11. August 2026

POINT 07/100 — Have You Resourced the Recruitment Ambition Properly?

Article written by Rolfe Pearce MBA in the category Foster Carer Recruitment

THE 100-POINT FOSTER CARER RECRUITMENT REVIEW

POINT 07/100 — Have You Resourced the Recruitment Ambition Properly?

Stage One: Strategy & Leadership

Imagine this conversation.

Last year your fostering service approved 12 new households.

This year the organisation needs 20.

The target is agreed.

It appears in the recruitment strategy.

The Recruitment Manager is informed.

Everybody understands the importance.

Excellent.

Now I would ask another question.

What has changed inside the organisation that makes 20 achievable when the existing system produced 12?

Perhaps the answer is perfectly clear.

More recruiter capacity.

Better marketing.

Additional assessment resource.

A redesigned process.

More community engagement.

Improved conversion.

Additional evening and weekend availability.

Better technology.

A different audience strategy.

A stronger proposition.

Perhaps several of those things are changing.

But if the answer is:

“Nothing really — we just need the team to recruit more.”

then I would question whether the target has actually been resourced.

That is Point 07 of the 100-Point Foster Carer Recruitment Review.

Recruitment ambition has an operational cost

In Point 06 I asked:

Is Your Recruitment Plan Actually a Plan?

A proper plan connects the fostering capacity required with the audience, geography, proposition, channels, candidate journey and expected outcome.

But a beautifully constructed recruitment strategy remains theoretical until somebody asks:

What does delivering this plan require?

Every additional activity consumes something.

Usually one or more of:

time,
people,
skills,
money,
management attention,
technology,
or operational capacity.

Those resources are finite.

That sounds obvious.

Yet I regularly see recruitment plans asking for substantially greater output while assuming the existing operation can absorb the additional workload.

Sometimes it can.

Sometimes it cannot.

The important thing is that somebody has tested the assumption.

Marketing budget is only one resource

Foster Carer Recruitment resourcing can easily become synonymous with:

“What is the advertising budget?”

Advertising matters.

But it is only one component.

Imagine spending substantially more money generating enquiries.

Your campaign works.

Enquiries rise dramatically.

Now ask:

Who answers them?

How quickly?

Who follows up when somebody doesn't respond?

Who conducts the Initial Home Visits?

Who maintains the relationship?

Who nurtures the people who say:

“I am interested — but not yet”?

Who processes applications?

Who undertakes assessments?

Who delivers training?

Who prepares cases for panel?

Who maintains the data?

Who analyses what is happening?

Who changes the plan when the evidence shows something isn't working?

More marketing can increase the demand placed on every part of the system.

Therefore spending more at the front of an under-resourced process can simply move the bottleneck somewhere else.

The current national model acknowledges this explicitly

The Department for Education's 2026 end-to-end Fostering Recruitment and Retention Programme does not treat recruitment capacity as a communications-budget issue.

Its design covers staffing structures spanning enquiry, assessment and approval; explicitly discusses staffing of assessment teams; requires consideration of Agency Decision Maker and panel capacity; and expects workforce structures to support efficient workflows and high-quality assessments. It also includes professional development and coaching so recruitment staff have the skills and tools required.

That is significant.

It recognises the principle behind Point 07:

Recruitment output depends upon organisational capacity.

Government has also committed more than £5 million across 2026/27 and 2027/28 to enable new hubs to develop the capacity and structures required for the end-to-end model.

Whatever one's view of regional hub structures, the management principle is difficult to dispute.

Changing the ambition requires thinking about the capacity required to deliver it.

Resource 1: People

Start with the obvious one.

How many people actually work on Foster Carer Recruitment?

But even that question requires care.

A service may say:

“We have three people in recruitment.”

Do all three work full-time on recruitment?

Or does one also manage marketing?

Events?

Administration?

Training?

Social media?

Reporting?

Placements?

Other duties?

A job title does not tell you the available recruitment capacity.

I am more interested in:

How much usable time does the organisation actually have available to undertake the work in the recruitment plan?

That can be very different.

The recruitment role can quietly become five jobs

Look at what some Foster Carer Recruitment roles are expected to contain.

Generate enquiries.

Answer enquiries.

Qualify prospective carers.

Arrange home visits.

Attend recruitment events.

Build community relationships.

Manage social media.

Produce content.

Maintain databases.

Write reports.

Follow up old enquiries.

Develop referral schemes.

Maintain contact with “not now” prospects.

Analyse performance.

Work with marketing agencies.

Attend meetings.

Support applications.

And sometimes undertake Initial Home Visits as well.

Every one of those activities may be valuable.

But there is a point at which:

“The Recruitment Manager is responsible for it”

becomes a substitute for deciding whether there is enough capacity to do it properly.

