11. August 2026

POINT 08/100 — Are Recruitment and Assessment Working as One System?

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

THE 100-POINT FOSTER CARER RECRUITMENT REVIEW

POINT 08/100 — Are Recruitment and Assessment Working as One System?

Stage One: Strategy & Leadership

Imagine you are thinking about becoming a foster carer.

You make an enquiry.

Someone responds quickly.

You have several conversations.

They answer your questions.

They understand your family.

Perhaps they visit your home.

They explain what fostering involves.

A relationship develops.

You begin to trust the organisation.

Eventually you make a significant decision:

“Yes. I would like to apply.”

From the organisation's perspective, something may now happen.

Your case moves from:

Recruitment

to:

Assessment.

From your perspective?

You haven't moved anywhere.

You are still trying to become a foster carer with the same organisation.

That distinction sits at the heart of Point 08 of my 100-Point Foster Carer Recruitment Review.

The organisational boundary is invisible to the applicant

Fostering services quite properly divide responsibilities between professional functions.

Recruiters recruit.

Assessing social workers assess.

Those roles are different.

They require different skills.

And assessment must maintain the professional rigour necessary to determine whether someone is suitable to foster.

But an internal division of responsibilities should not automatically create an external break in the candidate experience.

The Department for Education's new end-to-end fostering model makes this point very clearly. Its stated objectives include reducing handovers, removing transition delays, maintaining continuous support and creating a seamless journey from enquiry through approval and beyond.

That is not simply a structural reform.

It reflects an important recruitment principle.

The organisation may operate in departments. The prospective foster carer experiences a journey.

The application is not the end of recruitment

This is something I think fostering providers should consider carefully.

When does recruitment finish?

At enquiry?

Initial Home Visit?

Application?

Assessment allocation?

Panel?

Approval?

Different organisations may answer that differently.

But commercially and operationally, I would argue that the organisation has not achieved the recruitment outcome until a suitable household has successfully reached approval.

That does not mean an assessing social worker should become a salesperson.

Nor should professional concerns ever be suppressed because the organisation has invested time and money in recruiting somebody.

Quite the opposite.

Assessment must assess.

But the fact that someone is being assessed does not remove the need for:

good communication,

clear expectations,

momentum,

respect,

support,

and a coherent candidate experience.

Assessment is part of the recruitment journey, even though it performs a different professional function within it.

The handover can become a cliff edge

Think about the prospective foster carer's experience immediately before applying.

They may have had:

regular telephone calls,

emails,

informal questions answered,

perhaps contact with existing foster carers,

a home visit,

encouragement,

and quite intensive engagement.

Then they apply.

Suddenly:

“Your case is now with Assessment.”

What does that mean to them?

Who contacts them?

When?

Does Recruitment formally introduce the assessor?

Does the assessor already understand what has been discussed?

Does the prospective carer know what happens next?

Or is there simply silence while internal allocation takes place?

A handover that looks administratively normal inside an organisation can feel very different to the person experiencing it.

The evidence suggests the process itself matters

The latest Ofsted statistics offer an important warning.

Of the 5,370 mainstream fostering applications completed during 2024/25, 3,290 were withdrawn. Of those withdrawals, 2,175 were initiated by applicants. Among in-year applications withdrawn by applicants, 20% cited the fostering process not being as they expected.

We should be careful with that figure.

It does not tell us that 20% withdrew specifically because of poor handovers between Recruitment and Assessment.

Nor does every withdrawal represent recruitment failure.

Some people should withdraw.

Some should not progress.

Circumstances change.

But the figure does demonstrate something strategically important:

The experience of the process itself can influence whether prospective foster carers continue.

That means process design matters.

What did Recruitment promise?

There is another potential point of friction.

Recruitment may have communicated:

how long things take,

what assessment involves,

what training involves,

what support is available,

how intrusive checks may feel,

what will be expected of partners and family members,

and what happens at panel.

What happens if Assessment communicates something materially different?

The prospective foster carer is now receiving two versions of the same organisation.

That creates uncertainty.

Sometimes the problem is that Recruitment has unintentionally oversold simplicity.

Sometimes Assessment assumes something was explained when it was not.

Sometimes both teams are using technically correct language but explaining the journey differently.

Either way:

Recruitment and Assessment need a shared candidate proposition.

Not identical professional roles.

A shared explanation of the journey.

The applicant should not have to start again

One of the most frustrating experiences in any recruitment process is being repeatedly asked for information you believe you have already provided.

Some repetition is unavoidable.

Assessment is evidence-based.

Information needs to be explored in greater depth.

A social worker cannot simply accept a recruiter's initial conversation as a professional assessment.

But there is a difference between:

revisiting information for assessment purposes

and:

asking again because organisational information has not travelled with the applicant.

