The advert is the vetting: how a job post decides who applies

Most families assume the platform’s checks decide who turns up at the door. They do not. The job post does most of the filtering, and it does it before anyone applies: a vague advert brings volume and mismatch, and one misused clinical word can quietly rule out the very carers who could have done the job well. Our team spends more of its time helping families reword a post than on any other part of finding a match.

Private Carers – The Definitive Guide (Updated for 2024)

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The advert is the filter, not the checks

When you post a job, carers near you see it and decide for themselves whether to apply. That decision takes about twenty seconds, and it is made entirely on your words.

PrimeCarers checks carers’ identity and right to work, checks their DBS documents, and carers complete our onboarding before they can apply for work.

PrimeCarers is an introductory platform and does not provide, manage, supervise or clinically assess care. Clients remain responsible for checking carer documentation, interviewing carers, checking suitability for their specific needs, and agreeing the scope of care directly with the carer.

So the checks tell you a carer is who they say they are. They do not tell you whether this person can manage the lifting, cook a meal someone will actually eat, sit quietly through an eight hour night, or work with a relative who did not want a carer at all. Your advert is the only thing that sorts for that, so it is worth an hour of your time rather than five minutes.

One clinical word can empty your shortlist

A man in his forties who has been on dialysis for years, and who uses a wheelchair, called us because his advert was not working. He had written that he was looking for a nurse. He did not need a nurse. He needed someone who understood how much dialysis takes out of a person, who could cook a proper evening meal, and who could give firm, sustained pressure massage to his back and legs to ease the nerve pain.

The word “nurse” did two things at once. It put off experienced carers, who read it and assumed they were not qualified. And it drew in people who were not ready for how physical the massage turned out to be.

“You look at me, and I look as though I’m well. But unless you know that I have this condition, you won’t know that actually I’m knackered.”

He also said it is difficult to get that sort of thing across on a website. He is right.

We took “nurse” out, wrote in plain terms what an evening actually involved, including that the massage was twenty minutes of real physical effort, and sent the post back out to carers who had already declined it. Several of them looked again.

If you are writing the advert about yourself rather than about a relative, the hardest part is usually admitting on the page how much help you need. We have written separately about asking for help when you are the one who needs it.

Words that cost people applicants

• Nurse, when you mean a carer. Unless you genuinely need a registered nurse, this word removes most of your shortlist.
• Complex, with nothing after it. Say what is complex: the hoist, the catheter bag, the broken nights, the behaviour that frightens people who have not seen it before.
• 24 hour care, when you mean a live-in carer who sleeps most nights. Those are very different jobs at very different prices.
• Personal care, when you mean prompting, supervision and company. Plenty of carers filter personal care out or in.
• Must be experienced, without saying experienced in what. Experience is not general.

Vague posts pull in the wrong people

Someone posting on behalf of a family rang us completely stuck. The person needing support is an autistic man in his thirties who lives largely independently. He washes and dresses himself, makes his own drinks and does not want anyone fussing. What he needs is somebody awake in the house at night, because he has walked out in the small hours before.

“He doesn’t need anyone to do anything. He doesn’t need caring, as such. It’s just for his safety.”

Her first post said, more or less, “carer needed for autistic adult, overnight”. What it attracted was applicants whose whole career had been frail elderly personal care. Good carers, wrong job. What the post needed to say was whether this was a waking night or a sleeping night, which is the single biggest fork in overnight care, and that the daytime hours would go to a different carer, because almost nobody can do both well for long.

The same principle came up with two siblings arranging companionship for their brother, a man in his sixties recently home after a long hospital stay for his mental health. They spent twenty minutes on the phone with us before posting anything, and the wording is what they kept coming back to. As one of them put it:

“You’re not going to get somebody who’s mainly worked with Alzheimer’s and old-age people working with a brain injury, because they’ve never done that.”

He also described his brother exactly: if he thinks someone is watching him or talking down to him, life gets difficult, but if he trusts them, that person can make an enormous positive difference. Two sentences like that in a job post will do more sorting than any filter we could build.

Two rewrites, before and after

The night post

Before: “Carer needed for autistic adult. Overnight. Must be experienced and DBS checked.”

