Optimize Your Employer Brand to Attract and Retain Top Caregiver Talent

Although recruiting and marketing have different priorities, attracting candidates is where they intersect. According to Glassdoor, 86% of HR professionals report that recruitment is becoming more like marketing. 

Recruiters are using marketing techniques to attract candidates, such as seeking the right platforms to advertise roles for their ideal candidates, engaging the candidates throughout the hiring process, and helping to create successful employer branding to attract top talent. For a good reason, research shows that 75% of job seekers care about a company’s reputation when applying for a job. 

Since home care is a competitive industry where attracting and retaining talented caregivers is one of the biggest challenges, creating a successful employer brand plays a vital role. 

What is employer branding? 

Employer branding is how you present your unique identity as an employer to job seekers and your workforce. It involves communicating your company’s culture, values, and vision to current employees and potential candidates.

Showing your employees’ achievements, company events, the perks and benefits of working for you, and social responsibility projects your company supports, are all examples of employer branding efforts.

In this blog, we’ve compiled tips to optimize your employer brand and help you beat the competition in attracting and retaining top caregiver talent.

Seven ways to improve your employer brand and boost your reputation as a top home care employer

1. Build a positive company culture

Before you can talk the talk, you need to walk the walk. Home care providers who want to attract and retain talented caregivers must first cultivate a positive company culture.

A positive company culture is built on the foundation of transparency, open communication, and a supportive working environment. 

Building a positive company culture is a necessary long-term investment. It directly impacts recruitment and hiring by increasing retention rates, caregiver and client referrals, and profits, while reducing company costs. 

For example, your caregivers will likely recommend you as an employer and promote your employer brand via a caregiver referral program if they are happy working for you.

Home care providers who want to promote a positive company culture must address their employees’ struggles as much as their clients’. For example:

2. Establish your value proposition

A value proposition consists of your brand’s mission statement, values, vision, and culture. Your value proposition as a home care employer needs to be consistent, relatable, and true.

It’s important to use your value proposition while writing a job posting. If it resonates with people, you are more likely to increase the number of applicants and attract your ideal caregiver candidate.

Home care providers must ensure their value proposition is used on all marketing channels to attract talent and engage employees. For example, you can include your value proposition on your Careers page, LinkedIn page, internal mailings, and social media posts.

3. Leverage social media

Just as employers screen potential employees’ social media content, candidates often check a company’s social media accounts before applying. 

When they check your company’s social media pages, one of the key questions potential applicants are likely to ask is “What’s it like to work there?”. Therefore, leveraging your social media presence – for example, posting testimonial videos from your caregivers and positive written reviews via an employee referral program – can help you find and attract top talent.

You can use social media to showcase your employees and build a community for them. An active social media presence helps them connect more and increases engagement, collaboration, and retention. Plus, celebrating your employees humanizes your brand and helps you attract more potential applicants.

Consider featuring photos, videos, and blog posts on your social media channels to highlight your caregivers’ achievements, clients’ success stories, and team activities. While your employees engage with such content, it helps to show potential candidates what it’s like to work for you.

4. Optimize your caregiver hiring process

Once a caregiver applicant enters the hiring process, the most crucial part of your hiring team’s job begins. For the sake of your employer brand and reputation, they must provide a great candidate experience.

Surveys show that top talent often has multiple offers to choose from, so the quicker your hiring process is, the sooner your home care company can sign them up and beat the competition. 

An applicant tracking system (ATS) is necessary for a simple, fast, and efficient hiring process since it helps you streamline each step and track all applicants on a single platform. In addition, an ATS will help you to establish good communication with every applicant, keeping them fully informed and engaged throughout. 

Since 1 in 3 people report turning down jobs from companies with a bad online reputation, or a slow hiring process, you must optimize your hiring process to guarantee success.

5. Create an engaging onboarding process

Once a candidate becomes an employee, onboarding is the first experience they go through with your home care company. 

During the onboarding, your new caregivers will meet with their peers and gain a snapshot of how their day-to-day working life will be. Having a positive hiring process and then being treated differently during the onboarding can destroy their trust in your employer brand.

According to reports, people who experience negative onboarding are twice as likely to seek a different opportunity as soon as possible. This could explain the high turnover experienced by many home care businesses within the first 30-90 days of hiring. 

Therefore, your onboarding process must be engaging, consistent with the earlier discussions in the hiring process, and promote your company culture if you want to retain caregivers and protect your brand. 

6. Ensure a smooth offboarding process

Offboarding is just as important as onboarding to maintain good employer branding.

When a caregiver decides to part ways with your home care agency, for whatever reason, it should ideally be a smooth, respectful, and straightforward process.

Open conversation and mutual feedback during offboarding can strengthen your relationship with departing employees. In addition, supporting their choice to leave and ensuring there is still a place for them if they wish to return will positively impact your employer brand. 

In turn, this creates a network of former employees happy to refer you to other caregivers seeking work.

7. Create a diverse workforce

It’s becoming increasingly important for companies to recognize talent in diverse communities. Investing in diversity and inclusion in your workforce can help to optimize your employer brand and attract a wonderful variety of top talent. 

In addition, there are many other benefits of diversity and inclusion in the workplace that can’t be overlooked, including improved performance, a broader range of perspectives, better customer/client services, and an enhanced employee network.

Attracting and retaining top caregiver talent is highly competitive in today’s world, but it’s easier when you have great employer branding and invest in the right tools. 

At Smartcare Software, we support home care providers by solving the industry’s most significant challenges, such as caregiver hiring and retention. 

Contact us today to find out how our home care software can improve your recruitment and hiring process, help you retain your caregivers, and carry your brand forward intentionally as an employer.