10 Tips to Increase Your Chances of Hiring Top-Quality Caregivers for Your Home Care Business in 2023

Caregivers are the most valuable asset of any home care provider’s business and help keep your business running smoothly – but the industry is facing a crisis in finding and hiring quality caregivers.

Solving the ongoing caregiver crisis requires new approaches and innovative thinking if you want to get ahead in a highly competitive labor market. 

There are always opportunities for improvement at every stage of any recruitment and hiring process.

Home care providers that want to become best-in-class in attracting, hiring, and retaining caregivers need to revamp how they connect with job seekers, engage them throughout the hiring process, and keep them engaged and satisfied as employees. 

Whether you’re focused on attracting more top-quality applicants, decreasing the number of caregivers who drop off during the early stages, or minimizing your chances of turnover, we’ve put together ten top tips to help you optimize your caregiver hiring process in 2023.

1. Review your current caregiver hiring process

The first crucial step in fine-tuning your caregiver hiring process is to take an in-depth look at your current efforts to identify opportunities for improvement.

Recruitment and hiring metrics should be tracked as part of a data-driven hiring strategy to help you optimize your existing processes, including:

• How many open positions are created each month
• Number of applicants per opening
• Offer acceptance rate
• Average time-to-hire/velocity
• Average cost-per-hire/per channel
• Lead sources of hire 
• Turnover rate
• Diversity of applicant pool and hiring panel (i.e. races, gender identities, religious backgrounds, and more)

In addition to reviewing your current hiring process from your home care business’s perspective, it’s crucial to get the complete picture by also looking at the candidates’ experience. You can ask them for direct feedback whether or not they accept the job. Or take a walk in their shoes by auditing their journey from filling out the application to onboarding to truly understand their experience and identify areas needing improvement.

2. Make ‘building your employer brand’ a top priority

Research shows that 75% of job seekers care about a company’s reputation when applying for a job, so it’s critical to continually build and promote your employer branding to gain that all-important advantage over the competition.

There are many techniques you can use to gain a reputation as a great home care business to work for, to build trust, and create a positive, lasting impression, including:

• Build a positive company culture
• Regularly measure employee satisfaction
• Improve your onboarding process
• Provide opportunities for career development
• Streamline internal communications
• Create an employee advocacy/referral program
• Leverage social media to increase brand awareness
• Monitor and manage online reviews on sites like Indeed, Glassdoor, and Google

Promoting your employer brand through a compelling content strategy is also something to consider. For example, developing an excellent career site – that shows up in search results – as well as engaging job posts that perform well, will help you effectively tell the story of why your home care business is a great place to work.

Building a successful employer brand is a great way to bring in top talent, so it’s well worth making it an ongoing priority.

3. Be clear about what you’re looking for

To successfully attract and hire top-quality caregivers, you and your team must be 100% clear (and realistic) on your hiring needs and know exactly what you’re looking for. 

From the job posting and job description to the screening and interview stages, you – and the candidates you shortlist – must have complete clarity on what the job will entail, including hours and pay, duties, qualifications and qualities, and your company culture and values. 

This clarity needs to remain consistent throughout the process to guarantee you hire the best-fit caregivers for your business and your clients – who will stay the course.

4. Create engaging job posts and job descriptions

To attract the best candidates for your home care business, you must first study your target audience and understand what motivates and inspires them. You can also research what your competitors offer to ensure you’re up to speed. 

For example, are they prioritizing a good employer brand/reputation, competitive pay rates, enticing rewards and benefits, an alignment of values, opportunities for career development, and so on?

Combining your ideal candidate profile with this information will help you create focused, engaging job posts and job descriptions that really grab the attention of best-fit candidates and reduce the number of unsuitable applications you receive. 

5. Advertise in all the right places

Having put in the time and effort to produce engaging job posts and detailed job descriptions, it’s essential that you advertise in the right places where you know your target audience is going to be searching. For example, your social media pages, your career site/page, online job sites (e.g., myCNAjobs, Indeed, Care As One), referral partners, custom links, job fairs, events, etc.

Remember to promote job opportunities through current employees, too, as caregiver referrals can significantly boost your pipeline of high-quality candidates. 

This is where the right technology can make all the difference. 

With an Applicant Management System like Smartcare Software’s ENGAGE, every new job post you create can be shared across multiple channels at the click of a button, to reach as many of your target audience as possible. 

You can also share new job posts with people you know are already interested in working for you, using your existing database of talent to contact past candidates, former employees, and those signed up for your referral program.

