Housing Officer

City of Edinburgh Council; City of Edinburgh; Hybrid; GBP 30,000 - 40,000; Full time

Job summary

The City of Edinburgh Council is hiring a Housing Officer to join the Homelessness Prevention and Housing Options Team. This role involves providing critical support to prevent homelessness, working in a fast-paced environment, and collaborating with various statutory services. Ideal candidates will have experience in frontline services and knowledge of housing legislation, contributing to a vital mission for the community.

Qualifications

• Proven track record in challenging frontline service roles.
• Strong knowledge of the social housing landscape in Edinburgh.
• Understanding of key homelessness legislation and policies.

Responsibilities

• Provide tailored housing options advice and referrals to prevent homelessness.
• Participate in emergency duty teams and cover services across Edinburgh.
• Make key statutory decisions on customer entitlements.

Skills

Resilience

Knowledge of social housing

Understanding of homelessness legislation

Education

Experience in a frontline service

Job description

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Place Directorate

Housing Officer - Homelessness Prevention & Housing Options Team (HP&HOT)
Location - as our service is based across the 4 locality offices, you could be based at any of our locality offices. These posts are hybrid working posts with some home-working being possible.

We currently have 2 positions available.

HP&HOT Housing Officer Post Overview

The City of Edinburgh Council's Homelessness Prevention and Housing Options Team (HP&HOT) is at the frontline of tackling homelessness in Edinburgh. Working across the following locations:

South East Office - 40 Captain's Road, Edinburgh

Please note that that at any point in your employment with the Council that you may be required to working in any location across Edinburgh and therefore the above locations may change.

The HP and HOT Housing Officer will work in a statutory service and be fully responsible for providing tailored housing options advice, information and support referrals to either prevent homelessness or to enable assessed homeless people to access suitable housing as quickly as possible.

The HP and HOT Housing Officer will fulfil the Council's duties by working to legislative and good practice requirements and in collaboration with many other statutory services and partner organisations to make key statutory decisions about customers entitlement to services.

You will be required to participate on a rota and cover basis whilst working as part of an Emergency Duty and New Appointment team in localities. This is an extremely busy and pressurised service and you will often need to provide cover in a variety of locations across Edinburgh or reschedule your diary at very short notice to ensure our statutory duties to homeless households are achieved. As such this role requires you to display resilience on a daily basis and the ability to take ownership and responsibility of applicable tasks when working in an often challenging role with households who are experiencing crisis situations.

The successful candidate will therefore have a proven track record of working within a challenging frontline service. We are also keen to appoint candidates who have a strong knowledge of the social housing landscape in Edinburgh and have an understanding of key homeelssness legistlation and policies as well.

This post is regulated work with children and/or protected adults under the Protection of Vulnerable Groups (Scotland) Act 2007. The preferred candidate will be required to join the PVG Scheme or undergo a PVG Scheme update check. Where an individual has spent a continuous period of 3 months or more out with the UK in the last 5 years, an Overseas Criminal Record Check will be required. You will be required to provide this check. An unconditional offer of employment and commencement in the post will be subject to the outcome of both these pre-employment checks being deemed satisfactory.

We're committed to creating a workplace culture where all our people feel valued, included and able to be their best at work, and we recognise the benefits that a diverse workforce with different values, beliefs, experience, and backgrounds brings to us as an organisation.

As part of our goal to improve our organisational culture and create a great place to work together for the people of Edinburgh, we want to make sure that we're bringing the best people into our roles, not just in their skills and experience but also in their approach to work.

To help achieve this, we're changing the way we interview and assess candidates by moving from a competency-based interview approach to a behavioural and technical (skills for the job) based approach. This new way of interviewing will allow us to assess how you think and how you would bring Our Behaviours of Respect, Integrity and Flexibility into your ways of working.

You can find out more on Our Behaviours web page Our Behaviours - The City of Edinburgh Council

Our salary range typically reflects the initial starting salary and annually increases until it reaches the top of the range.

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