TL;DR:

The UK social care sector faces a persistent recruitment crisis, with 131,000 vacancies daily and high turnover rates requiring up to 450,000 hires annually.

Traditional 15-minute screening calls consume 180,000+ hours per year, costing millions in recruiter salaries and slowing time-to-hire to an average of 76 days.

Candidates often experience delayed responses, rigid scheduling, and inconsistent screening quality, leading to drop-offs and higher recruitment costs.

Progreso AI’s AI recruiter, Lily, revolutionises hiring by conducting instant, scalable, unbiased screenings at candidates' convenience, providing transcripts, scores, and summaries that save hundreds of recruiter hours and reduce hiring costs.

The solution accelerates recruitment, improves candidate experience, and ensures care providers fill vacancies efficiently.

4 min read ⬇️

1. Scale of Social Care Recruitment in the UK

High Vacancy Levels: The adult social care sector in the UK consistently has a large number of job vacancies. On any given day there are roughly 131,000 vacant social care posts (approx. 8.3% vacancy rate) in England alone . This vacancy rate is about three times higher than the average across the UK economy (around 2.8%) , underscoring the severe staffing shortfall in social care.

Size of Workforce & Turnover: The social care workforce comprises about 1.7 million filled posts , but turnover is extremely high – about 24.2% of care workers leave their jobs each year (nearly one in four) . This means employers must hire hundreds of thousands of workers annually just to replace those who quit. In 2023/24, roughly one-quarter of a million roles were vacated by leavers, and even after accounting for some internal moves, the sector still needed to hire on the order of 400,000+ new workers per year to backfill roles and meet rising demand . This annual hiring volume – likely close to half a million hires – makes social care one of the highest-churn labor markets in the UK.

Applications per Vacancy: Despite the high demand for staff, many social care vacancies struggle to attract large candidate pools. Anecdotally, a care home or home-care job might only receive a handful of qualified applications, whereas more attractive industries see far more interest. By contrast, across the UK job market the average number of applications per vacancy is much higher – in late 2024, employers were receiving ~49 applications per job on average amid a tight labor market . Social care roles typically see far fewer applicants per vacancy than this national average, due to factors like lower pay, demanding work, and required qualifications (e.g. care certification, DBS checks). In short, each social care vacancy often yields relatively few viable candidates, contributing to persistent unfilled roles even as other industries manage to field dozens of applicants per post.

 

2. Screening Calls – Volume and Time Investment

Prevalence of Screening Calls: Screening phone calls are a standard step in social care hiring. The majority of applicants who meet basic criteria will receive an initial phone screen – one estimate suggests around 70–80% of applications are screened by a recruiter via phone. This high screening rate reflects the volume-hiring nature of care: recruiters try to quickly vet almost every potential carer for availability, experience, and suitability. In practice, most candidates in social care get a screening call before any in-person interview.

Average Call Length: A typical phone screening is relatively short – usually about 15 minutes per call . Many organisations budget 15–20 minutes for an initial care role conversation. (This is shorter than a full interview, which might last 30–60 minutes, but the cumulative time of many 15-minute calls adds up fast.)

Daily, Monthly, Annual Call Volume: Given the scale of hiring, screening calls are happening constantly across the sector. We can estimate the volume: If the sector needs roughly 450,000 new hires a year (to replace leavers and fill new roles) and, say, an average of 10 candidates apply per role, that’s about 4.5 million applications. If ~80% of those applicants get a phone screen, around 3.6 million screening calls occur in social care annually. That breaks down to on the order of 10,000 screening calls per day, or about 300,000 calls each month (assuming hiring is spread evenly through the year). Even under more conservative assumptions, we are looking at millions of phone screenings per year across UK social care.

Total Hours Spent Screening: These calls consume a staggering amount of recruiter time. At 15 minutes each, 3.6 million calls translate to 900,000 minutes of calling – which is 15,000 hours per month, or about 180,000 hours per year spent on phone screenings. In more relatable terms, that’s roughly 120,000 workdays, or **500 recruiter work-years (if one recruiter works ~1,800 hours/year) dedicated just to phone screening. Put simply, the sector collectively spends centuries of work time every year on repetitive screening conversations. This is time recruiters cannot spend on other critical tasks like engaging with candidates later in the funnel, improving processes, or strategic workforce planning – it’s essentially time lost to the tedious but necessary chore of first-round filtering.

(To illustrate: a single recruiter might handle ~20 screening calls per day, which is ~5 hours of phone time. Sector-wide, thousands of recruiters are tied up on the phone each day just doing screenings.)