The Foster with North East interim evaluation provides an interesting real-world example of this challenge. Staff reported that clear working arrangements and agreement over what information should be collected at the initial stage helped later application processing; conversely, data transfer during the application stage was identified as an ongoing challenge in the partially regionalised model.

That is exactly the kind of interface Point 08 is concerned with.

Warm handover versus administrative transfer

There is a useful distinction here.

Administrative transfer

“Here is the applicant's record. Assessment now owns it.”

Warm handover

“Here is the prospective carer. This is what we know, this is what they understand, these are the issues already discussed, this is where they are emotionally in the journey, and this is who will contact them next and when.”

That second approach requires more thought.

But it preserves continuity.

A warm handover could include:

a brief joint conversation,

a clear introduction to the assessor,

confirmation of the next contact,

shared notes,

clarity over outstanding questions,

and agreement over who remains available if the candidate becomes uncertain.

It does not need to become bureaucratic.

In fact, the purpose is precisely the opposite.

Remove friction.

Relationship continuity matters

The Foster with North East evaluation also highlighted a particularly relevant concern.

Local Authority staff emphasised the importance of building relationships with prospective foster carers early, partly because fostering involves an ongoing relationship after approval. Some staff worried that changes in who undertook early-stage contact or visits could delay or disrupt relationship-building.

That is a valuable insight.

We are not simply recruiting somebody to complete a transactional process.

If approved, that person may remain connected to the fostering service for many years.

The recruitment relationship is therefore the beginning of a much longer organisational relationship.

That makes continuity more important, not less.

Assessment must not become the “serious bit”

There can also be an unhelpful cultural divide.

Recruitment is sometimes perceived as:

friendly,

promotional,

candidate-focused,

perhaps even commercial.

Assessment is seen as:

professional,

rigorous,

social-work led,

and therefore somehow separate from recruitment.

I think this is a false distinction.

Good recruitment should also be rigorous.

It should identify suitability early.

It should have difficult conversations.

It should manage expectations accurately.

It should not try to push unsuitable people through simply to improve a conversion number.

And good assessment can be:

professional,

challenging,

analytical,

and still provide an excellent candidate experience.

Rigour and candidate care are not opposites.

Recruitment should help Assessment — not create work for it

This relationship works in both directions.

Recruitment teams sometimes become frustrated with Assessment because they feel good applicants lose momentum.

Assessment teams can become equally frustrated if Recruitment sends people forward who:

have not understood the commitment,

have unrealistic expectations,

have significant unresolved suitability issues,

or have not been prepared adequately for the assessment process.

That is not an integrated system either.

A strong Recruitment function should improve the quality of Assessment's incoming pipeline.

It should help applicants arrive:

better informed,

better prepared,

more realistic,

and clearer about what will be expected.

Recruitment quality should reduce unnecessary Assessment workload.

Assessment should help Recruitment improve

The feedback loop should also work backwards.

Suppose Assessment repeatedly finds:

prospective carers misunderstand finances,

one particular question creates anxiety,

a campaign attracts households poorly matched to current need,

people are surprised by the depth of assessment,

or a particular issue regularly results in withdrawal.

Does Recruitment know?

Does Marketing know?

Does the website change?

Do initial conversations change?

Does the information pack change?

If that learning stays inside Assessment, the organisation keeps generating the same problem.

This is where two departments become one system.

Assessment should be a source of recruitment intelligence.

Speed matters — but not at the expense of quality

There is a danger in recruitment discussions of turning speed into an absolute objective.

Foster Carer Assessment is not ordinary employment screening.

It exists to support safe, evidence-based decisions about whether people are suitable to care for children.

The Department for Education maintains statutory guidance specifically governing assessment and approval, and the process includes formal professional responsibilities that cannot simply be removed in the pursuit of conversion.

So the question is not:

“How fast can we get somebody approved?”

It is:

“How much unnecessary waiting, duplication and administrative delay can we remove while maintaining the quality of assessment?”

Those are very different objectives.

The process can be designed

The two-stage fostering assessment framework illustrates this.

Stages 1 and 2 can operate separately or concurrently. In the 2022/23 cohort of approved mainstream fostering households, 76% experienced the two stages concurrently; 85% of IFA approvals and 65% of Local Authority approvals did so. Three quarters of approved mainstream applications that year completed within approximately eight months from Stage 1 start to approval.

More recently, the Foster with North East evaluation reported that one participating authority had begun running Stages 1 and 2 concurrently after learning from regional partners and said this shortened its typical application timeline.

The point is not that every provider should redesign its process identically.

It is that process design influences candidate experience and throughput.

Waiting and assessment are not the same thing

A prospective foster carer may accept that assessment takes time.

There are:

meetings,

checks,

references,

training,

analysis,

and important conversations to undertake.