Resource 2: Time

Time deserves to be considered separately from headcount.

You may technically have enough people.

But do they have time at the moment prospective foster carers need them?

Consider somebody researching fostering at:

7.30pm.

Saturday morning.

Sunday afternoon.

During their lunch break.

Their timetable does not necessarily align with the traditional operating hours of a public-service organisation.

The Department for Education's current programme notes that several of the existing hubs regarded as demonstrating strong practice provide out-of-hours support, alongside early relationship-building and regular contact.

That does not mean every fostering provider should operate a 24-hour recruitment service.

It does mean the organisation should ask:

Are our resources available when the people we are trying to recruit are actually available?

That is a recruitment-design question.

Resource 3: Specialist capability

Having somebody assigned to recruitment does not automatically mean the organisation has every capability required for modern Foster Carer Recruitment.

The operation may need access to skills in:

recruitment,

digital marketing,

candidate conversion,

copywriting,

SEO,

social media,

video,

community engagement,

data analysis,

CRM systems,

candidate nurture,

workforce planning,

and recruitment strategy.

It would be unreasonable to expect one individual to be genuinely expert in all of those disciplines.

The solution does not automatically mean employing ten specialists.

It may involve:

shared resource,

training,

external expertise,

regional collaboration,

automation,

specialist suppliers,

or deliberately prioritising the capabilities that matter most.

The strategic mistake is assuming that because an activity appears in someone's job description, the organisation has resourced the expertise required to perform it well.

Resource 4: Assessment capacity

This is one of the biggest potential constraints in the whole system.

Suppose your recruitment plan successfully generates twice as many suitable applicants.

Excellent.

Can assessment absorb them?

The current DfE end-to-end model explicitly allows hubs to consider staffing approaches such as pools of Independent Social Workers or mobile assessment teams and specifically identifies the need to resource panel and Agency Decision Maker capacity to support timely decisions.

That tells us something important.

Recruitment capacity does not end when somebody applies.

If the plan increases applications, the organisation needs to understand what happens downstream.

Point 08 will look specifically at whether Recruitment and Assessment are functioning as one system.

For Point 07 the issue is narrower:

Is enough capacity available to process the volume the recruitment plan intends to create?

Resource 5: Initial Home Visit capacity

There can also be a bottleneck much earlier.

Your funnel calculation from Point 03 may say that the organisation needs 100 Initial Home Visits to produce the required number of applications.

Fine.

Who will undertake them?

When?

How quickly after enquiry?

What happens when volumes spike following a successful campaign?

Can visits happen outside office hours?

What happens during annual leave?

What happens when operational social work pressures increase?

A target becomes more credible when these questions have been answered before the enquiries arrive.

Resource 6: Community engagement

Community engagement is a good example of an activity that everybody can agree is valuable while underestimating the resource required to do it properly.

Real community engagement is not:

attend one event and hand out leaflets.

It involves:

identifying communities,

building relationships,

following up contacts,

developing advocates,

working with businesses,

community organisations,

faith groups,

employers,

schools,

clubs,

local networks,

and existing foster carers.

It is relationship-based recruitment.

And relationships take time.

If a recruitment strategy says:

“Increase community engagement”

but gives nobody dedicated capacity to do it, that part of the strategy may exist principally on paper.

Resource 7: Technology

Technology should reduce unnecessary workload.

It should not simply create another system for people to update.

A Foster Carer Recruitment operation may need:

a usable CRM,

pipeline visibility,

automated reminders,

nurture capability,

website analytics,

campaign tracking,

shared case information,

dashboards,

and appropriate digital tools.

The DfE programme is itself moving towards digital tools intended to streamline recruitment and onboarding, with hubs expected to integrate with that national work as it develops.

But technology only becomes a resource when:

people can use it,

the data is reliable,

and it saves or improves something.

A CRM nobody updates is not recruitment infrastructure.

It is software expenditure.

Resource 8: Management attention

This resource is frequently overlooked.

Some problems cannot be fixed by recruitment staff.

They require decisions.

A policy needs changing.

Budget needs reallocating.

A website requires investment.

Assessment capacity needs increasing.

A process has become unnecessarily cumbersome.

A cross-departmental disagreement needs resolving.

If those decisions take three months, then leadership capacity has become part of the recruitment constraint.

Senior-management attention is therefore a resource.

Point 04 established that somebody needs to own the outcome.

Point 07 asks whether that person has the time and authority to act when the system requires intervention.

Resource 9: Data and analysis

Recruitment teams can spend an extraordinary amount of time manually assembling information that should already be available.

Downloading spreadsheets.

Reconciling enquiries.

Finding out where applicants are.

Working out who withdrew.

Trying to identify campaign sources.

Rebuilding reports every month.

