If you run a care home, domiciliary care service, or supported living provider anywhere in Sussex, you've probably felt it: adverts go up, a handful of applications trickle in, and very few of them are from people who actually have the right experience, availability, or genuine interest in care work. It's one of the most common frustrations we hear from care providers across Brighton, Eastbourne, Worthing, Crawley and the surrounding towns, and it's rarely down to one single cause.
Care recruitment in Sussex is genuinely difficult right now. Demand for care workers has grown faster than the local workforce, wages in retail and hospitality have risen to compete for the same pool of people, and many care providers are still advertising the way they always have, on the same national platforms as thousands of other employers, with the same generic job titles. If you're not getting the right candidates, it's worth looking honestly at where the gap actually is.
Why the usual approach stops working
Most care providers start recruiting the same way: a job advert titled "Care Assistant" or "Support Worker", posted to one or two national job boards, with a brief description of duties and a salary range. This works reasonably well when there are more candidates than vacancies. It works far less well when the opposite is true, which is the position most of Sussex finds itself in today.
The problem isn't usually the platform itself, it's that a generic advert competing against hundreds of near-identical listings has very little to make a candidate choose yours over anyone else's. Someone searching for care work in Eastbourne has options. Give them a genuine reason to pick your organisation specifically.
What actually helps
1. Be specific about what makes the role different
"Competitive salary" and "great team" appear in almost every care job advert in the country, which means they no longer tell a candidate anything. Instead, be concrete: is it a smaller home with a lower staff-to-resident ratio? Guaranteed hours rather than zero-contract? A genuinely flexible rota that fits around school pickups? Paid travel time between visits for domiciliary roles? These specifics are what a good candidate is actually scanning for.
2. Advertise locally, not just nationally
National job boards are built for national searches, and a Sussex-based candidate typing "care assistant Brighton" into Google is often shown a wall of listings from agencies and providers many miles away, or roles with locations so vague they could be anywhere in the South East. A platform built specifically around Sussex towns puts your listing in front of people who have already decided they want to work locally, which tends to produce far more relevant applications, even if the total number is smaller.
3. Make the application process genuinely quick
Long application forms are a significant, and often invisible, source of drop-off in care recruitment specifically, since many strong candidates are already working shifts and applying in short windows of free time. If your process requires a lengthy form before someone can even express interest, you are likely losing candidates who would otherwise have been well suited to the role. A short initial step, even just a CV and a phone number, converts far better.
4. Say who you're looking for, not just what the job involves
A duties list tells a candidate what they'll be doing, but not whether they'd enjoy it or be good at it. A line such as "this role would suit someone patient, who enjoys building relationships over time and doesn't mind an early start" does more to attract the right person, and gently discourage the wrong one, than another paragraph of responsibilities ever will.
5. Review your salary against the local market, not the national one
Wages that look reasonable compared to national averages can look considerably less competitive against what hospitality and retail are currently paying in Brighton, Eastbourne or Worthing specifically, particularly during the summer season. It's worth checking what similar roles are genuinely paying in your own towns before assuming the salary isn't the issue.
The bigger picture
None of this guarantees a flood of applications overnight, care recruitment across the whole country remains genuinely challenging, and there's no single change that fixes it entirely. But a more specific advert, aimed at the right local audience, with a process that respects a candidate's time, consistently performs better than a generic listing spread as widely as possible. Small, deliberate changes tend to move the needle more than simply posting the same advert in more places.