Housing Solutions Officer

Job description

**Housing Solutions Officer - Refugee and Migration**

A unique and exciting opportunity has arisen to join a well established team within our Housing service. The role will be at the forefront of making sure Sheffield is a welcoming city for all our residents and the Council is part of welcoming organisation.

We have one full time role (37hrs) Fixed Term for 12 Months.

We are excited to create this new role to ensure that all our communities are given the support they need to access good quality, suitable and sustainable housing, allowing them to settle and thrive within the city.

In 2004, Sheffield was the first UK city to join the Gateway Protection Programme, offering a legal route for a quota of UNHCR-identified refugees to be resettled in the UK and became the City of Sanctuary.

As a Housing Officer, you will bring to the role demonstrable experience of providing homelessness prevention advice and housing assessments for refugees and migrants, to ensure the Council supports vulnerable people. You will understand and respond to the specific needs of migrants, such as language barriers, lack of process knowledge and experience of trauma.

We are looking for enthusiastic and motivated individuals to join us on the transformation journey we are on, to deliver a unique housing advice offer for our residents; enabling people to live in safe cohesive communities; understand their rights and responsibilities; benefit from well-functioning services and have the opportunity to contribute their voice to shaping and delivering such services.

This job is fixed term for 12 months to help tackle the recent and ongoing increase in refugee and migrant homelessness.

Working within the limits of the accommodation resources available, it is not always possible to meet the accommodation aspirations of our customers; it is crucial to balance of empathy and understanding with managing customer expectations.

You would be working in a team with skilled and experienced officers, seniors and managers who would be on hand to support you. Depending on your skills and experience, and where we need to focus our staff resources, there are a variety of roles including telephone advice / assessments and same-day homeless prevention work, longer term homeless prevention casework, and casework to relieve homelessness.

**Who we are looking for**

To be successful, you must be able to demonstrate a clear customer focus, with an ability to prioritise and organise your work. We need excellent communicators who work well on their own initiative but are also flexible team players. It is important to be resilient and hardworking, with a keenness to learn.

We are investing in our workforce and are promoting opportunities to our under-represented groups. We value equality, diversity and inclusion and are focused on increasing the diversity of our workforce, particularly the number of Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic, Disabled and LGBTQ+ people, so that our teams reflect the communities in the city we serve. We are also supporting staff with unpaid caring responsibilities to work flexibly.

Under the Disability Confident Scheme, disabled applicants, who meet the essential criteria of this job, are guaranteed an interview.

Full-time employees work 37 hours for 52 weeks of the year and we offer a generous holiday entitlement. We are open to discussions about a wide range of flexible working opportunities which benefit you and the Council, including reduced hour contracts, working part time or as a job share.

If you are appointed to this role, your starting salary will be at the bottom of the grade. If you provide payslip evidence that your basic pay is greater than the bottom of the grade, we will consider starting you at the point of minimum advantage within the grade.

Equality of pay is extremely important to us. All roles at Sheffield City Council are going through an evaluation process which may result in changes to some pay arrangements from 2026. Find out more on our Sheff news page.

**Job details**:
Job reference

REQ003401

Date posted

02/06/2025

Application closing date

22/06/2025

Location

Sheffield

Salary

Grade 5 £29,093 to £31,586

Package

Fixed Term - 12 Months

Contractual hours

37

Basis

Blank

Job category/type

Housing