CareHires Raises £1.7M to Fix Recruitment for the UK's Care Sector

CareHires, a UK recruitment technology company, has raised £1.7 million from West Hill Capital and other investors to develop its specialist platform for connecting care workers with care homes, domiciliary care providers, and other social care organisations. The company is building the hiring infrastructure that the care sector specifically needs — combining job matching, compliance verification, and credential management in a platform designed for the unique hiring workflows and regulatory requirements of care work — to help providers fill vacancies faster and at lower cost than conventional general-purpose recruitment approaches allow.

The UK social care sector faces a staffing crisis that has worsened significantly over recent years. Care homes, home care agencies, and supported living providers collectively have hundreds of thousands of vacancies at any given time, driven by a combination of challenging working conditions, historically low pay, the demanding emotional and physical nature of the work, and competition for entry-level workers from higher-paying sectors in the post-pandemic labour market. For providers, unfilled vacancies mean either rationing care — turning away residents or reducing service levels — or relying on expensive agency staff whose day rates can significantly exceed the cost of directly employed workers.

General-purpose job boards and recruitment agencies do not serve this market well. The specific compliance requirements of care work — DBS checks, professional registrations, moving and handling training, medication administration qualifications — add a verification layer that general hiring platforms are not built to handle. CareHires addresses this by integrating compliance verification directly into the hiring workflow: candidates can upload and have verified their DBS certificates, training records, and professional qualifications, and providers can instantly see the compliance status of any candidate they are considering rather than having to manage this separately. This reduces the administrative burden on providers, accelerates the time from application to start, and gives candidates a portable, verified record of their credentials that follows them across employers.

The funding will be used to develop the platform, grow the candidate and employer networks, and build the compliance and credential management features that differentiate the product from general recruitment tools.

Sources

• CareHires — company website