To have meaningful impact, we need community voices

There is more demand than ever for community members and people with lived experience to be involved in health research, policy, and service design and improvement.

As this practice continues to grow, we have the opportunity to reflect on how recruitment is approached, to ensure it feels genuinely welcoming, respectful, and aligned with the spirit of meaningful collaboration.

We all know that first impressions count

At Health Voices Victoria, we are continuously learning and evolving how we recruit and support people to engage in efforts to improve health and wellbeing.

Last year, we conducted a survey on what works and what doesn’t when it comes to recruiting consumers. You can read about the findings here.

Of course, recruitment is just one step in an engagement process, but it’s one we get asked about a lot – we saw this an opportunity to help others feel more confident or prepared to take on this activity.

So, we created a recruitment guide

Over the past 12 months we have been developing this guide. It takes our practice wisdom, our learned and lived experiences, and insights gathered from our wider community, and channels them into one practical resource.

Download resource

We share our recommendations across four key phases of the recruitment process.

  1. Prepare and plan
  2. Design your process
  3. Communicate and promote
  4. Complete and close the loop

Throughout the guide, we highlight examples from our own recruitment experiences to spark ideas and demonstrate practical approaches that you can learn from or adapt.

At the end of this guide, you will also find some useful tools and templates:

  • A recruitment checklist
  • An expression of interest form template
  • A position description template

We are here to help

Health Voices Victoria provides several services to enable community members and people with lived experience the opportunity to connect with people working to improve health and wellbeing.

1

Promote through our newsletter

Each month we share a newsletter, The Chorus, with our subscriber community. We can promote opportunities on your behalf, at no cost. To be eligible for this service we ask that you:

This is one way we can help to ensure that the opportunities that we promote meet minimum practice standards, while still being able to provide this service at no cost to organisations.

2

Receive tailored support to help you connect to the people you need to reach

We provide end-to-end recruitment support as part of our paid services. This involves a four-step process:

  1. Understanding your needs
  2. Developing recruitment materials
  3. Promoting the opportunity through various channels in our extended network
  4. Screening and selecting people that best align to the project and communicating outcomes

If you would like our support on an upcoming initiative or project, we would love to hear from you.

You can contact us at healthvoicesvic@deakin.edu.au or book in for a call with our Manager of Innovation & Service Development, Jo Szczepanska.