3 Ways to Build a Pipeline of Quality Home Care Talent

To keep a strong pipeline of qualified home care talent in 2019, you’ll need to rethink your strategy, strengthen your brand, and embrace new technology, writes Beth Kempton of Hireology.

Between a historically low unemployment rate, few job seekers interested in home care careers and 97% of caregivers open to new job opportunities, staffing up with quality talent is more challenging than ever in the home care industry. At the same time, the demand for qualified, compassionate home care employees has never been greater – an aging population is contributing to significant growth in the industry, with Americans projected to spend $5.7 trillion on home care by 2026.

The competitive hiring market and growing demand for home care services means your agency needs to have a strategy in place to build a pipeline of quality applicants – rather than only starting the hiring process when you have an immediate need. Below, we’ve pulled together a few tips to get started.

Treat Hiring Like Customer Marketing

Think about how you drive new business for your home care agency. When it comes to your marketing budget, you likely don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Instead, chances are you tap into many channels to drive business – including your website, local advertisements, digital advertisements, and more. But many businesses in home care – and other industries – don’t take the same approach with recruitment marketing. Instead, they often make the mistake of buying costly, one-off job board postings to fill roles quickly as soon as they open up. But these one-off postings can lead to a high quantity, yet low quality of applicants and, as a result, wasted budget.

By instead diversifying your job board spend, you can reach hundreds of the best local and national recruitment channels. Other channels you can reach with a diverse recruitment marketing strategy include include local classified ads, social networks, specialty and mass media job boards. You can also tap into different channels depending on the role your home care business is recruiting for rather than using the same strategy each time you have an open role. Ultimately, this will help your home care business drive more quality candidates and, as a result, increase overall productivity and profitability.

Automate Your Recruitment Marketing Efforts

The average time it takes to post a single job board posting is 1.5 hours and each post can cost hundred of dollars – while often driving few quality candidates. If your home care business frequently has job openings, the cost and time spent on each job board posting transaction add up quickly. Instead, by enlisting the help of an automated recruitment marketing tool, you can move away from transactional job board spending and the entire process will be managed for you, while reaching hundreds of applicant channels.

While the recruitment campaign is being managed for you, your HR team can save time and spend it on other tasks to help your home care business grow. Ultimately, this will save your team time and money, and help you attract more quality applicants.

Once you have a more diverse recruitment marketing strategy, it’s important to understand which applicant channels are driving the most qualified candidates – and eventual hires – and which channels aren’t driving results for your home care business. And when you have a grasp into the performance of different applicant channels, you can eliminate the channels that aren’t driving results, ultimately reducing recruitment marketing costs without sacrificing overall quality of hires.

By diversifying your job boards and other recruitment channels, you can avoid spending too much of your budget on costly, one-off job board postings. As a result, you can have a continuous recruitment strategy in place and always have your open roles posted on channels that drive results. This will be especially helpful for building a pipeline of quality candidates for roles you need to fill regularly, such as caregivers.

Build a Strong Employment Brand

With so much competition for home care employees – from other home care businesses and employers across industries – maintaining a compelling employment brand is key to attracting the right job applicants and providing top-notch care. Your employment brand is just as important as the overall brand you build to attract new customers at your home care agency.

The low unemployment rate means job seekers can be more selective than ever before when it comes to finding new job opportunities. Because of this, the goal of your employment brand should be to sell job applicants on the opportunity of joining your team. In your job descriptions, focus on what your home care team offers its employees – with details such as your benefits, company culture and awards.

Beyond writing great job descriptions, your home care business needs a compelling career site, as the most quality job seekers tend to apply to open roles on career sites, as opposed to simply clicking “apply” on several job board postings. On your career site, highlight details about the workplace culture, career progression and overall benefits to get top talent excited about joining your team. Also make sure your career site is mobile-friendly – making it easy to both read and apply to open roles via mobile devices. Hireology data found that a career site is 15x more cost-effective than job boards when it comes to attracting quality caregivers.

With the right job descriptions on your career site, you can get top talent excited about the prospect of joining your team, ultimately helping you build a pipeline of qualified talent for your open roles.

Your recruitment strategy is more important than ever before, given the tough hiring market and increasing demand for home care. By following these tips, you can be more proactive with your hiring efforts and attract more quality candidates.