After: “Waking night support, 10pm to 7am, four nights a week, for a man in his thirties who is autistic and lives independently. He does not need personal care. He makes his own drinks and puts himself to bed. You would be awake and downstairs, keeping an eye that he does not leave the house at night, and available if he wants to talk. Calm, low key company suits him far better than someone chatty. Daytime support is arranged separately with a different carer.”

The companionship post

Before: “Companionship required for elderly lady.”

After: “Two mornings a week, three hours each, for a woman in her nineties who is sharp, funny and mostly independent. A walk if the weather allows, a coffee out, a simple lunch and some conversation. No personal care. This is cover while her regular carer is away, so we would like the same person each week. Because the visits are short, we can only realistically consider carers who live within about fifteen minutes.”

Her son told our team it was not major care, just companionship, and then added that he knew how hard the job is anyway. Both things are true. Light work is still surprisingly hard to staff, because short visits only pay if the travel is short, which is why nobody will drive twelve miles for an hour’s work. If you are booking companionship care, say where you are within a few minutes’ radius and say it early.

What to put in, and what to leave out

Put in:

• The real hours. A live-in carer told us she applied for a role, waited over a month, and only then discovered the post had described a gentle placement when the reality was twelve hour days and disturbed nights. Undersold hours do not save you money. They cost you the carer, usually in week three.
• What the person can still do. Carers price and choose on the gap between independence and need, not on a diagnosis.
• The physical demands. Stairs, hoisting, transfers, weight, how many times a night.
• The household. Pets, other family in and out, parking, whether there is a room and a door that closes.
• The rate, and how you got to it. In 2026, self-employed private carers typically charge £18 to £25 an hour, and live-in carers booked through the platform roughly £130 to £190 a day. Agencies commonly charge £25 to £35 an hour for visits and from around £239 a day for live-in, so going private is usually cheaper, though it is not a guaranteed saving. If the nights are broken, say so and pay nearer the top of the range. You can read more on what a private carer costs per hour.
• The personality that works. Quiet, brisk, chatty, unbothered by bluntness. This is not fluff. It is the thing that decides whether the placement lasts.

Leave out: the full address, the door code, the full name, and the medical detail a carer does not need in order to decide whether to apply. One daughter had posted a job for her father, who lives alone, then rang close to cancelling it because she had frightened herself imagining strangers tracing him.

“I get a bit nervous about putting things out there about my dad. He is living on his own.”

Only a partial postcode is shown publicly, which was enough to settle it, and the job went out to local carers that afternoon. Being specific about the work is not the same as being identifiable. You can be very precise about the job and still give away almost nothing about the person.

When nobody applies

Sometimes a post is fine and the silence is about something else. One woman managing an urgent search rang us after days of nothing: eight carers invited, not one reply.

“I’m pulling my hair out. It’s driving me nuts. We’re a little desperate.”

Before you rewrite anything, check the mechanics. In one urgent case, after a father came home from surgery in the same week his wife died, no invitations had gone out at all because the phone number on the account was wrong. Once that was fixed, two nearby carers were found within the day.

If the mechanics are sound and it is still quiet, the usual culprits are the rate, the radius, the hours, or a post that reads as harder than the job is. Widen the area, offer a travel contribution, split a job that needs two carers into two posts, and say plainly which parts of the role are light. Then ask us to re-send it: carers who declined a vague post often look twice at a clear one.

What to do next

1. Rewrite your post as a day, not as a diagnosis. Start at the time the carer arrives and describe what happens, hour by hour, until they leave.
2. Delete every word you cannot explain. If “complex”, “nurse” or “experienced” survives, put the explanation next to it.
3. Name the hours and the rate honestly, including the nights, then check the number against current private carer rates.
4. Add three sentences about the person: what they like, what irritates them, and what a good day looks like.
5. Read the applications for evidence, not for keywords, and ask about the specific task that worries you most when you interview carers.

Related reading

• The certificate says yes. Can they actually do it?
• Meeting a carer: what a good trial looks like, and what a bad one costs
• Why nobody will drive twelve miles: the real geography of the carer shortage
• How to check a private carer: your step by step guide
• What is overnight care? Sleeping nights and waking nights