Residential Child Care Staff Selection

Here's vital information on making the right recruitment choices, getting the best staff, and avoiding potential abusers!

“More than a set of procedures, good staff selection practice is about a set of principles that embody particular attitudes to the task. If we achieve these basic principles, we will go a long way towards eliminating selection errors and the risk of abuse that follows such errors.”
—Author Meredith Kiraly

Residential Child Care Staff Selection: Choose With Care draws upon international research and the experience of practitioners to help you improve your ability to recruit the best staff. With a minimum of jargon, this book covers the range of selection methods and advocates a considered—but not cumbersome—approach that uses more than one method of assessing skills. It illustrates management techniques that reduce the likelihood of abuse and will show you how to avoid recruiting potentially abusive individuals.

Residential Child Care Staff Selection: Choose With Care provides insightful background information, examining the developmental needs of children; issues in the care of children away from home; abuse and pedophilia; and legal and ethical issues. Then the book discusses in more detail research findings which underpin key principles of good care and good staff selection, and best practice in a range of recruitment and selection practices. You'll also find a recruitment guide for all organizations that work with children and young people. The recruitment guide thoroughly examines the challenges and pitfalls of the recruitment process and will help you identify those who are most fit for this difficult yet extraordinarily rewarding career, and avoid recruiting those most likely to be abusive.

This valuable book also includes four helpful appendixes that provide:

• examples of situational and behavioral questions to use in interviews
• Equal Employment Opportunity guidelines for acceptable and unacceptable interview questions
• a profile of a skilled residential child care worker that you can use to judge whether candidates measure up
• sample staff selection forms—job descriptions, application form, a short-listing grid, job interview schedule, interview performance rating form, a reference check proforma, and a selection report