Hiring a domiciliary care worker
Ninety-five applications for rounds that start at seven in the morning across a scattered patch. Most of the screening on this role is not judgment at all — it is a map and a driving licence.
The hardest filter on this role is not on the CV. It is on a map. Domiciliary care runs on rounds: a sequence of visits with travel between them, often starting before dawn. That makes two ordinary-sounding facts absolutely decisive — whether someone drives and has a car, and where they live relative to the patch — and neither is a judgment you can make from experience or values. A superb carer who lives forty minutes from the round is not a candidate for the 7am call, however good they are. Layered on top is the thing that separates this from care-home work entirely: these visits are lone working. Nobody is down the corridor. The person who copes is not the same as the person who copes well on a staffed floor, and the CV describes both as care experience.
Rounds, radius, and working alone
Selene goes after the practical shape of the round first, because on this role geography decides more applications than any scored criterion will.
The patch, the vehicle, and the call times
Three facts determine whether an applicant is viable at all here: whether they drive, whether they are within reach of the patch, and whether they can do the early and late calls that rounds are built around. All three are yes-or-no, and all three are usually discovered far too late.
One sentence changes the guide
The second half is the part managers usually forget to ask for and then miss most. A carer who stays ten minutes and says nothing has been kind. A carer who stays ten minutes and rings the office has changed what the service knows about that client — and in a job where nobody else visits, that call is the only monitoring there is.
Exceptional, not just good —
“The one who stays the extra ten minutes because something isn’t right, and then rings the office to say so.”
→ Noticing-and-reporting became a must-have; lone-working experience outranked general care experience.
What the guide ends up measuring
Seven criteria, four of which are facts. That ratio is unusual and it is honest: on a round-based role, viability genuinely is most of the decision, and pretending otherwise just means discovering it later.
Four questions, and they settle most of the pile
Licence, vehicle, right to work, vetting and call times are all facts. On this role they are not a convenience — they are the majority of the decision, and asking them on the application page means an applicant who cannot reach the patch at 7am finds out on day one rather than after two interviews. It also means none of that is billed as screening.
Scored on the doorstep judgment
Selene never receives the candidate’s name or the raw CV. She scores a blind, structured profile, with any stated age, sex, nationality and religion stripped out before scoring runs.
What she reads for is what someone did when they were the only person in the room, which is the whole job here.
How the blind scoring works →What stays with you
Selene's half
- Turning the licence, vehicle and call-time rules into application-page questions on day one
- Reading everyone who clears them against the same guide, blind, with the evidence attached
- A ranked shortlist of people who can actually reach the round
- A decision record that still explains itself months later, to whoever asks
Yours
- Advertising the role — Selene doesn’t post to job boards or sourcing sites
- Licence, insurance and vetting checks before anyone visits a client; she records what candidates state, she doesn’t verify it
- The interview and the values conversation, with her brief in hand
- Every hiring decision, and any override — stored with your reason
Nearby roles
Describe the patch
Rural or urban, driving or walking rounds, early calls or all-day — the gates change with every one of those.