Aged care continues to face a workforce challenge – Recruiting expert Anthony Nguyen suggests calculated risk may pave the path to bring the best candidates to the sector

Anthony Nguyen did not set out to be in recruiting, nor did he envision working and collaborating with some of Australia’s leaders in aged care. Like many who have found their spot in the sector, it’s been by accident but there’s no other place they’d rather be. His story is of the outsider being brought in because it became personal. The excellence and humanity that underpins the eye-brow raising work ethic of so many of aged care’s professionals became a reality to him and supercharged his desire to innovate and push progress. With boomers ageing into aged care in record numbers, the time to recruit the best into aged care is now. Nguyen suggests that providers and leadership will have to step out of the safety of the ‘ways things are done’, into opportunities of the new, to meet the record numbers of staff needing to be attracted to the sector. His story also shows that if aged care flexes its heart and brains through storytelling, skies the limit to bringing in the best that never would have thought aged care.

Starting out

Experts are forged not ready-made, and Nguyen had to go through his own refining process. Starting out recruiting in mining, engineering, oil and gas, he discovered it wasn’t quite his cup of tea. He found connection difficult to find, and building rapport a challenge. Recruiting in the space wasn’t only an existential challenge but a physical one too. Working through a chronic pain issue as well, he would come home each day, lie on the floor and try to relieve the pressure.

He knew he needed to move on, and in finding a new role he was asked if he would recruit for physios. And though he didn’t know it, he was off to the races. His first thought was, “bloody fantastic, I’m looking for a physio. I need them to fix my back!”

His world completely changed. He was talking to physios, completely tuned into what they were saying because he was picking their brains on what he should be doing, essentially there was skin in the game.

Allied health brought it

Nguyen was all in when recruiting for physios. He even found his way on to a PHD study run by a student underneath one of Australia’s leading professors in back pain at Curtin university. Within a month his back pain was gone. It was, simply put, life changing. He had suffered through the pain for at least seven years, had thought that was his lot. Tying shoelaces hurt, sneezing had hurt, and here he was able to move freely again.

“I fell in love with the healthcare sector because this stuff matters.”

“These health and aged care professionals, they’re doing things that you hear in stories, but until you’ve lived it and feel the appreciation for what your life is like now, well, you can see the connection there.”

Since 2014, Nguyen has been recruiting in the health and aged care space. And he’s never looked back.

Deeper in – more to learn

After his come to physio moment, Nguyen had the opportunity to recruit in nursing. Now with some years under his belt came his first point of wisdom, knowing he didn’t know everything.

He thought, “I’ll figure this out, I’ll do some research but there’s just so many different areas of nursing, from mental health nursing to child nursing, rural and remote, and the different wards in the hospital, I had to be honest, I couldn’t get my head around it.”

Herein Nguyen shares a kernel of drawing in the best, honesty. Provider leadership, when seeking to draw in the great front-line staff, whether in nursing roles or care workers, instead of a rigid front of ‘this is how things are done around here’, an openness to hear from the heart and skills of recruits, in flexibility, can facilitate a trust to step out of former paths to take a chance in aged care.

Nguyen stepped into recruiting for aged care, calling his aged care facility manager contacts asking, “Do you need a nurse?” He was staggered at the response, “’give us everyone you’ve got.’”

“I didn’t realise what a shortage there was.”

Overcoming stigma

Working with providers who needed staff came easily, “getting the candidate was a whole different story, many were not interested in aged care, and I came to learn pretty quickly that there’s a huge stigma around aged care.”

“It wasn’t all negative, sometimes what I heard was that it was just a slow boring industry, on the negative though, it was understaffed, underfunded and under-resourced.”

What challenged Nguyen to understand the wider systemic reform that is still needed was hearing that some nurses felt, “you’d be risking your registration if you were working in an aged care facility because you’d be asked to be in positions that you’re not capable of humanly managing. That was hard to hear from the candidate’s side.”

High performing providers have started to earnestly facilitate resources to tackle this but it takes the lift from the sector as a whole to bring change to the fore. Emphasis, and resources on the line for culture, support and training of front-line staff, has never been more critical in the recruitment of new staff.

The stories of best-friendships, between colleagues as well as the cherished relationships between front-line staff and residents also has a part to play in contributing to the understanding of the reality of aged care for many. There are positive experiences, there are those who have truly found their professional and purpose home in aged care. Nguyen had seen these stories, had placed candidates in positions where they realised their stories.

While honouring the need to safeguard front-line staff burnout, and allotting resources (both government funding reform and provider policy play a part), the sector has bountiful instances of professional fulfilment that Nguyen wanted to highlight when talking to candidates who were unsure of aged care.

Sincere passion needs a platform

“There’s got to be positives, I was thinking about how to give these stories a platform, I’d be sitting in front of my clients, we’d be having coffee, having a chat and they’d be so animated and passionate about their work in aged care.”

“They were so excited talking about aged care and what it’s done for them professionally and personally.”

