Bridgeway Connect was built by a qualified social worker with fourteen years in UK health and social care. It started with a handful of fair questions, asked by colleagues and by people working alongside him. How do I find a role that will sponsor me? Is this advert genuine? What do I put in this application? They were reasonable things to want to know — and the answers turned out to be scattered, hard to find, and often out of date. This is an attempt to put that experience to work for as many people as possible, in the places where things are least clear.
Applications started arriving in volume and sounding identical. A tool that writes a confident, polished application about anybody is now free and everywhere, and the effect has been to devalue the whole pack — when every application reads the same, a good one stops standing out, and the people who lose most are the ones whose experience is real.
Registration routes, visa routes, sponsorship wording, what each regulator wants, what an employer actually means by "essential" — the information exists, but it is scattered across a dozen places and half of it is out of date. Most people are piecing it together at night, on a phone, between shifts.
This platform exists to make that process more streamlined: one place, one profile, and straight answers about where you stand.
Adult social care in England had around 96,000 vacancies on any given day in 2025/26 — a vacancy rate of 6.2%, the lowest in a decade and genuinely good news. But it is still around three times the rate across the wider economy, and it did not improve by accident.1
It improved substantially because people came to do the work. With the dedicated international route now closed, new international recruits arriving from abroad fell to 30,000 in 2025/26, the lowest in four years, while the number of domestic workers filling posts has fallen by 130,000 since 2020/21. Skills for Care estimate the sector will need 410,000 more posts by 2040.1
So there is no shortage of people who want to do this work and are qualified to do it. There is a gap between those people and the employers who need them — and a lot of noise in between. That gap is what this is for.
The conversation is automated. Giovanni is an AI, and we say so everywhere, because a candidate who works that out later has been misled — and this is an audience that has been misled enough.
Sponsorship matches are different. Every one is reviewed by a person before it is emailed to you, because that is where a wrong answer costs the most.
If you want to reach that person, you can. Email admin@bridgewayconnect.co.uk, or use the feedback form — both reach a human being, not a queue.
The platform is early, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise. It may get things wrong, and when it does we want to hear about it — that is what the feedback page is for, and it is read by a person.
Everything here is improved continuously. Whatever you are looking at today is the least good version you will ever see.
We do not charge work-seekers to find work. We do not sell visas or jobs. We will not tell you what you want to hear because it makes a better sales page.
The free service does not depend on anyone buying anything.
We do not introduce candidates to employers, and we do not pass on anyone's details. Nobody's name, contact details or documents are released to anyone — our terms say so in plain words, and that is not something we plan to quietly change.
What we do is help people put their own experience forward clearly, in their own applications to you. If that raises a question — about how we work, how we handle data, or something you have seen us publish — ask, and a person will answer.
Get in touch · Request our compliance pack
The compliance pack is being written. Ask for it and we will send you what exists today and tell you honestly what does not yet.
Bridgeway Connect Ltd is registered in England and Wales, company number 16869434, at Suite A, 82 James Carter Road, Mildenhall, IP28 7DE. We are registered with the Information Commissioner's Office, registration number ZC098492.
Sources
1. Skills for Care, The size and structure of the adult social care sector and workforce in England, published 25 June 2026, covering 2025/26. Vacancy rate, vacancy numbers, comparison with the wider economy, international recruitment and the 2040 projection are all from this release.
2. Background on the sector workforce: House of Commons Library, Adult social care workforce in England.
Last checked 12 September 2026. We date our figures because they move, and a statistic without a date is not worth much.
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