For the third quarter issue of Home Care Evolution Quarterly magazine, as promised, this is part 3 of “The Road To $10 Million.” And in this article, I’m going to discuss things that we need to do from a recruiting standpoint so that we will be able to recruit enough caregivers to generate more than $10 million in total annual revenue.
THE NUMBERS:
First, let’s have a look at the metrics and the numbers behind getting this volume of caregivers. How many applicants do we need to have apply for a job if I want to generate over $10 million in revenue? Based on the data from the 2022 Home Care Pulse report, you would need to have more than 1000 applicants apply to work for your company every year. From these 1000 applicants, you will then need to progress more than 40% through to an interview (Approx 450), to then have about 200 to 215 caregivers work for your company. 200+ caregivers hired and working for you full time, will generate over $10M in revenue.
RECRUITMENT EFFORT:
To be able to generate almost 1,000 applicants, you will need to have an entire recruiting department or recruiting division of your organization. It could also be a separate entity that focuses on recruiting in and of itself, independent of the rest of the operation of your home care agency. In this operation or division, you will have a division or department manager, a managing supervisor who oversees all things recruiting in your organization.
This supervisor will be able to assist in the future of recruiting, making relationships at schools and universities, and then managing and supporting all the recruiters within. This person also will have to pick up responsibilities of the recruiting role when someone is a call out or someone is on vacation or they take a leave of absence, or if you must terminate someone and you have turnover at the position. They should be able to jump in and do recruiting temporarily until the organization gets made whole. Underneath this person, you should have at least three full-time recruiters. It’s safe to say that if you have one recruiter, that person should be able to generate about 200 to 250 applicants a year. Therefore, in order to generate 1000, you would need to have the manager and then three or four additional recruiters. That’s from a leadership and development of staff necessary to succeed.
RECRUITEMENT SOURCES:
Moving on to the actual recruiting itself, the best five referral sources for caregivers based on the 2022 Home Care Pulse report are:
- Indeed.com
- Employee Referral Bonus Program
- myCNAjobs
- Reputation/Word Of Mouth
- Social Media Advertising
INDEED – Let’s start with Indeed, which most of you are using. There are several ways to do it. What most of my top clients who are doing over $10 million in revenue are doing with Indeed are they have a combination of paid ads mixed in with the free ads. They pay for the higher levels of service, where you can have one of your recruiters comb through caregivers who have posted their resume, and then they actively contact these caregivers, trying to bring them in the door. This is the most effective way to utilize Indeed.
EMPLOYEE REFERRAL BONUS PROGRAM – Now over the years, I have seen people do $50-100 bonuses, where the caregiver has to work for three months, and then they get the bonus. I say that is too difficult. Make it easy to attain. The easier it is for somebody to attain the bonus, the more likely you’re going to have to pay the bonus. The more likely you pay the bonus; the more likely people are going to be willing to refer their friends and family to work for you. You want to pay this bonus, so remember that. I recommend making it 40 hours or 80 hours. Once that new hire has worked 40 to 80 hours for you, you pay it to the caregiver.
The second part of this, make the bonus worthwhile. Cost of living has gone up dramatically these last two years. And as a result, $50, $100 is not very exciting. What I recommend doing is paying $250 or even as high as $500 for every caregiver that meets the minimum hours mentioned. That is such a high amount of money that caregivers will be more willing to refer and do so frequently.
Last, you need to over promote this with your caregivers. Send it out in your newsletters. Every time you have a phone conversation, you end the phone call reminding people of it. Send it in text messages regularly. Recognize people when they’re getting the referral bonus. Take pictures, post it on social media. Every single time you speak to a caregiver, even on a field visit to drop in to check on them, make sure you promote your employer referral bonus program. Until you have caregivers asking you to “STOP”, you’re not promoting it enough!
myCNAjobs – My advice is to make sure that when you do work with myCNAjobs, take a look at their library of how to get the maximum return on investment. MyCNAjobs does an extensive training on their software to teach you how to get your return on investment. Where most people go wrong is they don’t utilize the tools that myCNAjobs offers, which shows you ways to maximize getting caregivers and keeping them working for you. So, when you use myCNAjobs, remember, it’s more than just a job posting site. It’s a job posting site with resources that help you to be able to maximize your return on investment, which will help you to generate more leads and keep those caregivers working for you.
WORD OF MOUTH – This is all about what you are doing to retain your caregivers. Make sure that your caregivers have meaningful work while maintaining a good balance between the schedules that they’re working for and their ability to be with their family. Do your best to offer competitive wages. Have perks and benefits. Above all else, offer field support by having people come in the field and offer them support on a regular basis.
I teach people how to create the care coordinator position, as I talked about in the last issue of Home Care Evolution Quarterly. The care coordinator is a field supervisor. Agencies that have field supervisors tend to keep their caregivers working for them longer than agencies that don’t. As a result, the agencies with field supervisors also tend to attract more caregivers working for them than the agencies that don’t because when the caregivers know they have field support, they want to work for those agencies. This results in having a better reputation and that reputation is worth its weight in gold!
SOCIAL MEDIA – when it comes to social media, it can be difficult as there are so many platorms to choose from. Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are only a few. In my opinion, Facebook is the only one to focus your effort on. The other platforms are good, but “There’s only so much money to go around”. You will find professional caregivers on LinkedIn, for example. The drawback from LinkedIn though is any caregiver that’s savvy enough to have a LinkedIn profile and use it regularly is going to cost you top dollar. This is a very experienced caregiver who deserves the higher compensation. So, unless you’re paying the top 25th percentile in your marketplace, you may need to look elsewhere.
Facebook with their boosting post and advertising department, they’ve really vamped it up where you can now get somebody on the phone who can help you with setting up your Facebook advertising. You can target certain demographics. You can target people who are caregivers. You can target people who are not caregivers, but they work certain type of positions in other industries, and you might be able to get them to transition over into the home care space. There’s a lot of things you can do with the targeting. And people who are on Facebook, yes, they’re using Facebook for personal connections, but as they’re scrolling through and they’re thinking and they’re seeing all these other ads for things that they want to buy, it also makes them think about what they can and can’t afford, and then the need for resources and a job. So, as they’re scrolling through, if they see your ad, they might contact you and that’s a great source.
So this is what it takes. You now know how many caregivers you need to have apply for your company. I’ve discussed the five best recruitment sources based on the latest Home Care Pulse data and why each one of those sources are good and how to maximize it. Finally, we talked about setting up a recruiting division within your organization to help you to get these 1,000 applicants. In the final part of “The Road to $10 Million, Part 4,” we are going to talk about the sales and marketing effort it takes to generate the referrals necessary so that you can generate $10 million and beyond.
Steve “The Hurricane” Weiss, President & CEO of Home Care Evolution
Steve “The Hurricane” Weiss is a dynamic and entertaining public speaker, known for his expert knowledge in all things sales and marketing. From a young age, Steve has been driven to succeed and excelled across vastly different industries. Steve founded Hurricane Marketing Enterprises in 2012 with a goal to help other business owners around the globe.
Steve’s passion is to lead business owners on the path to find people in need of their services and convert these prospects into clients. His company’s mission statement is to help business owners increase their census, revenue, and profits. Through his programs and presentations, he has guided thousands of individuals to grow their organizations and continues to help them blow away the competition.
With his dedication and hard work, Steve has developed a foolproof program that enables start-up companies to quickly get ahead of the competition while helping existing businesses experience an explosive transformation. Many of his clients double and even triple annual revenue in as little as 6 months.