Sitting in these instances, Nguyen was struck by the energy rolling off provider leadership, executives, clinical heads, nurses, aged care workers, managers, there were so many that were energised and buzzing about their work in aged care. They didn’t have rose-tinted glasses, they had a resolve to passionately leverage their skills to bring about change in what they knew to be one of the most rewarding professions and sectors on earth.

“I’d be watching the way they talk and I thought, if I could just get a camera to record what you were just saying in joyful realism, the way you said it, I’m sure we could change some minds.”

It was as simple as that, a call to highlight the truthful stories behind the passionate hearts and minds in aged care, to be a truthful ingredient for candidates outside the industry to assess when making their professional recipes.

Aged care can be “pretty cool”

And quite by accident, Nguyen found himself in the frontiers of media exploration from recruiting, organically creating and collaborating with aged care leaders and advocates in a podcast that has shone a light on the hard-working and heartfelt stories of those in aged care.

“So that’s how the idea for the podcast came up, it was me wanting truthful marketing footage to send to some nurses that had been unsure about aged care, to show, hey, this can be pretty cool, and these are the reasons why this nurse or executive has stayed in aged care.”

“I thought maybe we’ll change some minds here. That’s where the podcast came from.”

Nguyen reflects back, “I did my first episode in mid-2023, and by the end of 2024, we had 80 episodes of people who had deep and enduring reasons to be in aged care, it was a simple teams recording, I don’t even know if you’d call it a podcast but it struck a chord with people because it was people in aged care telling their stories.”

Providers have a place to step into the stories in their midst. Opening up media platforms, or even in-house platforms for staff to tell their stories is a moral and strategic opportunity. For all roles, from executives and the CEO, to clinical staff and volunteers, to create a space where real stories are told from the heart of aged care about why people stay, why people work hard, why there is substance and reward in working in aged care, even though there are difficult days.

Storytelling is critical

Nguyen was selected to speak at the 2024 National ACCPA Conference on the Power of Storytelling to Address Workforce Issues in Aged Care. He recalls the energy in the room was incredible, “so many people in the room were supporting us as we spoke.”

Through his speech at ACCPA, and ever since, Nguyen has been on a mission. The sheer numbers needed to be recruited to meet the incoming needs of aged care are prolific but not insurmountable.

Nguyen has and continues to advocate for the embracing of the power of storytelling to directly address workforce issues, whether in retention, recruitment and upskilling. Anthropologists remind us, humans are herd animals, there is a deep need to understand and make sense of truth in relation to how others have experienced life. Centering storytelling in branding and recruitment must be a pivot focus for providers as they strategise from the next years and decades ahead.

“Providers have to be willing to do things differently, in their recruitment and marketing campaigns.”

Charting a new course is never without risk, “I will continue to implore providers to take a little bit of a risk with the adverts they post when trying to recruit, making quality placements can be done through doing things a little differently in the adverts.”

Nguyen encourages providers to put their flavour into their recruiting, branding and messaging. Every provider has a heart and personality, contributed and developed by those that call it home, and those that seek to bring the best care because it matters. These experiences and stories are the ingredients that should be in the wording of recruitment adverts.

“You will get candidates much easier if you just put your own voice in there.”

Bring sexy back to aged care

When the bar is lifted for the sector at large, this is a good thing for everyone. For front-line staff finding their best fit, for providers having less turnover, for residents clicking with great staff and receiving person-centred care. Recruiting well can be the lynch-pin of beneficial and sustained changed across the sector.

After talking at ACCPA and encouraging all providers to “change adverts a little bit, I thought, I’ll need to also kick it up a notch, that’s when I thought, okay, I’ll be a bit risky too.”

“I wrote the adverts about bringing sexy back to aged care, and that really resonated with the industry because the dominant media sentiment is that aged care is not sexy, and I thought, okay, let’s bring sexy back to aged care.”

Nguyen is open and good-natured about his pushing the envelope, “I am towing the line between what’s acceptable, for sure I’m being cheeky but in good faith I want to poke fun at somethings that may need to be looked at, so that we can raise awareness about it and just think about it a little bit.”

For the thousands who are pouring themselves into aged care work, who have meaningful and fulfilling careers caring for human-beings, in the difficult and the hilarious, in the confusing and joyous, Nguyen is about advocating for their stories to contribute to the picture of what aged care is seen to be.

Providers – storytellers already exist in-house

“To draw people into the aged care sector we need to share stories, and not just stories of the overarching organisation and what it’s trying to do.”

Nguyen assesses, “I think every organisation would have at least five people who would be amazing storytellers, or would have amazing stories to tell. They just need a platform.”

“There’s still a lot of untapped stories out there.”

Calculated risk and doing things a bit differently may go a long way to bringing in the best to support a sector that needs the cavalry to arrive, for all involved. Centering the stories at the heart of a facility, from the residents that call it home, from the staff that keep the wheels turning, this is the flavour that should be poured into recruitment adverts.

Into landing pages of websites, into podcasts and into social media channels can be the stories of the incredible staff that know that aged care is their spot and they’d be nowhere else.