Every hour spent manually reconstructing basic management information is an hour that cannot be spent recruiting.

This is not yet the detailed management-information discussion — that comes in Point 09.

Here the issue is resource utilisation.

Is administrative friction consuming recruitment capacity that could be better used elsewhere?

That is a legitimate resourcing question.

Resource 10: Flexibility

Plans rarely unfold exactly as forecast.

A campaign performs unexpectedly well.

A staff member leaves.

Assessment demand increases.

A new geographic shortage emerges.

A competitor changes its offer.

An event suddenly creates significant interest.

An advertising channel stops performing.

Does the organisation have any spare capacity to respond?

An operation permanently running at 100% utilisation can appear efficient.

But it may also be extremely fragile.

There needs to be some ability to absorb variation.

The bottleneck principle

Here is the operational point I would emphasise.

A recruitment system can only move as quickly as its principal constraint allows.

Imagine:

Marketing can generate 500 enquiries.

Recruitment can effectively manage 350.

Initial Home Visit capacity can manage 120.

Assessment capacity can manage 35 applications.

Then the theoretical capacity of the marketing function is not the critical issue.

The system constraint sits elsewhere.

Putting additional money into generating 700 enquiries may make the first number look impressive.

But it does not automatically increase approvals.

The resource conversation therefore needs to happen end to end.

Local Authority resourcing

For a Local Authority, there can be an additional difficulty.

Foster Carer Recruitment sits inside a much larger children's-services environment.

Operational priorities inevitably compete for:

social worker time,

management attention,

budgets,

communications support,

digital resources,

and specialist expertise.

That is understandable.

But it also means leaders need to distinguish between:

“Recruitment is strategically important”

and:

“Recruitment has actually been given the organisational capacity required to deliver the strategic expectation.”

Those are different statements.

IFA resourcing

The issue can look different in an IFA.

A smaller provider may have highly committed staff but very little dedicated recruitment infrastructure.

A Registered Manager or social worker may be expected to recruit alongside their core responsibilities.

The organisation may want significant growth while recruitment remains effectively a part-time function.

At the other end of the spectrum, a large IFA may have significant marketing budgets but create distance between marketing activity and local operational capacity.

Again, the question is not:

“Are we a large organisation or a small one?”

It is:

Is the resource model appropriate for the recruitment outcome we expect?

The false economy of under-resourcing

There is a temptation to look at Foster Carer Recruitment as overhead.

Another employee costs money.

External specialist support costs money.

A CRM costs money.

Community activity costs money.

Marketing costs money.

Assessment resource costs money.

All true.

But there is another side of the equation.

What does insufficient fostering capacity cost?

For an IFA, insufficient foster carer capacity constrains future placement opportunities and growth.

For a Local Authority, insufficient appropriate in-house capacity can increase reliance on other provision and reduce placement choice.

Government's 2026 fostering reforms explicitly connect expanded foster care with greater placement choice and reduced pressure on expensive residential provision.

Resourcing recruitment should therefore be considered alongside the value of the capacity recruitment is intended to create.

The resource-to-target test

I would ask senior leaders to put two documents beside each other.

DOCUMENT ONE

The recruitment ambition.

For example:

20 additional fostering households.

DOCUMENT TWO

The resource change that makes that ambition credible.

What has increased?

What has changed?

What has been redesigned?

What additional capability is available?

What has been stopped to free capacity?

What bottleneck has been removed?

If the second document is blank, I would want to understand why the organisation expects the first number to change.

Ten questions I would ask

How much dedicated recruitment capacity do you actually have?
Does that capacity match the activity required by the plan?
Are staff available when prospective foster carers need them?
Does the team have access to the specialist skills the strategy requires?
Can Initial Home Visit capacity support the required funnel volume?
Can assessment and approval capacity support the required number of applications?
Is technology reducing workload or adding to it?
How much recruitment time is lost to administration and reporting?
What additional resource or operating change accompanies an increased recruitment target?
If nothing material has changed, why should leadership expect a materially different result?

That final question is the Point 07 test.

Where FCR Specialist fits

Sometimes an organisation knows exactly what it wants to achieve but does not have the specialist capacity internally to redesign the route to achieving it.

That does not automatically mean employing more people permanently.

It may mean:

reviewing where existing resource is being used,

identifying the real bottleneck,

upskilling a team,

redesigning part of the process,

bringing in specialist expertise for a defined period,

or removing activity that consumes substantial effort without producing sufficient value.

The FCR Specialist Foster Carer Recruitment Diagnostic and Re-tune looks at the end-to-end operation and asks whether the resource model genuinely supports the recruitment ambition.

Because sometimes the problem isn't that people are not working hard enough.

They are being asked to produce an outcome the system has not been equipped to deliver.