Inside Anglicare's Move to a Skills-Based Hiring Model

In this article:

• Reigniting the Anglicare Workforce
• Moving from Burnout to Better Care
• Supporting the Heart of our Communities

While it's widely reported that Australia is facing a dire shortage of care workers (more than 110,000 by 2030 in aged care alone), what's not often mentioned is the ripple effect this has on the entire community.

After all, frontline workers not only build trusted relationships with their clients, but also the people they interact with each day. Families, friends, employers – they are all impacted when there is no continuity of care.

As a foster carer, I've seen this first hand. Restructures to government departments, heavy case loads and excessive administration means that every time I get a call introducing me to a new case worker, I feel like I'm going back to square one.

That feeling of starting over is the hidden cost of talent attrition – yet one that is rarely counted. We often focus on the hard costs of hiring strategies or the agency cost multiplier, but forget the cascading impact beyond our organisation’s walls.

Reigniting the Anglicare Workforce

One organisation that is committed to giving Australian care workers the support they need to remain at the heart of the communities they serve, is Anglicare Sydney.

In a recent webinar, Yvette McDonald, Chief People and Customer Officer at Anglicare, shared the five skills-based hiring strategies her organisation uses to build a sustainable and resilient workforce in complex, high-stakes care settings.

1. Bridge the Gap Between People and Technology 

Too often, digital transformation is treated as a siloed IT project 'inflicted' on the business. Yvette argues that for workforce change to succeed, it requires a deep partnership between the Chief People Officer and the Chief Information Officer.

“Starting strong by having a really close partnership with the IT team will make an enormous difference – not only for the implementation, but also ongoing,” Yvette says. "Technology should serve as a shared platform for deploying capability at scale."

At Anglicare, the shift succeeded because it was business-led. The goal wasn't just to go digital, it was to use technology to alleviate the specific pain points that were driving staff toward burnout.

2. Eliminate 'Administrative Tax' on Managers

In care environments, time is precious. If leaders are buried in paperwork, they don’t have time to look after their teams.

At Anglicare, a major focus of its workforce transformation was stripping out manual, paper-based processes that added little value to client outcomes.

“No one comes to work to fill out HR forms,” Yvette says. “We want our leaders to be able to coach staff and not be pushing around bits of paper.”

When Anglicare removed unnecessary handoffs and simplified core people processes, managers became free to focus on what actually matters: presence, coaching and emotional support.

This shift hasn’t just improved efficiency – it’s fundamentally changed how leaders experience their roles.

Managers used to be frustrated when salary reviews or contract changes took weeks. Now these tasks are completed in seconds.

The team has also eliminated 27 paper forms as a result of reimagining their HR processes. “It’s the things we’ve done internally that have made the biggest difference,” Yvette explains.

3. Adopt a Skills-Based Hiring Ecosystem

The traditional model of rigid role definitions is becoming obsolete in the face of global nursing and care shortages.

"In the future, we will need to move away from role-based planning, to skills-based hiring," Yvette explains.

"By focusing on what people can do and where they are strongest, we will be able to deploy capability more flexibly. For example, skills-based rostering will ensure a home has specific competencies (like wound management) present on every shift, regardless of specific job titles.

“At the moment our industry thinks about a role being present at every shift, such as 24/7 nursing," Yvette says. "But it is not an efficient allocation of skills in an ever tightening labour market.”

A skills-based hiring system can help create internal resilience and career mobility, without necessarily increasing the size of the team.

4. Democratise Data to Empower Accountability

Historically, siloes and legacy systems have made it hard to gain accurate, enterprise-wide people data. At Anglicare, making data visible – and usable – for frontline leaders was a turning point.

“Previously, anything people-related was a black box,” Yvette says. “Now, our managers have a lot of visibility over their teams – turnover, performance, engagement, and much more information than what they had previously.”

This transparency shifted accountability back to the frontline. When managers see trends early, they can take responsibility for leading their teams rather than escalating every friction point to HR.

"We've given them the tools to be able to do [their job]... it's really improved the capability of our leaders to be able to step up and effectively manage their team," says Yvette.

When managers have real-time data on turnover, performance, engagement and compensation, they can have richer, more transparent conversations with their teams.

5. Use human-AI collaboration to improve care

Rather than treating AI agents in healthcare as an experiment on the fringes, Anglicare is approaching it as a way to fundamentally rebalance work – away from administration and toward human connection.

In Yvette’s view, “AI will actually make work more human, because it will mean the robots can do all the robot work and the humans can do the human work.”

By automating routine tasks and ingesting complex taxonomies, AI reduces the cognitive load that leads to burnout.

This frees up staff time to spend with clients – to hold a hand when someone is scared or to listen to a resident's story without looking at a stopwatch. The question at Anglicare is now: "Who is best to do this task – a human or a system?"

Moving from Burnout to Better Care

By adopting these strategies, Anglicare has been able to halve turnover, cut hiring time by 75% and double referral rates from inside the business. “We now have people wanting to grow their career with us,” says Yvette.

Anglicare’s workforce is not only more stable, but people are also more hopeful about the future. “Today we’re optimistic about what’s possible, because we using much more powerful tools,” Yvette says.

This sentiment is reflected in Anglicare’s recently launched employee promise: “Know you can. Believe we will.” And this promise is just the beginning.

As Yvette notes, transformation is never finished. “What we’ve put in place is a platform for us to do more change; to create even simpler processes for our managers and people.”

This is particularly critical as Anglicare continues to expand – welcoming the Infinite Care team to the Anglicare family – while maintaining a high standard of care for the clients and communities they serve.

Supporting the Heart of our Communities

Anglicare's story demonstrates that Australia’s aged care talent shortage is not just a labour-market problem. It’s a systems and cultural opportunity.

When an employee feels valued and supported by their systems, they stay. When they stay, they build relationships. And in the care sector, those relationships are the only metric that truly matters.

We often talk about employee retention as a 'drop in the ocean', but the reality is that it creates a ripple effect that cascades through families and communities.

To truly address the care worker shortage, we need to build systems, skills and cultures that allow them to do their best work — consistently, sustainably and hopefully.

Learn how industry leaders are moving beyond reactive hiring and burnout cycles to achieve proactive, people-centered workforce transformation with our comprehensive eBook: A Workforce Playbook For The Care And Support Sector.