What is often much harder to accept is dead time.

Nothing appears to be happening.

Nobody knows when the next stage will start.

The applicant has no meaningful update.

Weeks pass because:

an assessor has not been allocated,

a meeting cannot be arranged,

information has not transferred,

or responsibility is unclear.

From a management perspective, it is important to distinguish:

time spent assessing

from

time spent waiting to be assessed.

Only one of those necessarily contributes to assessment quality.

One pipeline, not two lists

Recruitment may maintain one tracker.

Assessment may maintain another.

That is operationally understandable.

But can the organisation see the whole applicant journey?

At minimum, both functions should have shared visibility of where prospective carers are in the process and who is responsible for the next action.

The Department for Education's current model explicitly expects transparent monitoring across the entire pipeline and anticipates collecting milestones including enquiries, expressions of interest, initial visits, application starts, panel and approvals.

Point 09 will look much more deeply at management information.

For Point 08, the requirement is simpler:

Recruitment and Assessment should be looking at the same journey.

Agree the service standards between the teams

I would encourage providers to define some very simple internal expectations.

For example:

When an application is received, how quickly is the next person introduced?

How quickly should assessment allocation occur?

Who contacts the applicant if allocation is delayed?

Who owns regular contact during waiting periods?

What information must Recruitment transfer?

What feedback does Assessment return?

When does Recruitment step back?

When might it become involved again?

What happens if an applicant begins to wobble?

Who notices if a case has stopped moving?

These do not all need to become formal policies.

But if nobody knows the answers, the applicant is likely to discover the gaps before management does.

The “not yet” applicant is particularly important

Someone may reach assessment and then conclude:

“This isn't the right time.”

That does not automatically mean:

“Never.”

What happens then?

Does Assessment close the case and move on?

Does Recruitment receive the person back into a nurture process?

Is there permission to stay in touch?

Does somebody record:

why now was wrong,

what might change,

and when it may be appropriate to reconnect?

This is another example of why Recruitment and Assessment need to operate as a loop rather than a one-way conveyor belt.

The Local Authority issue

In a Local Authority, operational pressures can complicate the interface.

Assessment may sit within a broader social-work function.

Urgent children's-service demands can understandably affect staff availability and priorities.

Recruitment may therefore have very little control over what happens to its applicants once responsibility transfers.

That makes leadership design even more important.

The recruiter cannot reasonably be expected to deliver the approval target if the organisation does not manage the downstream dependencies affecting those approvals.

This takes us back to Points 04 and 07:

ownership and capacity.

Point 08 is where those two issues become visible in the candidate journey.

The IFA issue

An IFA may have a different structure.

Recruitment and assessment may operate more closely.

Or they may be separated geographically, nationally or functionally.

In larger organisations, central marketing may generate the enquiry, a call centre may qualify it, local recruitment staff may visit, and another team may assess.

Again, there is nothing inherently wrong with specialisation.

The danger is fragmentation.

Every additional handoff has to justify itself by adding more value than friction.

The interface test

Here is a useful exercise.

Take ten prospective foster carers who moved from Recruitment into Assessment.

Look at the seven days either side of that transition.

What happened?

Who contacted them?

What information moved?

How quickly?

What did they have to repeat?

What questions arose?

Was the next step clear?

Did the frequency of contact change?

Did anyone check how the handover felt?

You may learn more about your recruitment system from those 14 days than from several pages of monthly statistics.

Ten questions I would ask

At exactly what point does Recruitment hand responsibility to Assessment?
Does the prospective foster carer know that transition is happening?
Is there a named next contact before Recruitment steps away?
What information moves with the applicant?
What information do applicants unnecessarily have to repeat?
How long do people wait between application and meaningful assessment contact?
Who maintains engagement if assessment allocation is delayed?
Does Assessment routinely feed learning back into Recruitment?
Can both teams see the candidate's progress through one end-to-end journey?
If I asked your applicants whether Recruitment and Assessment felt like one organisation, what would they say?

That final question is the Point 08 test.

Where FCR Specialist fits

Some of the most important recruitment losses do not occur within a department.

They occur between departments.

That makes them easy to miss.

Recruitment can appear to have completed its work.

Assessment can appear to be managing its allocated cases.

Yet candidates can still experience:

delay,

duplication,

confusion,

lost momentum,

or inconsistent communication.

The FCR Specialist Foster Carer Recruitment Diagnostic and Re-tune examines the recruitment journey across those boundaries.

The purpose is not to blur professional responsibilities.

It is to make sure that:

Recruitment prepares people properly.
Assessment receives them properly.
Information travels properly.
Communication continues properly.
And the prospective foster carer experiences one coherent journey.

Because different teams may legitimately perform different functions.

The applicant should not have to carry the organisational boundary between them.