Has your experience of advice/customer service gained working with a range of clients given you the ability to interact effectively with professionals and members of the public alike? Then join Shelter Scotland as an Empty Homes Adviser and you could soon be playing a vital role within our Empty Homes Advice Service.

About the role

This role helps deliver advice through the Empty Homes Advice Service (EHAS), which takes queries from members of the public as well as practitioners engaged in empty homes work. These enquiries come from empty homeowners, those with concerns about empty homes in their community, people interested in buying and renovating empty homes, and empty homes practitioners. The Adviser will provide advice to these groups via telephone and email and will ensure online advice content remains up to date, creating new resources as needed. They will undertake activities to promote the service and wider partnership to reach the intended audience, including social media and events.

Role specifics

You will provide advice on empty homes options to owners, neighbours, potential buyers, and practitioners, responding to enquiries by phone and email with a focus on assessing needs and achieving desired outcomes. The role involves advocating for clients with other agencies, maintaining high standards to meet contractual and professional targets, and accurately recording information on our case management system. You will identify cases needing further advice and make referrals where necessary, collaborating with Shelter services and other agencies. Empowering clients to self-help, keeping advice knowledge up to date, and working within the service’s operating model are key. You will also provide written advice confirmations, update online advice resources, contribute to marketing efforts such as events and social media, and carry out other duties as directed by your line manager.

Apply to be part of our team and be the change you want to see in society.

Benefits

We offer a wide range of benefits, including 30 days of annual leave, enhanced family friendly policies, pension and interest free travel loans. Our employees also have access to a tenancy deposit loan, payroll giving, cycle to work scheme and an employee assistance programme.

We are happy to talk about flexible working, personal growth, and to promote a workplace where you can be yourself and achieve success based only on your merit.

About the team

Part of an award-winning Communication & Policy Department, our Scottish Empty Homes Partnership (SEHP) is a Scottish Government funded project aimed at enabling private sector empty homes to be brought back into use across Scotland. The Partnership achieves this via a mix of policy work, capacity building, training, best practice sharing and awareness raising with councils, community groups and others. It’s also home to the national Empty Homes Advice Service - a public facing advice line that anyone can call for help or to report an empty home

Do you have some experience of advice work, preferably with a focus on housing issues, and a real desire to advance your specialist level knowledge? Then join Shelter Scotland as a Housing Rights Worker and you could soon be playing a vital role in helping to identify and resolve the homelessness and bad housing issues facing local communities.

About the Team: Community Team

There are three Community Teams - North, West and East. These teams of housing rights workers engage with and activate communities in delivering insight and evidence and targeted interventions, to address local issues and contribute towards the Shelter Scotland Housing Emergency campaign for structural change. We work to the three equal parts of our Community Purpose:

We challenge bad practice: In the face of Scotland’s housing emergency, we will hold local duty bearers to account and defend people’s rights.

We build capacity: The supply issues at the heart of the Housing Emergency in Scotland create an unsustainable demand for housing services in Shelter Scotland, across the sector and in sectors traditionally beyond housing. We build capacity within affected organisations and groups to respond with and for the people they support.

We strengthen our case for change: We work closely with our Comms and Advocacy colleagues by providing useful insights and context about what is happening locally. We create opportunities for people with lived experience of housing and homelessness to lend us stories which bring the real issues behind the statistics to life.

Our North Team covers regions from Fife northwards and operates out of our two regional offices in Dundee and Aberdeen with the team spread across these locations.

About the role

In our North Community Team, we are engaged in our local communities to understand the housing issues people are facing to gather insight and evidence around the broken system, and we apply our expertise to work toward solutions. We seek to work with and within communities to build capacity and drive action around housing rights and the housing emergency. Lived experience of the housing emergency is at the heart of everything we do.

About you

Already with some relevant experience, you’re used to working with a variety of internal and external stakeholders, have great time management skills and enjoy collaborating with people from other teams and organisations. The ability to listen to, engage and empower individuals and communities will be key. So will your willingness to challenge practice and hold people to account – including influencing decision makers. Adept at presenting information and arguments in clear and compelling ways, you have a real enthusiasm for delivering workshops and presentations too. What’s more, you’re a creative problem solver with an innate ability to gather evidence and identify insights, issues and trends and are proficient using Word, Excel, email, the internet and in-house CRM systems.

Apply to be part of our team and be the change you want to see in society.

Benefits

We offer a wide range of benefits, including 30 days of annual leave, enhanced family friendly policies, pension and interest free travel loans. Our employees also have access to a tenancy deposit loan, payroll giving, cycle to work scheme and an employee assistance programme.

Shelter Scotland helps thousands of people every year struggling with bad housing or homelessness through our advice, support and legal services. And we campaign to make sure that, one day, no one will have to turn to us for help. We’re here so no one has to fight bad housing or homelessness on their own.

We are happy to talk about flexible working, personal growth, and to promote a workplace where you can be yourself and achieve success based only on your merit.

About the team

Our three Communities Teams are responsible for identifying, investigating and intervening in housing and homelessness practice issues. We engage with our local communities to understand the issues people are facing and apply expert housing knowledge, insight and analysis to identify solutions to them. As well as providing advice and advocacy for individuals, we also use our insight, relationships and influence to drive systemic change, always ensuring that lived experience is at the heart of everything we do.

We’re looking for confident and influential people who want to be at the heart of their local community looking for an opportunity to have control of creative merchandising within managing a Shelter shop. Do you have experience of managing a team whilst also empowering and motivating individuals? If so, then this could be the role for you at our Montrose shop.

About you

You will need to be an active team player and be able to demonstrate how you’ve managed and motivated a team previously beyond expectations and experience of providing excellent customer service in a face-to-face role.

Have a good knowledge of recruiting and developing a diverse team and how you have supported and motivated teams to progress and how you would bring these skills into this position.

You will need to have good communication skills to engage with the local community to seek out new opportunities to increase the shops contribution to help further Shelter’s cause. You will develop your own and your teams’ interests in merchandising the shop attracting customers and continually develop yours and your team’s knowledge of Shelter, who we are and what we do.