Recruiter Time Lost: The opportunity cost is enormous. Those ~500 work-years spent on phone screens equal a large team of recruitment staff working full-time on nothing but asking the same initial questions. For a typical recruiter earning around £27k per year , the salary cost alone of time spent on screening calls approaches £13–15 million annually across the sector. The human cost is also significant: screening calls are repetitive and tiring, contributing to burnout and reduced productivity among recruitment teams.

 

3. Cost of Screening Calls & Recruitment in Social Care

High Cost-per-Hire: Hiring in social care is expensive – far more than just the wage of the new employee. According to CIPD benchmarks, the median direct cost per hire (advertising, recruiter time, etc.) for UK employers is about £1,500 for an entry-level employee and £3,000 for a senior manager . Social care roles tend to fall on the lower end of salaries, but because of high turnover and hiring challenges, the effective cost-per-hire can be substantial. Many care providers rely on paid job boards, recruiting events, and significant staff hours to fill each vacancy. When you factor in onboarding costs (training, DBS checks, induction time) and the productivity lost while a role is vacant or a new hire ramps up, the true cost per hire in social care easily climbs into the thousands. Some estimates put all-in hiring costs for a care worker at £3k–£5k, and for more skilled roles (like registered managers or nurses) £10k+ – especially if agencies are used.

Recruitment Agency Fees: A large portion of social care recruitment is outsourced to agencies due to the urgency of filling roles. Agencies typically charge 15–20% of the position’s annual salary as a fee for finding a candidate . In practical terms, hiring one care worker through an agency (with a ~£20k salary) might cost a care home £3,000–£4,000 in fees, while hiring a senior nurse or manager (salary £30–40k) could incur a £6,000–£8,000 fee. For hard-to-fill positions, fees can climb as high as 25–30% . These fees significantly drive up the cost-per-hire. Many social care providers face a tough choice: pay agencies thousands per hire or maintain in-house recruiting teams that themselves cost tens of thousands in salary and still struggle to fill roles.

Salaries & Screening Labor Costs: The salary expense of internal recruitment teams is a major cost factor. A typical in-house recruiter in social care earns around £25–30k/year (plus benefits), and much of their paid time is spent on labor-intensive tasks like screening calls. Using the earlier estimate of ~180,000 hours/year on screening calls: if we value recruiter time at roughly £15 per hour (salary + overhead), that’s ~£2.7 million/year of recruiter wage cost spent purely on phone screening across the sector. This is essentially an inefficiency tax – money spent on manual filtering that could be reduced with better tools or processes.

Long Time-to-Hire = Higher Costs: Sluggish hiring processes in social care exacerbate costs. The average time-to-hire in the care sector is about 76 days (2.5 months) , which is extremely long for frontline roles. Each day a care position sits unfilled has a financial impact: providers may incur overtime costs for other staff, have to bring in agency temps (at elevated hourly rates), or in the worst case leave beds/services unused (lost revenue) due to lack of staff. With an average vacancy lasting 76 days, the cumulative cost of vacancies is enormous – consider agency cover: at £15/hour for a support worker, covering a 76-day vacancy (full time) costs the employer around £6,800 in temp wages. Multiply this by thousands of vacancies and the sector is bleeding money due to slow hiring. It’s no surprise that at any given time around 126,000 agency or bank staff are working in social care to plug gaps – a costly stopgap solution to the recruitment lag.

Impact of Inefficient Screening: The manual screening call stage itself can slow down time-to-hire and increase costs. Coordinating phone interviews can introduce days or weeks of delay – phone tag with candidates, difficulty reaching people during work hours, etc. Every extra week spent scheduling and conducting screenings extends the vacancy duration, meaning more interim costs and a higher chance the candidate drops out or takes another job. It’s a vicious cycle: high volume of applicants -> many screening calls -> long hiring timelines -> higher costs and candidate drop-off -> need to screen more applicants to find replacements. The inefficiency of manual screening is at the heart of this cycle.

Cost of Candidate Drop-Off: Another hidden cost is when suitable candidates drop out because the process is slow or frustrating. All the recruiter time spent sourcing and screening that person is then wasted, and you have to start over. Unfortunately, slow screening and scheduling are a top reason candidates abandon applications. Over one-third of UK job seekers (36%) said they would withdraw their application if they don’t receive a timely response on status . Every candidate who drops out due to delays means the cost-per-hire for that role goes up (more advertising, more screening of the next candidate, etc.). In social care’s competitive talent market, losing candidates to a slow process is an expense employers can’t afford – yet it happens frequently under traditional methods.

