Winning Strategies for Recruiting Caregivers to Your Home Care Agency

Ten thousand people turn 65 every day in the U.S. As the population ages, home care agencies are more necessary than ever to the health and wellbeing of our communities. The global skills shortage is especially acute for the healthcare industry, and without high-quality caregivers, your agency won’t be able to meet those needs and take advantage of the outstanding opportunities for growth.

Recruiting caregivers requires more than posting a few open positions on job boards. Because caregivers are in such high demand, you’ll have to compete for top talent, which means investing time and energy in your employer brand and hiring process.

Don’t go in without a plan. Here are the 8 best strategies for recruiting top caregivers to your home care agency.

1. Leverage your agency’s reputation

Do you know how your agency is perceived in the community? What do your clients think? What about your employees? Is your name recognizable–and respected–among those who have never worked with your agency?

The way you’re viewed in your area will greatly impact your ability to recruit caregivers. To take advantage of your home care agency’s reputation:

• Measure your reputation with an NPS, or net promoter score. This is a calculation of how trusted your brand is. 
• Create your employer value proposition, or EVP. This statement describes your attitude toward employees and what you can offer them that other home care agencies can’t.

Not only is a recruitment marketing strategy the way you’ll grow the team that powers your home care agency, it’s also a means of attracting new clients to the business. The way you present yourself as an employer reflects the quality of care you provide.

2. Understand the home care industry’s reputation

Unfortunately, the home care industry has a reputation for being low-paying and thankless. Turnover tends to be high and the emotional toll can be great.

But home care and senior care are also known for being highly rewarding and purposeful. Given the current and upcoming demand, jobs in healthcare—and especially home care—are known for being very secure. Caregiving is a highly employable skill.

Keep both in mind as you recruit caregivers, and build an employer value proposition that speaks to the good and bad parts of the industry’s reputation.

3. Design an employer brand

Your employer brand is the way your home care agency is perceived as an employer. What is it like to work at your company? What is your standard of care? Does your staff like working there? What is your attitude and tone as an employer—hard-working, optimistic, caring, serious, warm, motivating?

Build your employer brand by:

• Polishing our job descriptions 
• Branding your careers site 
• Claiming and completing your profiles on job boards and review sites
• Building relationships with local schools, healthcare systems, and clinics
• Getting involved in your community

4. Build a presence online

When candidates find an open job, one of the first things they’ll do is look you up online. When they do, the information they find should be complete, accurate, and recent.

And with a little reputation management, you can also increase the odds that it will be positive too.

• Create a careers page on your home care website
• Claim your social media profiles—and keep them active
• Claim and complete your profile on job boards like Indeed, CareerBuilder, and LinkedIn
• Claim and complete your profile on company review sites like Glassdoor and Care.com
• Optimize Google Business Profile
• Ask clients and caregivers to review your agency
• Create an agency blog and update it regularly
• Build a relationship with local media outlets to earn coverage

5. Know your talent pool

What are the characteristics of your ideal caregivers? Where do they live? What training and experience do they have? What are their interests?

Information like this can help you find both active and passive job seekers who are a fit for your agency. Leverage the job boards they prefer, the websites they frequent, the social media platforms they use, and the times of day they look for jobs, to find pools of talent you can dip into.

6. Speak to your audience’s needs and wants

When marketing your agency to potential clients, you have to speak directly to the needs, wants, and concerns of your audience. The same is true for recruitment marketing.

If you know what they hope to get out of a job in the near term, and what they want out of a long-term career, you can use your recruiting strategy to address those needs. For instance, on your careers page and job descriptions can boast about:

• Competitive compensation and benefits
• Training and promotion opportunities
• Opportunities for flexible scheduling and remote work 
• A purposeful and meaningful career 
• A supportive and welcoming work environment

7. Set goals for your campaigns

The best way to design an efficient campaign—and measure your success—is by setting goals. Yours might be to increase the quality of hire, decrease time to hire or cost to hire, increase employer brand awareness, or expand the talent pool to new demographics and skill sets. The earlier you identify these goals, the more smoothly you can run a campaign and the better your results will be.

8. Automate your recruitment cycle

According to a survey by the Boston Consulting Group, 66% of job seekers say that the number-one way for an employer to stand out is with a timely and smooth hiring process. The best way to achieve this is by automating your recruitment cycle.

Recruitment automation lets you:

• Track and shepherd candidates through the recruitment funnel
• Respond with lightning speed to prospective caregivers
• Keep your talent pipeline full (and prevent leaks) so you can hire quickly and efficiently
• Automate job postings on major career sites
• Run recruitment ad campaigns to cast a wider net and find new leads to add to your funnel 
• Personalize your outreach to top caregiver candidates
• Easily schedule interviews with prospects
• Quickly field candidate questions via personalized text messaging and voicemail capabilities
• Seamlessly guide candidates through each step of the hiring cycle
• Maintain consistent and active connection with your top candidates

Start automating, recruit better, recruit faster

When you automate your recruitment marketing campaigns, you can hire top-quality caregivers faster. At Home Care Marketing Pros, we use our CareFunnels Recruit platform for recruitment marketing so you can build an active talent pipeline full of ideal prospects. Book a demo and we’ll show you how.