6. Guarantee a positive candidate experience

Many home care providers miss out on great applicants simply because they don’t provide a positive candidate experience – usually due to an inefficient hiring process. 

It’s vital to understand that the candidate experience includes all the interactions an individual will have with your home care business before becoming an employee – from reading your job post, navigating the application process, attending interviews, through to your hiring and onboarding processes. 

A positive candidate experience will come from timely, clear, and consistent communication throughout each of these touchpoints in your hiring process – with applicants feeling engaged and that their time is valued and respected, regardless of the end outcome. 

The easiest and most cost-effective way to achieve this is by using an Applicant Tracking System (ATS), which guarantees a simple, fast, and efficient hiring process that streamlines each step and tracks all applicants on a single platform. The beauty of an ATS is that everything you need to complete each step is within one system, making it time- and cost-effective. 

A key benefit of using an ATS is that it helps you establish good, consistent communication with each applicant so that you never miss an opportunity to stay connected and keep them fully informed and engaged throughout. 

A recent study revealed that 30% of job seekers in today’s market get hired in less than two weeks. So, if your home care business takes longer than that to hire, you’re not providing the best candidate experience and will potentially miss out on the top third of available quality talent.

7. Improve your interview strategy

Almost all home care businesses will occasionally hire candidates who seem perfect at interviews but lack the required performance level or don’t fit the company culture – resulting in higher caregiver turnover.

Interviews are a vital step in the job application process. They provide the ideal opportunity to really get to know each applicant and decide if they are suitable to meet the needs of your company, clients, and culture. However, they cannot be rushed – and should be used to assess a candidate’s soft skills (like emotional intelligence, teamwork, effective communication, adaptability, etc.), as well as confirm hard (or technical) skills and qualifications.

Just because a candidate is well qualified and experienced to do the job doesn’t automatically guarantee that they will. The best way to avoid hiring the wrong people is to ask the right interview questions.

Knowing what you are looking for will help guide your interview strategy and the questions you need to be asking to ensure you’re delivering focused and effective interviews that identify the perfect fit for your caregiver team. 

Read our recent blog for more guidance on improving your interview strategy to find the best-fit caregivers.

8. Make sure your offer is compelling 

Many home care providers make the mistake of thinking that pay is the most crucial factor in attracting great talent. In fact, there are multiple other ways to make sure your job offer stands out from the competition to attract the top talent available.

Research shows that caregivers actually place significant value on other benefits like flexibility, career training and development opportunities, vibrant company culture, paid sick leave, health and wellness perks, recognition, and rewards. It’s not all about the money!

When competing with dozens of other home care providers for the same caregivers, you need to sell your open roles and highlight all the additional perks you can offer the job seeker. 

9. Better utilize employee referrals

We’ve already mentioned employee referral programs, but they warrant being a top tip in their own right. Creating a strong word-of-mouth reputation and referral pipeline can be your best sales tools to attract top talent.

In addition, using a caregiver referral program alongside job boards and hiring websites can significantly cut your hiring time and costs and improve the quality of applicants you receive.

Happy employees attract other employees who are keen to work in a positive and team-oriented environment – so setting up an employee referral program is undoubtedly the way forward. Adding a paid referral bonus to reward referrals that turn into hires is a surefire way to engage your current caregivers in the program.

10. Continually track and measure results 

Data is an essential part of understanding which steps in your hiring process are working well and which require some improvement. Most successful business models rely on data metrics to analyze and refine existing processes.

Using Smartcare Software tools, you can identify how cost-efficient and effective your hiring pipeline is by accessing a wide range of data, including:

• source of hire: which channels generate the most applications
• quality of hire: which channels attract the best-qualified applicants
• time-to-hire: the time involved in finding and hiring a new employee
• which job postings achieve the best return on investment (ROI).

Sophisticated data collection and reporting software options are essential to optimize your hiring process and achieve that all-important edge as the home care industry continues to grow.

The caregiver hiring market is tighter than it’s ever been, so your home care business needs to stand out from the competition if you’re going to attract top talent and secure those quality hires that will keep your business running smoothly.

Smartcare Software can help you make hiring talented candidates easier and faster with ENGAGE ATS – accelerating the hiring process and increasing quality, efficiency, and consistency across all stages, right through to onboarding and retention.

Contact us today for more information on how we can help you streamline your hiring process and secure top-quality caregiver candidates for your team in 2023 – or request a free demo.