The UK prison service is grappling with persistent recruitment and retention issues that undermine workforce stability and operational efficiency. Attrition rates reached 13.4% as of June 2023, highlighting the urgent need for innovative hiring practices.
The expectation gap challenge
The Efficiency Spotlight Report from the Criminal Justice Joint Inspection highlights critical challenges in the prison service, including the high attrition rate of 13.4% as of June 2023. The report cites a significant factor contributing to the elevated attrition rate is the misalignment between candidates’ expectations and the realities of prison work.
Mitie’s modern approach: Realistic Job Assessments (RJAs)
To tackle the candidate expectation gap and enhance hiring accuracy, Mitie—one of the strategic outsourcing partners for the prison service- is revamping the recruitment process for prison workers.
Part of this operation includes ThriveMap’s Realistic Job Assessments (RJAs) in its new hiring process. RJAs aim to bridge the gap between candidate expectations and job realities by:
- Providing role clarity: Candidates experience “a day in the life” scenarios to understand the demands of prison work.
- Enhancing retention: Better-prepared candidates are more likely to stay, reducing costly attrition.
- Skills-based hiring: RJAs focus on role-specific competencies and skills potential, ensuring candidates are equipped for the unique challenges of prison environments.
Reducing attrition with Realistic Job Assessments
ThriveMap’s RJAs are bespoke to the role and company. By using insights from current employees and subject matter experts, ThriveMap creates immersive assessments that simulate real job scenarios. This process helps candidates self-assess their fit while enabling recruiters to identify the best-suited individuals.
How does ThriveMap create these bespoke assessments?
The process involves a series of steps designed to ensure accuracy, relevance, and effectiveness:
- Job analysis: What does the role involve?
- ICP workshop: Do we have hiring criteria alignment?
- Building an ideal candidate profile: Who are we looking for?
- Realistic Job Assessment: Who are the best fit candidates?
- Data optimisation: How do we optimise this assessment to refine our selected candidates?
Impact on retention
In previous projects, RJAs have successfully reduced attrition by 10% to 40%, a critical improvement in environments like prisons, where stability is essential for both operational efficiency and prisoner rehabilitation efforts.
Looking forward
Innovative approaches like ThriveMap’s RJAs offer a path forward by ensuring prison workers are better prepared, more committed, and aligned with the realities of the role.
By addressing early attrition, organisations like Mitie are helping to build a more stable and effective workforce, ultimately improving outcomes for staff, prisoners, and the broader community.
For more on recruitment and retention in the UK prison service, you can view the full report here.
Ready to see the difference? Book a Demo of ThriveMap’s Realistic Job Assessments
Book a demo today to discover how ThriveMap’s Realistic Job Assessments can help fix your attrition problem by bridging the candidate expectation gap, improving hiring accuracy and automating high volume processes.
