What Is Recruitment Marketing for Home Care Agencies?

The next time you need to hire a caregiver, do you know how long it will take? What about where you’ll find them? How confident are you that you can find high-quality, fully-qualified candidates? Is your staff prepared to interview applicants and make a decision quickly?

Given the shortage of qualified healthcare workers, competition for home caregivers will only increase for the foreseeable future. Unless you’re equipped with a recruiting strategy, your competition can easily scoop great staffers right out from under you.

Posting open positions on job boards and hoping for the best just won’t cut it anymore. Home care agencies must be proactive and intentional about recruiting top caregiver talent.

Should your home care agency have a strategy for recruiting caregivers?

So, is this something your agency needs? Absolutely. Your agency needs a recruitment marketing strategy—even if you’re not actively hiring.

The benefits of a recruitment marketing strategy include:

• Faster hiring
• Reduced hiring costs
• Higher quality of hire
• A larger, and higher-quality talent pool to pick from
• A more diverse caregiving team
• Greater awareness of both your employer and customer-facing brands
• A better candidate experience and higher offer acceptance rates
• Increased retention rates for existing employees

Recruitment marketing isn’t necessarily expensive; there are plenty of ways to find great caregivers on a small business budget.

5 basics of recruitment marketing

There are five fundamental steps of recruitment marketing that every agency should follow.

1. Design an employer brand

At its core, your employer brand is a reflection of what it’s like to work at your organization, your standards for employees, and how you treat your staff.

• Identify your company values, which can inform every hiring decision you make
• Define your employee value proposition, or EVP. This is what your agency offers its caregivers that your competition can’t
• Set standards for your visual identity, which should be closely related to your customer-facing brand
• Establish a consistent online presence by building a careers page, claiming and updating your profiles on reviews sites (like Glassdoor, Care.com, Yelp, your Google Business Profile, etc.), and keep your social media accounts active

2. Set standards for hiring caregivers

Only a consistent recruiting process will return consistent recruiting results. Start by building a plan that your agency team can follow in concert.

• Reach an agreement with agency leadership and hiring managers about compensation range, job requirements, and the characteristics of ideal hires
• Create rubrics for scoring candidates
• Clearly map and document the hiring process
• Train all interviewers on best practices
• Assign a point of contact for each position so candidates have a seamless communication process
• Make a plan for consistently onboarding new hires

3. Identify your goals

Now that you’ve identified your employer brand and set hiring standards, it’s time to define your goals for recruiting caregivers.

Make your goals SMART. That is, specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.

4. Measure progress

Because you’ve set a smart goal, measuring it should be relatively easy. For some goals (like percentage increases), you’ll need to start with a baseline. For others, you’ll simply need to track progress as you go.

A good recruitment automation platform can track your progress in real time and identify ways to swerve and improve. Schedule regular check-ins with the hiring team to discuss progress, and prepare to be creative and agile if plans get off track.

5. Learn from past campaigns

Every recruitment campaign you run is an opportunity for learning: Which job platforms or referral sources capture the best applicants? What ad copy is most likely to convert? At what point in the hiring process are top candidates most likely to drop out?

You can use your recruitment automation platform to gather data and feed it back into your next hiring campaigns, improving the process every time you need to hire.

The spill-over effects of recruitment marketing

It’s not just prospective employees who will be watching your recruitment campaigns—potential clients will also be aware of your employer brand and hiring strategy.

Imagine you need at-home care for an elderly family member. There are two great agencies in town, so you do your research to pick the best one.

• Agency A’s website has a few open job postings and a quick note about hiring great employees, but there’s little information otherwise.
• Agency B’s website features detailed information about their high standards of care and how their caregivers are trained and consistently upskilled. On the website, you also find testimonials from home care workers about how much they enjoy their jobs and why they chose homecare as a profession.

Which one would you choose? Sometimes, a well-thought-out recruitment marketing strategy can make the difference in gaining a client and losing them to a competitor.

Hire better caregivers, faster

Ready to power up your recruitment marketing campaigns for better results? At Home Care Marketing Pros, we use our data-driven CareFunnels Recruit platform to design and execute hiring programs for home care agencies. Our automated solution lets you quickly screen applications, automatically schedule interviews, consistently communicate with top candidates, and move them seamlessly from application to onboarding.

Book a free demo and let us show you the difference automation can make.

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