 

4. Candidate Experience with Traditional Screening

Manual recruitment processes in social care don’t just burden employers – they often frustrate candidates, which can damage the organisation’s reputation and ability to hire. Some common candidate pain points with traditional screening include:

• Slow Response Times: Candidates often apply and then wait…and wait. In many cases, weeks go by with no update after submitting an application. Surveys show slow feedback is the #1 frustration among UK job seekers – cited by 52% of candidates . When an applicant finally gets a screening call, it might be long after they applied, by which time they may have lost interest or accepted another job. Half of UK professionals have even declined a job offer because the hiring process was too long , showing how drawn-out timelines directly lead to lost talent.

• Rigid Scheduling: Traditional phone screens usually happen during Monday–Friday business hours, when recruiters are in the office. But many care workers are employed or have other commitments, making it hard to take a call at 2 PM on a Tuesday. The lack of scheduling flexibility – “Can you speak at 10 AM tomorrow?” – often forces candidates to juggle work shifts or personal duties to accommodate the recruiter. If they can’t make the offered slot, it can be days before an alternative is arranged. This rigidity is a major turn-off. In fact, 23% of candidates specifically complain about the difficulty of scheduling interviews in recruiting processes . It’s inconvenient and stressful for job seekers, especially those currently working who can’t easily step away for unscheduled calls.

• Poor Communication & Ghosting: Many candidates experience inconsistent communication from employers. They might have an initial call and then hear nothing for weeks (or ever). Unfortunately, ghosting by employers is rampant – 45% of candidates say they have been “ghosted” after an initial conversation with a recruiter (never receiving any follow-up or decision) . This leaves applicants feeling disrespected and anxious. Even those who do get contacted may find communications disjointed – one recruiter calls for a phone screen, a different person emails them later, etc. 44% of job seekers cite poor communication about next steps as a major frustration . This lack of transparency and consistency creates a negative impression of the employer. Candidates begin to perceive the organisation as disorganised or uncaring when communications fall through the cracks.

• Inconsistencies and Bias: With human screeners, the experience can vary widely. Some recruiters are friendly and well-prepared; others may sound rushed or apathetic, or ask inconsistent questions. Unstructured screening calls can introduce unconscious biases – for example, a recruiter might have a preconceived notion based on a candidate’s accent or background, affecting the tone or outcome of the call. From the candidate’s side, this can come across as an unfair or cursory evaluation. There’s also little transparency; candidates often don’t know why they weren’t selected beyond the screen. Overall, the traditional process can feel like a black box: the candidate isn’t sure what the interviewer is really looking for, whether the questions are standardised, or how objectively they’ll be judged. This ambiguity and potential bias lead to a neutral or negative perception of the hiring process. Many job seekers simply endure phone screens as a necessary hurdle, but they don’t enjoy the experience – and a poor interaction at this stage can sour them on the employer for good.

In summary, manual screening methods often deliver a subpar candidate experience: delayed feedback, inflexible scheduling, and hit-or-miss interactions. Candidates may feel like their time isn’t valued. For an industry like social care that desperately needs to attract and retain talent, these traditional screening woes can be especially damaging – they directly contribute to candidates dropping out or viewing the organisation negatively (over 50% of candidates say they wouldn’t recommend a company with poor communication during hiring ).

 

5. Automating Screening Calls: How Progreso AI’s Lily Improves Social Care Hiring

The inefficiencies outlined above – endless phone tag, recruiter burnout, high costs, and frustrated candidates – point to a clear need for innovation. Progreso AI offers a solution: an AI-powered recruitment agent named Lily that automates the screening call process. Lily is designed to make social care recruitment far more efficient while improving the candidate experience. Here’s how:

✅ 24/7 Screening at Candidates’ Convenience: Lily can call candidates on their schedule, anytime – even at 11 PM on a Saturday if that’s when the applicant is free. Unlike human recruiters bound to office hours, Lily’s AI recruiter is always available. This means candidates no longer have to take time off or rearrange their lives for a screening call. They choose a convenient slot (even late nights or weekends) and Lily will be there. The result is faster first-contact times and happier candidates. No more waiting days to find a mutually available 15-minute window – screenings are completed within hours, not weeks, speeding up time-to-hire dramatically.

