The Future of Caregiver Recruitment: Leveraging Data for Success
How to deploy your agency’s existing data to recruit top caregivers—and improve the process over time
How much does it cost your agency to recruit one caregiver? Do you know how you recruited your highest-performing employees? Could you replicate the process? Could you replicate it tomorrow?
A data-driven recruitment strategy can answer these questions—and more—about your most valuable asset: your people.
Employers that leverage data to design, execute, and improve their recruitment are the ones that have an advantage amid the global healthcare talent shortage.
You may already have a lot of the information you need to improve your recruiting process, making it faster and more efficient—and more likely to produce quality hires. Your past recruiting campaigns and your current employees supply a lot of this data, it’s just up to you to put it to work for you.
What is data-driven recruiting?
Data-driven recruiting is the process of using quantitative information to improve the recruitment process and attract and retain caregivers to your agency.
Using data for recruiting allows you to:
- Make better, more consistent hiring decisions
- Improve the quality of hire
- Recruit caregivers and other staff members more quickly
- Find passive job seekers who wouldn’t otherwise apply to your jobs
- Build a talent pipeline so you can hire more quickly in the future
- Establish a positive reputation for your home care agency and build your employer brand
- Prevent leaks in your talent pipeline to keep it full of great talent
- Discover new pockets of qualified caregivers
- Improve the candidate experience
- Test and tweak campaign elements to polish your hiring process over time
How to use data for caregiver recruiting
Recruiting caregivers can be a long and opaque process. Data-derived insights let you map and clarify the process so it can be replicated and repeated over time. These are best practices for using data in your home care recruiting strategy.
1. Identify goals
First, set your goals. Don’t worry yet whether you have the right data—that can be mined from existing sources or identified for later collection.
Common goals of data-driven recruiting are:
- Decreasing time to hire
- Decreasing cost to hire
- Improving quality of applicants and/or of new hires
- Increasing applicants with a specific license or skill
- Onboarding caregivers more quickly
- Decreasing employee turnover/increasing employee retention
Although improving cost to hire and time to hire are popular goals among recruiters, prioritizing these metrics should never come at the expense of quality. The better the match between caregiver and agency, the more likely they are to provide excellent client care, and to stick around.
2. Plan and document your full recruitment cycle
To best measure and improve recruiting, your agency should standardize its application, interview, and hiring process.
- Create a process for writing and formalizing job descriptions
- Identify job boards and referral sources for promoting open positions
- Map the hiring sequence from application to onboarding, so all candidates go through the same process
- Create a rubric for scoring job candidates
- Train hiring managers and employees on interview best practices
- Document the onboarding process and train agency staff (especially HR teams and hiring managers) on best practices
3. Automate your analytics
The same marketing automation platform you use to drive new client business can also be used to find and recruit new caregivers to your agency—this is the tool you’ll use to power your data-driven recruitment campaigns. These sophisticated (yet easy to use) systems replace arduous, inefficient, and error-prone spreadsheets, turning manual work into smooth digital processes.
You might hear data collection platforms for recruiters called applicant tracking systems, or ATS. These systems help you collect, store, analyze, and track data over time.
4. Leverage your existing data
It’s likely that you already have data ready for application in your recruiting practice, even if it needs to be organized.
With what you already have, you may be able to calculate metrics like time to hire and average tenure and identify referral sources for top caregivers. Those are baselines you can build on.
5. Gather new data
Now that you’ve mapped your goals and started organizing the data you already have, you can start gathering the new information you need to drive better recruitment marketing programs.
As you map data collection to your marketing goals, you might gather information like:
- Quality of hire (often calculated by scoring current caregivers against a rubric that includes performance reviews)
- Applications per role
- Quality of applicant/relevance to the role
- Offer acceptance rate
- Retention and turnover rates
- Performance reviews and productivity scores
6. Improve over time
In the data-driven recruitment process, you may learn that the best-performing caregivers come from a specific training program, or those who stay the longest were referred by current employees. You might find that specific language in a job description returns the highest-quality applicants or that top candidates tend to drop out of the hiring funnel at a specific point.
As you gather new data, hire new caregivers, and measure the results, you’ll reinforce your ability to make better hiring decisions in the future.
Using data analytics for recruiting caregivers—without a data analytics team
Recruitment automation platforms make it possible for home care agencies to recruit caregivers without needing a dedicated people analytics team. No need to outsource insight collection or recruiting—your team can do it all, with no quantitative expertise needed.
The team at Home Care Marketing Pros can help you stand up and run a data-driven recruitment program. Our CareFunnels platform gathers and analyzes your data to improve recruitment marketing campaigns. Book and demo and we’ll show you how to measure your process to improve it.
