Home health care hiring is more challenging than ever before. Between record-low unemployment and limited interest in home health care jobs, agencies are finding it difficult to attract and hire qualified employees for open roles.
To improve home health care hiring at your agency, it’s important to first sell top talent on the opportunity joining your team presents, then keep candidates engaged throughout the hiring process once they’ve applied. Below, we’ve outlined several ways you can see improved results with hiring home health care workers by embracing technology.
1. Excite Candidates with Your Career Site
Today’s job seekers have access to countless open roles at the tips of their fingers. And up to 70 percent of job searches start on Google. To ensure you’re hiring home health care workers who can help you achieve your business goals, you need to reach prospective applicants where they’re searching for roles. One way to do so is with a compelling, search-optimized career site.
When it comes to home health care hiring, the most engaged job applicants apply for roles on company career sites, as they’re interested in learning more about employers and their potential fit for open roles, rather than simply clicking “apply” on a job board.
The goal of your career site should be to get job seekers excited about joining your team by answering the “What’s in it for me?” question. Beyond pay, today’s top job seekers are interested in employers’ benefits, career paths, ongoing training opportunities, and more.
On your career site, outline everything you have to offer employees. And highlight both employee testimonials and success stories to show job seekers firsthand examples of employees who have grown in their careers at your home health care agency.
2. Speed up Time to Review Applicants
Hireology data found that hiring managers take an average of 10 days to review and respond to initial job applicants. But a recent study also found that top talent is off the market within 10 days of starting the job search – meaning you need to act quickly with your home health care hiring.
One way to speed up the initial applicant review process is by leveraging prescreen surveys. These surveys automatically get sent to new applicants, helping your team save time instead of reviewing each applicant individually. The surveys include “knock out” questions, so applicants who are absolutely not a fit for your open roles get eliminated from the hiring process.
Prescreen surveys are automatically scored and only the most qualified candidates move on to the next step in the hiring process, saving your team time and helping you keep candidates engaged after they apply to your home health care jobs.
3. Streamline Interview Feedback
Beyond initial applicant review, another step of the home health care hiring process that can often get held up is the interview stage. And a recent study found that 70 percent of job candidates lose interest in job opportunities if they don’t hear back within a week of an interview.
In some cases, different hiring managers at your agency might ask different interview questions. Or, your hiring managers might take handwritten notes during and after each interview, making it complicated to compile interview feedback.
To improve the interview stage of your home health care hiring process, you can embrace interview guides. Such guides are role-specific and ensure you’re asking objective, compliant interview questions. With the right technology in place, you can also automatically score interviews, rather than relying on handwritten notes. This enables you to get back to prospective home health care workers quickly and move forward with additional hiring steps sooner rather than later.
4. Effectively Communicate with Candidates
No matter how efficiently you review initial applicants or complete interviews, your home health care hiring process can get slowed down if you don’t have the right communication tools to keep candidates engaged. If you’re like most hiring managers, you’ve likely run into situations when you’ve played phone tag with a candidate or one of your emails has been accidentally overlooked, only for the candidate to receive another job offer before you get in touch.
Rather than tapping into traditional communication methods such as phone calls and emails, your home health care team should consider leveraging text messaging. About 90 percent of job seekers are willing to receive text messages during the hiring process – and texts are much more likely to be seen and responded to than other forms of communication. And Hireology data found that text messaging can save up to eight days on your total time to hire.
To more effectively fill your home health care jobs, your team can tap into text messaging to schedule interviews, share directions to your workplace, follow up with feedback post-interview and remind candidates of actions they need to take – such as completing skills testing.
5. Automate Verification Steps
Even if candidates pass your prescreen survey and interview process with flying colors, it’s critical to include candidate verification as part of your home health care hiring process. Most of your employees have clients’ lives in their hands on a daily basis, so you want to have full confidence in candidates’ backgrounds before extending an offer. But if you don’t move quickly with the verification stage, your top candidates might end up receiving and accepting other job offers.
By embracing technology, you can speed up the reference and background check process without risking candidate quality. For reference checks, rather than your team playing phone tag with candidates’ references, candidates can simply fill in their references’ contact information and surveys are automatically sent out. References can fill out the surveys when they have a few minutes and automated reference checks take less than two days to complete, with an average response rate of 85 percent. And for background checks candidates submit the required personal information and the rest of the process is taken care of automatically.
Gone are the days of paper applications and a manual hiring process. By tapping into technology throughout your home health care hiring process, you can boost candidate engagement and hire employees who will drive productivity, profitability and improved client care. For additional tips on keeping top talent engaged, read our resource, “”The Hireology Candidate Engagement Playbook.”
