Consultants were burning out on a rotating on-call phone.
A specialist care recruitment agency covering domiciliary and supported living placements was losing its most experienced consultants to burnout. The root cause was a rotating on-call rota that required one consultant to handle all overnight and weekend activity while maintaining a full desk during the day.
The on-call rota required one consultant to handle all overnight and weekend candidate queries, booking confirmations, cancellation cascades, and emergency shift-fill requests — often while managing a full caseload during business hours. Three experienced consultants resigned in 12 months, each citing the rota as the primary reason for leaving. Recruitment costs to replace them had already exceeded £45K, and irreplaceable institutional knowledge and client relationships were walking out the door with every departure.
Audentia set up a dedicated out-of-hours desk operating from 6pm to 8am weekdays and full coverage across weekends, branded entirely in the client’s name and integrated with their existing CRM and telephony systems. Our team handled inbound candidate calls, confirmed next-day bookings, managed cancellation cascades and replacement fills, and escalated genuine emergencies to the nominated on-call consultant only when strictly necessary. A structured daily handover report was delivered by 8am each morning, giving the day team a complete, actionable picture of all overnight activity.
The on-call rota was eliminated entirely within the first month. Consultant attrition dropped to zero over the following 12 months — no further resignations related to workload or burnout. Overnight booking confirmation rates improved from 74% to 96%, and emergency escalations to senior staff fell by 82%. The client estimated the annual cost of Audentia’s out-of-hours service at roughly one-third of the cost of replacing a single experienced consultant.
Consultant attrition in following 12 months
Overnight booking confirmation rate
Reduction in emergency escalations
vs replacing one experienced consultant
We got our weekends back and our clients got a better service. I wish we’d done it two years earlier.
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