✅ Massively Scalable Calls (No Bottlenecks): Whether you have 10 applicants or 1,000, Lily can handle it. The AI agent makes multiple calls simultaneously, so your screening capacity instantly scales with your applicant volume. In traditional hiring, if 100 people apply, a recruiter might spend 25 hours that week on phone screens; with Lily, all 100 screenings could be completed in parallel in a single day. This eliminates the bottleneck of waiting for a recruiter’s availability. Every qualified candidate gets immediate attention. High-volume recruiting – such as seasonal hiring or bulk recruitment for a new care home – becomes seamless, as Lily can literally call everyone at once. The throughput is no longer limited by human bandwidth, ensuring you never lose good candidates to slow outreach.

✅ Structured, Unbiased Interviews: Lily conducts screening calls in a highly consistent and structured manner. Every candidate is asked the same core questions in the same friendly, professional tone. This brings uniformity and fairness to the process – no risk of an exhausted recruiter forgetting to cover a key question or letting bias creep in. An AI doesn’t prejudge based on accent or background; it evaluates responses objectively against the criteria. This unbiased screening helps surface the best candidates who might be overlooked by human snap judgments. It also means higher quality data on each candidate – since the questions are standardised, you can truly compare answers apples-to-apples. Recruiters can be confident that everyone has had an equal opportunity to impress during the screen.

✅ Detailed Transcripts, Scores, and Recordings: Every AI-driven call with Lily is documented. The system transcribes the entire conversation, automatically scores candidate responses, and generates a concise summary of each interview. It even provides the audio recording for recruiters to review if desired. All this is delivered instantly to the hiring team. Recruiters save countless hours they would have spent taking notes or writing up feedback – Lily does it for them. When a recruiter is ready to move candidates forward, they can quickly read the AI’s summary and see a data-driven fit score for each person. This lets one recruiter effectively supervise dozens of screenings without personally being on every call. The result is a huge productivity boost: your HR team can focus on engaging top candidates and making decisions using Lily’s rich interview insights, rather than dialling phones and scribbling notes.

✅ Reduced Time-to-Hire and Lower Costs: By automating the screening stage, Progreso AI compresses the hiring timeline from the start. Days (or weeks) of phone tag are eliminated – often the initial screen can be completed the same day a candidate applies. This means qualified candidates move through the funnel faster and you fill roles sooner. A process that once took 76 days can drop substantially. Faster hiring not only saves on interim costs (fewer agency temp hours needed, etc.) but also improves candidate conversion (less drop-off). Moreover, automation lets you do more with a smaller recruitment team – the equivalent work of many recruiter-hours is handled by Lily, reducing cost-per-hire. Organisations can scale back expensive agency usage because their in-house team, augmented by AI, can handle volume efficiently. In short, Progreso’s AI recruiter directly addresses the cost and efficiency pain points: you spend far less recruiter time (and money) on each screening, and by closing vacancies faster you relieve the financial strain of unfilled shifts and overburdened staff.

 

Progreso AI’s “Lily” is transforming social care recruitment by tackling the root inefficiencies. For HR Directors, COOs, CFOs and CEOs in social care, this kind of recruitment automation offers a way to break the cycle of high turnover and slow hiring. Instead of pouring more budget into recruitment agencies or overtime due to vacancies, forward-thinking providers are investing in AI-driven hiring process optimisation. The outcomes are compelling: significantly improved recruitment efficiency, lower time-to-hire, and a better candidate experience – all of which ultimately means more care roles filled with the right people, at lower cost.

By adopting an AI recruiter for screening, social care organisations can finally overcome the chronic challenges in their hiring process. Lily ensures every candidate is contacted promptly, screened fairly, and moved forward quickly, without exhausting your human recruiters. This leads to a virtuous cycle: faster hiring of care staff, less money wasted on inefficient processes, and candidates who feel valued by the responsive, modern experience. In an industry where people are the most precious resource, Progreso AI is helping providers hire the talent they need swiftly, smartly, and cost-effectively – delivering tangible benefits to the bottom line and the quality of care.

 

Sources:

• Skills for Care – Adult Social Care Workforce Report, 2024

• The King’s Fund – Social Care 360 (Workforce)

• House of Commons Library – Adult Social Care Workforce briefing

• JobTrain (UK) – Talent Intelligence Report, 2023

• Tribepad – CIPD Talent Planning Survey 2022 (cost-per-hire)

• Office for National Statistics – Labour market data

• Robert Half UK – Jobseeker Sentiment Survey

• HR Magazine / Greenhouse – Candidate Ghosting Research, 2024

• HR Review / Tribepad – UK Recruitment Trends, 2024

• Skills for Care – Workforce Intelligence (vacancies & agency staff)

• Cronofy – Candidate Expectations Report 2024