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Welfare Benefits Advisor

Employer
Home Group
Location
London (Farringdon Road)
Salary
Up to £30,000_£20,000 - £29,999
Closing date
16 Aug 2021

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Job Details

Welfare Benefits Advisor

Covering South London, Kent and some of East Sussex

Permanent Full Time (37.5 hpw)

Salary circa £29,000 negotiable based on skills and experience, plus brilliant benefits!

Supporting our customers to better manage their finances. That’s when it hits home.

We have fabulous opportunity for you to join our awesome and growing team in this relatively new role to Home Group known internally as a Financial Inclusion Partner. Your role will be to support our customers and help them to reduce their rent arrears through better money management, and signposting and supporting the claims for available benefits.

You’ll join our team of Housing Managers and Community Housing Assistants across London and South East who manage our rented, leasehold and shared ownership housing stock. While the team deal with all areas of housing management including estate management, antisocial behaviour, new tenancy signups, mutual exchanges and income collection, your role will be different but equally important!

You will work with customers who are in debt and offer support to those who are struggling to manage their finances and risk homelessness due to their debt with us. Offering great customer service, you’ll advocate on our customers welfare rights. You’ll provide top notch advice and support to our customers to empower them towards financial independence. Here at Home Group we call this role Financial Inclusion partner, but we appreciate that it may be called something different elsewhere, key to us are that you understand the role and the skills you have.

About you
You have a great understanding of welfare benefits and rights and are up to date on recent reforms as well as knowledge on the DWP and local authority processes. You’ll be our ‘go to’ person on local and national charities and funding options available. You’re a natural problem solver, able to relate to people from all backgrounds and passionate about building our customers confidence in managing their finances.

You’re confident creating debt management and budgeting plans. You have experience of arrears monitoring and collection processes and are confident working in customer`s homes and engaging with vulnerable and hard to reach individuals. Working alongside our Housing Managers you’ll evidence that support is being offered to households with arrears. Ultimately, we need to see a reduction in debt but we want to make sure that our customers have the right support and information to do that. We’re especially keen to receive applications from you, if you have experience of using preventative and education-based methods to work with at risk households.

Quote
Speaking to a customer at a recent rent visits they said, “Thank you so much for helping me to work out my outgoings and organise a payment plan, I feel so much more in control”. 

About our team
You’ll join our wonderful Team who are super passionate about delivering on our Customer Promise to our customers in the region. To us were not just a team we’re a ‘work family’.  We don’t just love to support our customers, we’re there for each other too!

The team is managed by Louise who loves the great outdoors and when not walking, out running or riding her bike, loves spending time with her 2 house rabbits.  

Where you’ll work
The wider team looks after customers across the London and South East areas, your remit is smaller than this and your caseload will be to work with our customers in the South London (Croydon, Mitcham), Kent and part of East Sussex. While you will be able to organise your own diary, you could find yourself working in Croydon one day of the week and in Maidstone or Dover on another. 

As this is a community-based role, you need to be able to drive, as well as having access to a vehicle insured for business purposes. Don’t worry, we’ll pay you expenses to cover this use!

The great news is that you will have the flexibility of working either from home or our nearest local office. We’ll give you the technology and kit to make that easy. We don’t want you to spend all your time in the car though, so you will have control over your own diary to plan your day effectively.

Working hours
It’s the team’s unwritten rule that you attend the important appointments in life, be it your child’s school play, your partner’s graduation, or to get your new fridge delivered. Our focus is on getting the job done, not your working hours! We would expect your main hours to be worked Monday – Friday but occasional evening and weekend work will be needed sometimes so that you can meet up with our customers who are at work themselves.  

Here at Home Group we have invested heavily in our future and use current and up to date equipment. You’ll be issued with the latest kit, which could include a Surface Pro and mobile. So, it's really important to us that you are technologically savvy (or at the very least not a technophobe!)

It’s important to us that you have worked in a similar environment before and have experience of welfare benefits, income collection and rent arrears processes used within housing services. It would also be great if you have delivered 1:1 support and coaching to individuals with debt issues and have a good understanding of the options available to them. Don’t worry, we won’t drop you in the deep end, we’ll help to you understand how things work at Home Group!

It would be great if you had some qualifications in financial advice, however we appreciate that you might have the some great transferrable skills so we’re more interested in your experience than certificates!

When you join, you’ll need to have a valid Enhanced Check under the Disclosure and Barring Service. The great news is that we will pay for that to be done if you don’t have a transferrable one.

Want to know more?
If you’re not reading this advert on our career’s pages, press the APPLY NOW button to access lots of useful stuff! You can download the Financial Inclusion Partner Job Description, and find out more about Home Group. We’ve also got some short films that show you what it’s like to work here, and we know you’ll want to find out more about our award winning benefits and rewards package!

To apply
Don’t delay applying for this brilliant job, as we may close it early if we get lots of applications! Just upload your CV and if you have one, your covering letter (this will help us learn more about you!). If you need them, we’ve also got some great templates to help you.

You’re unique!
Home Group play a big part in tackling prejudice and discrimination, not just for our customers, but colleagues too! You can be yourself here, because we value everything that makes you unique. So, whatever your age, race, sexuality, disability, religion, or gender identity, we recognise and celebrate our differences. Together we make Home Group a great place to work!

#social #care #socialcare #welfarebenefits #debtadvice #KentJobs #WelfareBenefitJobs #EastSussexJobs #SocialHousingJobs

Company

There’s never been a more exciting time to join us, as we build and sell over 10,000 new homes across the UK.  From affordable housing to our brilliant private sale brand Persona, we’re shaking up the new build market.  You’ll have the opportunity to work on everything from affordable homes to luxury apartments and build the career you want with us. 

As one of the UK’s largest developers of new homes and providers of houses for affordable rent.  We also provide long term integrated health and social care housing.  We don’t just build houses, we build homes and develop vibrant communities where people want to live. 

What keeps us busy?

We’re building homes, independence and aspirations and according to our trophy cabinet we’re pretty good at it! 

We’re winners of the 2018 UK Housing Awards Development Programme of the Year, Silver Best House at the What House Awards 2018, and RESI Landlord of the Year 2016.  We’re constantly challenging the status quo, delivering unparalleled schemes and ground-breaking products.  We pride ourselves on building happier, healthy homes, putting space and people before profits.

Oh and did we mentioned that we rank No. 27 in the UK’s Best Large Places to work, and 17th in Stonewall Top 100 Employers 2019?    

We’re growing

As we’re building new homes, we’re growing our team too so there are lots of opportunities for you to join us across the UK.  So whether you’re acquiring land, designing places, delivering schemes, selling homes or regenerating neighbourhoods.  You’ll be working alongside brilliant people to unlock bold opportunities, exciting new partnerships and collaborative projects across the UK. 

Join us

You can find out more about us and our current vacancies on our website at www.homegroup.org.uk/careers or on our Facebook and Linkedin pages.    

High-flying career, work life balance, brilliant benefits and a cherry on top!  There are so many reasons you’ll love working at Home Group.  https://youtu.be/624xZO1nXqY

 

Company info
Website
Location
2 Gosforth Park Way
Gosforth Business Park
Newcastle upon Tyne
Tyne and Wear
NE12 8ET
GB

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