Ten Metrics Home Care Providers Need to Track to Improve Caregiver Hiring Success

While finding and attracting caregivers is difficult, establishing a simple, efficient, and quick hiring process can change this and help your home care business save time and money.

The first crucial step is to take an in-depth look at your current caregiver hiring process to find areas for improvement. Recruiting and hiring metrics are an essential part of a data-driven optimization strategy. 

You can begin the process of fine-tuning your caregiver hiring process by tracking and improving the following ten metrics:

1. How many open positions are created each month

Tracking how many open positions are created each month helps hiring teams determine the frequency of caregiver requirements and the success of your hiring efforts.

By comparing the number of open positions with previous months, you can begin to predict periods of high and low demand. This helps you prepare your hiring strategy to meet the care expectations in busy periods.

You must also track the number of open positions if you hire in bulk and want to track how quickly you can fill roles.

2. The number of applicants per opening

The number of applicants can tell home care providers if their job posting is effective and how much demand there is for the job.

Tracking this metric is important for adjusting job postings and ideal criteria. For example, your hiring team may decide to encourage less experienced candidates and determine training requirements when you’re not receiving the desired number of applicants.

At the same time, hiring teams can compare the number of applicants to various job postings to find the best-performing posts that bring in the most high-quality applicants.

3. Offer acceptance rate

There are three reasons why a candidate may decline your offer:

If you are experiencing low rates of offer acceptance, it can act as a warning for your hiring team to take the necessary steps and create a transparent, quick, and engaging hiring process.

For example, your hiring team can improve job descriptions and offer transparency about the company culture, salary, benefits, and more. In addition, they can use an applicant tracking system that engages candidates throughout the hiring stages and speeds up the hiring process.

4. The average amount of time-to-hire

The average amount of time-to-hire, or time to fill, refers to how quickly your hiring team selects and hires the best candidate, once candidates have entered the hiring pipeline.

An inefficient hiring process may cause a longer time to hire and result in a higher cost per hire. For example, requiring the candidates to fill out too many forms, not using a mobile-friendly application platform, or not having an automated background screening process can slow recruitment. 

Smartcare’s ENGAGE Hiring Hub is built to solve these problems, so home care providers can quickly post positions, engage quality applicants, and move them through the stages of their hiring process. 

For example, one multi-state home care provider that has used ENGAGE for over eight months, reported bringing their applicant-to-hire timeframe down from 20-25 days to 10-15 days.

Tracking this metric invites new methods to speed up the hiring process, such as using a caregiver-centric applicant tracking system, updating the screening process, or changing your recruitment strategy from the ground up.

5. The average cost-per-hire

Cost-per-hire refers to the total amount spent on hiring in a year, divided by the number of hires. For example, the total cost of hiring may include recruiter fees, job posting fees, and other internal or external hiring expenses.

Home care providers must track this metric to determine their return on investment in hiring and use it as a guide for future hiring budgets. In addition, hiring teams must track this metric to hit their targets in reducing hiring costs.

At the same time, knowing how much it costs on average to hire a new caregiver is important to know when considering different strategies. For example, you may consider increasing investment in caregiver retention if your average cost-per-hire is very high.

6. Source of hire and sourcing channel effectiveness

Hiring teams use various internal and external sources to increase the number of caregiver applications. By tracking the source of hire, home care providers can determine which one is attracting the most applicants. 

Similarly, tracking sourcing channel effectiveness helps you understand the return on investment of your preferred sources. Whether job boards or social media platforms, the company’s own careers website or employee referrals, you must look into how much time and money was spent and how many candidates were generated. You can also compare the quality of applicants to understand sourcing channel effectiveness.

Sourcing channel effectiveness will also help with understanding how candidates prefer to apply. For example, a shorter mobile-friendly application process will typically generate more applicants.

7. Turnover rate

Caregiver retention is an ongoing challenge in the home care industry, which is why tracking and understanding the turnover rate at your company is vital.

The turnover rate is calculated by dividing the number of employees who left their job by the total number of employees within a set period of time. 

Research shows that hiring new caregivers could cost more than investing in retaining caregivers. So, tracking the turnover rate helps home care providers spot what isn’t working.

Home care providers can prioritize certain aspects of their caregiver retention strategy by looking into the reasons behind high turnover rates – such as lack of support or communication, unsatisfactory onboarding, burnout, and so on.

8. Employee referrals

Most successful hiring strategies combine different methods and hiring sources. For example, using a caregiver referral program in addition to job boards and hiring websites can cut your hiring time and costs and improve the quality of hires. 

Thanks to employee referrals, hiring teams can hire better candidates in a cheaper and faster way. Home care providers that ensure their caregivers are satisfied with their jobs can create advocates for their business.

You can improve your caregiver hiring by incentivizing your employees to refer other caregivers. Later, track the success of your employee referrals by looking at how many hires you make and comparing them with other hiring channels.

9. Diversity of candidates

Inclusion and diversity are the foundations of a positive work environment where people from all backgrounds feel accepted despite their differences. 

Home care providers can use candidate surveys to track applicants’ gender, race, and nationality data which can inform them of the diversity of their talent pool.

Hiring teams can make sure that they are considering applications from people equally by tracking this metric.

10. Candidate experience

Hiring success depends on many of the metrics mentioned above, yet one of the most crucial metrics is the candidate experience. It refers to the impression left on both successful and unsuccessful candidates.

A positive candidate experience helps your new hires start their job with enthusiasm and motivation. As for the unsuccessful candidates, they should take away something positive from their experience without feeling rejected.

Opting for an applicant tracking system that gathers candidate feedback is key to measuring the candidate experience your home care business provides. In addition, improving how your hiring team interacts with candidates can go a long way in engaging and retaining applicants; preventing drop-offs.

Smartcare Software’s ATS tools help home care providers streamline their hiring process and enable them to track the metrics mentioned to improve their hiring success.

With Smartcare Software, time-consuming tasks, such as responding to applicants and storing their information, become automated. Hiring teams can screen more candidates, quickly move them through hiring stages and track the success of different hiring channels. 

Smartcare also makes it easy to convert an applicant to an employee with a click of a button, eliminating redundancy and paper from the process, and speeding up applicant-to-hire processes by over 50%.

To learn more about Smartcare Software tools that contribute to caregiver hiring, please get in touch with us or request a free demo. We are here to support you every step of the way.