Attracting Top Caregivers on a Small Business Budget

Workforce analyses indicate that time-to-hire reached an all-time high in 2023, at 44 days from job posting to offer acceptance. But home care agencies often can’t wait that long to fill open roles, especially for caregivers. When your clients need care, you have to be ready to provide.

Recruitment can be a costly and time-consuming endeavor, but there are habits you can form and strategies you can deploy to make the hiring process more time- and cost-effective. Here are our favorite free and low-cost and strategies for recruiting top caregivers for your home care agency.

Build your employer brand

Your employer brand is the way the public and your current staff perceive your home care agency as an employer. Do you care about the safety, health, and well-being of your workforce? What about their future careers? Do you pay well, promote fairly, and provide an inclusive work environment? What values do you base your work on?

You can foster your employer brand by:

• Creating a high-quality, comprehensive careers page on your home care website that includes information about compensation and benefits, company culture and values, the hiring process, and open positions
• Giving job applicants a customer-grade candidate experience, leaving them with plenty of positive things to say about your home care agency—even if you don’t offer them a job
• Keep an employer blog that recognizes the good work of your employees and celebrates company culture, or post congratulations on social media
• Ask for reviews from your current staff, and use them on your careers page to boost your reputation
• Writing clear and inclusive job descriptions (more on that below)

Establish a presence online and in your community

When you’re recruiting new caregivers for your agency, one of the first things they’ll do is to search for your business online.

• Most job boards—like Glassdoor, Indeed, and LinkedIn—have a free employer profile component, so claim yours and keep it fresh with content, photos, and announcements.
• Claim your Google Business Profile and keep it up to date
• Use social media to engage with your community and celebrate the success of your home care staff. Try TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn for establishing your employer brand.

Be crystal clear about what you’re looking for in new hires

The more clear you are what you’re looking for in caregivers and other agency staff, the more quickly and efficiently you’ll be able to recruit them.

First, reach an agreement among your home care agency leaders and hiring managers about the qualifications and characteristics of ideal hires, then tighten and polish your job descriptions to reflect those goals.

• Limit non-negotiable job requirements (the more mandatory requirements you list, the more likely you are to dissuade great candidates from applying)
• Write inclusive job descriptions to expand your hiring pool
• Tell candidates what your agency can offer them, like upward mobility, training opportunities, occasional remote work, or great benefits
• Indicate in the job posting what applicants can expect from the hiring process

Streamline your application and interview practice

The longer it takes to fill a position, the more it costs to do so, so streamline your application process with clear requirements and prompts, and tell candidates exactly what you’re looking for in a new team member.

• As early as the application, tell prospective caregivers what to expect from the interview process—how many rounds, how they will be evaluated, who they will meet, how long it may take, etc. This cuts down on the number of questions you’ll need to ask and help less-than-ideal candidates self-select out.
• When it comes time to interview your top picks, set clear expectations for interviewers. What should they learn from their interactions with candidates? What kinds of questions should they ask? How should they evaluate candidates? Can you provide a rubric for scoring?

The more clear and consistent you can be about the process, the more swiftly it will move and the more consistent your hiring results will be.

Keep your talent pipeline full

When it’s time to hire new caregivers, you need to move quickly. There are few things as stressful as running an understaffed home care agency, so don’t wait until a position is empty to start building your talent pipeline.

• Participate in local career fairs and community events to expand your network and build your employer brand
• Stay in touch with local community colleges and training programs so can keep an eye on top caregivers entering the field
• Post “talent network” openings on job boards and on your careers page, that is, not an active job posting but an invitation to submit a resume and cover letter for future consideration.
• Keep in touch with former employees, especially those who were a great asset to your agency—you might be able to win them back in the future or get a few referrals

Deploy smart recruitment automation

Just like your client marketing programs can be automated for power and efficiency, your recruitment campaigns can be automated with the same technology. Make good use of your investment in marketing tech by deploying it on both the client and candidate sides.

• Track applicants as they move through the process so your top candidates don’t fall through the cracks
• Give applicants and candidates a smooth and consistent experience with your recruitment process
• Gather data about the types of candidates you’re winning over

Set up an employee referral program

Your current staff and caregivers can do a lot of the recruiting for you. By setting up an employee referral program, you can equip your staff to talk about your agency, bring in ideal candidates, and reward their participation.

Build strong relationships with local colleges

The students coming out of local colleges and training programs are eager to land jobs, and you could be the one to snap them up. Form good relationships with administrators and instructors and offer to share your knowledge with their students for free.

Track results to optimize

You can keep track of your recruitment marketing campaigns, sorted by job board, outreach, and results so you can identify the most successful job boards and strategies. Most recruiters will track cost-per-hire and time-to-hire, but what is often most important is quality of hire.

Try a PPC campaign

Though PPC ad campaigns aren’t necessarily inexpensive, they are very efficient and can uncover new insights about the potential caregivers most likely to engage with your open jobs.

Just like digital ad campaigns for attracting new clients can be targeted at ideal consumers, your digital ads for recruiting caregivers can be targeted at your ideal talent pool. With PPC campaigns for recruiting you can:

• Build employer brand awareness
• Add caregivers to your recruitment funnel for now—and for later—to kick-start the recruiting process when it’s time
• Learn about the interests and behaviors of the demographics most likely to engage with your job ads
• A/B test your campaigns to optimize for success as they run

Automate your caregiver recruitment for better results

The same tech that powers your home care agency campaigns can also power your recruitment marketing campaigns. Home Care Marketing Pro’s CareFunnels can be deployed across channels and across goals. Schedule a demo to let us show you how it’s done.

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