If you’re having trouble recruiting caregivers for your home care business, you aren’t alone. But there are steps that you can take to be more successful with your recruiting. In this episode of A Drink With the Hurricane, our guest speaker Anne-Lise Gere talks about different approaches that can help with recruiting when you’re looking for quality caregivers.
One of the top two problems that home care business owners around the country share with me is that they can’t get enough caregivers – they’re having trouble with recruitment. At Hurricane Marketing Enterprises, our area of expertise is helping you with the other top problem that home care businesses today face: Getting more clients. To address problems with recruitment, we’ve gotten guest speaker Anna-Lise to share her advice. Here’s what she has to say:
You may be familiar with the marketing funnel, which you may use to turn people you meet into paying clients. Recruitment has its own funnel: We turn potential candidates into valuable employees.
You can picture the recruitment funnel as an inverted triangle with three levels or steps:
Attraction
Selection
On-Boarding
Attraction
When you’re seeking caregivers for your home care business, you’re trying to attract candidates to fill out applications for the position. The trick is to achieve quantity and quality: To get a sufficient number of candidates who have the right experience to be a good fit for your company. If you’ve ever posted an ad on Craigslist and attracted hundreds of applicants, only to find that none were qualified enough for you to offer them the job, you know that the wrong type of recruiting can be a waste of time.
The secret is to put your recruitment funnel where you’re most likely to find good candidates.
Many clients affected by the caregiver shortage want to know how to attract more potential hires. Most are posting job listings on multiple websites, and that’s all that they’re doing. It’s an easy approach, but it’s also lazy, and it’s not always fruitful. For better results, expand your horizons beyond online posting.
You’ll have luck if you go out into the local community and find places where potential caregivers hang out. They may spend time there virtually, if not physically. One of my favorite places to suggest is technical schools that have nursing programs and CAN or HHA programs. This is the type of training that people get if they’re interested in becoming caregivers. If you advertise your vacant positions at schools like these, you should be able to find people who are qualified to be caregivers. You’ll just need to decide if they have what it takes to be right for your agency during the selection process.
Selection
This stage of the recruitment process is the one that most people are familiar with. Once you’ve got a pool of candidates, you select those who meet your criteria, then have a screening interview over the phone. If they sound right, you bring them in for a face-to-face interview.
It’s wise to have two people in your company meet prospective hires before you make job offers. It’s a simple checks-and-balances step that doesn’t take much time or effort, and it could prove to be very valuable.
Extending a job offer is the stepping stone from the Selection process to the On-Boarding process.
On-Boarding
Once someone accepts a job offer, she becomes a new hire. Many people think that the recruitment process is over during an employee’s first day of work. You’ll have greater success with retention if you consider On-Boarding to be the third step of the recruitment funnel, since there’s such high turnover during new caregivers’ first 90 days of employment.
A successful On-Boarding process extends well beyond first-day orientation. Ideally, it should continue through the first 90 days that a new caregiver is with your company. Check in, answer questions and help the caregiver navigate your home care company. I recommend a mentoring program to help your new caregivers become skilled, effective and committed to your agency as quickly as possible.
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If you’d like to hear Anna-Lise’s insights into your company’s recruitment challenges, we can set up a one-on-one meeting with her for you! Every person who registers for the upcoming Hurricane Marketing Enterprises Boot Camp as a VIP will receive a complimentary one-on-one strategy session with Anne-Lise. She’ll help with your recruitment and retention challenges so that you’ll be able to Blow Away The Competition!
