Hi, folks. Steve “The Hurricane” here, and for today’s episode of “A Drink with The Hurricane”, we’re gonna discuss recruitment and retention, specifically promoting caregivers from within your organization to increase your retention rates. So raise your glass and let’s toast to your success. Cheers.
So recruitment and retention. This is the biggest challenge all home care agencies are facing. You can’t get enough caregivers to meet the demand. And even if we can get the caregivers, it’s just as hard, if not harder, to keep the caregivers working for us. Because as soon as the case ends, if we don’t have work to send them to right away, they’re gonna leave us and go work somewhere else. So this is an ever going, never ending problem. Here’s a quick tip on how you can improve the situation. And that is real simple, by promoting people from within. One of the best clients that I have who’s doing this right now, is Caleb and Faris down in Georgia. They have a huge agency. They are a regional provider. They cover the entire state of Georgia. And they grew their business by promoting people from within. They actually have a career path for caregivers where a caregiver comes in. They start out as a caregiver. They put in their due diligence. They get little promotions and tweaks and incentives along the way. Afterwards, they get a chance to become what’s called a Team Lead or a caregiver, a guaranteed work caregiver. Somebody where you’re paying them to be on call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, or whatever schedule you set up for them. They don’t have any work to start the day, but you assign them to where they have to go. And they’re given a bump in salary when they get this promotion.
The next level up would be a Care Coordinator, which is a manager who’s field oversight, overseeing several caregivers, managing the care that they’re giving to the patients that are entrusting you with their care. From that, you can promote somebody to an office staff; recruiters, schedulers, and even marketing representatives can all be people who get promoted from within. And remember, as I’m saying this to you, this isn’t every single person. You create the career path. The caregivers have to put in their due diligence. They have to prove worthy of getting these promotions and these advancements. You may have 100 caregivers that you hire in one day. I’m sorry. One year. Those 100 caregivers, 95 of them are not gonna make it to the next level. 5 make it to the Team Leads. Out of those 5, maybe 2 become a Care Coordinator someday. And 1 eventually goes to your office staff. So it’s a very, very small percentage. But with this, you can build upon it in the second thing.
When you’re interviewing your caregivers, now that you have a career path, you promote this career path as a reason why they should work for your company. Think about it. It’s very difficult to get caregivers to work for you. So when you’re doing your interviews, you have to almost sell caregivers as to why they should work for your company. When people see that there’s an opportunity to advance and grow and change their futures with hard work, and that’s the key, hard work, it’s not easy being a caregiver. But if you put in your time, as this company is growing, you will be able to advance with us, as long as you’re the right person for it. That’s attractive. That’s how you get the most upwardly mobile, the people who are most likely to advance an organization to come to work for you. People like that opportunity. And that’s how you attract the cream of the crop.
The third and final thing that you can do is once you create this career path, spread it amongst your active caregivers. Let ’em know that there’s this new career path that you’re rolling out. There’s new positions that will be available and it’ll be available based on merit. Meaning when somebody earns it. Now you don’t just promote somebody right away just because. You wait until that client passes away, or discontinues services with one of your good caregivers. So this way you know. You have an idea. If I think Tony is one of my best caregivers, I wanna promote Tony. I don’t wanna take him off of his case because he’s working with his client and his client’s happy. But if his client discontinues services, as a way to not lose a really good caregiver, I’m gonna promote Tony then to the Team Lead, or to a Care Coordinator. Why do I wanna do this? I wanna do this for two reasons. One, the people who are working in a salaried position should be somebody that I know, like, and trust. A caregiver who’s worked for me for at least a year, year and a half, has earned the right to being promoted. I know this person is responsible. I know I can trust them to do a good job because they’ve already worked for me for a certain period of time. And obviously, the second reason why we do it is because when you promote from within, you create a culture that recognizes excellence. When you create this culture that recognizes excellence, you’re gonna be able to, again, attract bigger and better caregivers to do better work for you, making your company truly the agency of choice.
So if you like this tip, folks, do yourself a favor. Click the link below and register to come to the next Home Care Evolution Conference where I’ll get three days with you going over how I can help you adapt your business to the ever changing circumstances of healthcare. Transform it so that you can then move forward with confidence, thriving in the brave new world. I cannot wait to see you at that conference, ’cause you know I’m gonna give you everything you need to blow away the competition.
So I’m Steve “The Hurricane” and I spent three days teaching all these people how to, “Blow away the competition!”