logic.
Something like:
NEED
What capacity do we need?
AUDIENCE
Who can potentially provide it?
GEOGRAPHY
Where do we need them?
PROPOSITION
Why should they choose us?
CHANNELS
How will we reach them?
JOURNEY
How do we convert interest into application and approval?
TARGET
What does each stage need to produce?
OWNERSHIP
Who is responsible?
MEASUREMENT
How will we know whether the plan is working?
If those questions cannot be answered clearly, a 40-page recruitment strategy may simply be hiding the absence of a coherent one.
The calendar comes last
Once all of those decisions have been made, the calendar becomes useful.
Now we can decide:
what happens in April,
what happens in May,
what happens in June,
what campaigns run,
what events happen,
what content is produced,
what budget is released,
and who does what.
The calendar is the execution layer.
It should not be mistaken for the strategy above it.
Ten questions I would ask
- What specific fostering capacity is this plan designed to create?
- Which audiences are being prioritised and why?
- Which geographical areas are being prioritised and why?
- What is the provider's recruitment proposition?
- Why has each major marketing channel been selected?
- What job is each significant recruitment activity expected to perform?
- Does the plan connect attraction with conversion and assessment?
- What assumptions is the plan making?
- What organisational dependencies could prevent delivery?
- If I removed the activity calendar, would there still be a recruitment strategy underneath it?
That final question is my Point 06 test.
Where FCR Specialist fits
Many providers do not lack recruitment activity.
They are doing a great deal.
The challenge is determining whether all of that activity connects logically to the outcome the organisation needs.
The FCR Specialist Foster Carer Recruitment Diagnostic and Re-tune examines that connection.
I look at:
the requirement,
the audience,
the proposition,
the geography,
the channels,
the recruitment journey,
the funnel,
and how those pieces fit together.
Sometimes the answer is to introduce something new.
Sometimes it is to stop doing something that is consuming time or money without contributing enough.
And sometimes the biggest improvement comes simply from joining together activities that were previously being managed separately.
Because the question isn't:
“Are we busy recruiting?”
It is:
“Is everything we are doing part of a coherent plan to produce the fostering capacity we actually need?”
THE 100-POINT FOSTER CARER RECRUITMENT REVIEW
Stage One — Strategy & Leadership
06/100 — Is Your Recruitment Plan Actually a Plan?
NEXT: 07/100 — Have You Resourced the Recruitment Ambition Properly?
A beautifully designed recruitment plan can still fail for one very straightforward reason:
The organisation has not provided the people, time, skills, systems or capacity required to deliver it.
That is Point 07.