Befriending Coordinator

Age UK's Telephone Friendship Service is recruiting for Befriending Coordinators to join our growing team

Loneliness is a major issue that is now widely recognised in society today, particularly amongst older people. By scheduling weekly calls from our trained volunteers, Age UK's National Telephone Friendship Service provides older people with a chance to make a new friend from the comfort of their home.

As a Befriending Coordinator, you will play a vital role in coordinating and supporting the thousands of matches between our members and volunteers across the UK. Whether you are answering emails and calls, ensuring safeguarding measures are upheld or supporting members and volunteers through the onboarding processes, you will be helping to ensure this much needed service reaches those who need it most, in a safe and efficient manner.

Utilising your excellent customer service skills, you will be the first port of call to support our volunteers and older members - so you'll need to be comfortable spending a lot of time on the phone and communicating by email. You'll also need to be passionate about supporting older people and have a good understanding of older people's needs.

This role can either be based at our office in Blackpool, or in Ashburton Devon. We offer a hybrid model of home and office based-working, so you will need to be within a reasonable distance of either the Blackpool or Ashburton office and be willing to travel there regularly. As a guide, the team currently work from the office once or twice a week but please be aware this could increase.

You will work a 35-hour working week, 5 days out of 7 with start and end times between 8am and 6pm. It will include weekend and bank holiday shifts, which will be arranged on a rota basis.

We are looking to recruit highly motivated individuals to join our friendly and supportive Friendship team - if this sounds like you, please apply for immediate consideration.

Please ensure that you submit a cover letter with your application. This role is termed Friendship or Assessment Coordinator internally at Age UK.

Must haves:

* Excellent communication skills
* Confident and friendly telephone manner
* A passion for supporting older people
* The ability to work flexibly
* Excellent IT skills including Microsoft Office
* Ability to manage a busy workload
* A commitment to promoting equality and diversity
* Being a positive team player.

Great to haves:
* An understanding of older people's issues
* Experience supporting volunteers
* Knowledge of safeguarding issues
* Experience of working with older people over the phone
* An understanding of mental health issues.

What we offer in return

• Competitive salary, 26 days annual leave + bank holidays + annual leave purchase scheme
• Excellent pension scheme, life assurance, health cashback plan and EAP
• Car Benefit Scheme, Cycle to Work Scheme and Season Ticket Loan
• Techscheme - buy any tech from Apple or Currys, up to £1000, and spread the cost over 12 months, interest free
• Blue Light Card Scheme
• You Did It Awards - recognition awards from £100-250.

Additional Information

This role description is not intended to be exhaustive in every respect, but rather to clearly define the fundamental purpose, responsibilities and dimensions for the role. Therefore, this role description does not describe any individual role holder. In addition to the contents of this role description, employees are expected to undertake any and all other reasonable and related tasks allocated by line management.

All CVs will be anonymised by our recruitment system when you apply for a role at Age UK. Please note that our system is unable to anonymise cover letters, and we would therefore ask that to support the work we are doing on making our recruitment selection process fairer and more unbiased, that you remove any personal information from your cover letter/supporting statement, including your name before uploading this. All equalities monitoring information is also anonymised and not shared with the hiring panel. Your name and address will only be known to us once you are invited for an interview.

Age UK is an Equal Opportunities employer and positively encourages applications from suitably qualified and eligible candidates, regardless of age, sex, race, disability, sexual orientation, gender reassignment, religion or belief, marital/civil partnership status, or pregnancy and maternity. We guarantee an interview to disabled candidates who meet the minimum criteria under the Disability Confident Scheme. Please note that on occasion, due to high numbers of applications, Age UK reserves the right to limit the overall number of interviews offered, and therefore, it may not always be practicable or appropriate to interview all disabled people that meet the minimum criteria for the job.

Age UK is committed to safeguarding adults at risk, and children, from abuse and neglect. We expect everyone who works with us to share this commitment.

Early application is encouraged as we will review applications throughout the advertising period and reserve the right to close the advert at any time.

Age UK politely requests no contact from recruitment agencies or media sales. We do not accept speculative CVs from recruitment agencies nor accept the fees associated with them.