Between a record-low unemployment rate, few job seekers interested in home care careers and 97% of caregivers being open to new job opportunities, staffing up with quality talent is more challenging than ever in the home care industry. But the demand for qualified, compassionate home care employees has never been greater – an aging population is contributing to significant growth in the industry, with Americans projected to spend $5.7 trillion on home care by 2026.
Due to the competitive hiring market and growing demand for home care services, it’s critical for your agency to have a strategy in place to build a pipeline of quality applicants and ensure the employees you have on staff are productive. Below, we’ve pulled together a few tips to get started.
Build a Strong Employment Brand
With so much competition for home care employees – including other home care businesses, retirement homes, and hospitals, among other employers – building your employment brand is key to attracting the right job applicants and providing top-notch patient care. Your employment brand is just as important as the overall brand you build to attract new patients at your home care agency.
The low unemployment rate means job seekers can be more selective than ever before when it comes to finding new job opportunities. Because of this, your employment brand should include job descriptions that answer the “What’s in it for me?” question for job seekers. In your job description, focus on what your home care team has to offer – such as your benefits, company culture and awards. And while home care-related positions require certain certifications, your job description should also highlight preferred competencies, rather than only specific required experience. For example, let job seekers know you’re looking for caregivers who are compassionate and level-headed.
In addition to great job descriptions, your home care business needs a strong career site, as the most engaged candidates apply through career sites. Your career site should include details on career progression and overall benefits to help top candidates see the opportunity your team offers. Hireology data found that a career site is 15x more cost-effective than job boards when it comes to attracting quality candidates.
With effective job descriptions and a compelling career site, you can get top talent excited about the possibility of joining your team, ultimately helping you build a pipeline of qualified talent for your open roles.
Approach Hiring Like Customer Marketing
When it comes to your marketing budget, chances are you don’t put all your eggs in one basket. You likely tap into many channels to drive business at your home care agency – including your website, local advertisements, digital advertisements, and more. But many businesses in home care – and other industries – don’t take the same approach with recruitment marketing. Instead, they often make the mistake of buying costly, one-off job board postings to fill roles quickly as soon as they open up. But these one-off postings can lead to a high quantity, yet low quality of applicants and, as a result, wasted budget.
By instead enlisting the help of a hiring partner like Hireology, you can diversify your job board spend and automatically reach hundreds of the best local and national recruitment marketing channels. These channels include local classified ads, social networks, specialty and mass media job boards. You can also tap into different sources depending on the role your home care business is recruiting for rather than using the same strategy each time you have an open role.
Automate Your Applicant Sourcing Efforts
With Hireology’s automated sourcing tool, Applicant Engine, the applicant sourcing process is managed for you. Applicant Engine manages your recruitment budget and invests in sources expected to drive quality candidates based on predictive analytics. Applicant Engine taps into a network of 500+ applicant sourcing channels – including national job boards, organic search engine feeds, local classifieds, social media and other niche sources. While the recruitment campaign is being managed for you, your HR team can save time and spend it on other tasks to help your home care business grow.
Once you have a more diverse recruitment marketing strategy, it’s important to understand which applicant sourcing channels are driving the most quality candidates – and eventual hires – and which channels aren’t driving results for your home care business. And when you have a grasp on the performance of different applicant sources, you can eliminate applicant sourcing channels that aren’t driving results, ultimately reducing sourcing costs without sacrificing overall quality of hires. Hireology customers who have tapped into Applicant Engine to manage their recruitment marketing budgets and help build their applicant pipelines have seen a 30 percent reduction in overall job board costs.
By diversifying your job boards and other recruitment channels, you can avoid spending much of your budget on costly, one-off job board postings. As a result, you can have a continuous recruitment strategy in place and always have your open roles posted on channels that drive results. This will be especially helpful for building a pipeline of quality candidates for roles you need to fill regularly – such as caregivers.
Boost Productivity Post-Hire
Once you have new employees on board, it’s critical to get them up to speed as soon as possible. Through Hireology’s partnership with ClearCare, the leading web-based and mobile operating platform for home care agencies, employee management and scheduling is made easier. As soon as a caregiver is hired through Hireology, data is securely sent to ClearCare, where caregivers can receive open shift opportunities, reducing scheduling time by 80 percent.
With more efficient scheduling, your home care business can better gauge your hiring needs and tap into the pipeline of talent you’ve already built to ensure you stay fully staffed with quality caregivers. And when you’re staffed up with compassionate, qualified caregivers, this can help boost your agency ratings from both employees and clients.
Your recruitment marketing strategy is more important than ever before, given the competitive hiring market and increasing demand for home care. By following these tips, you can be more proactive with your hiring efforts, attract more quality candidates and better manage your employees’ time.
