Demand for home health care services continues to increase, presenting many challenges when it comes to staffing your home health care agency. Recent data projects that Americans will spend $5.7 trillion on health care by 2026. But many home health care agencies struggle to keep up with this growth from a staffing perspective.
Beyond projected job growth, there are many challenges in home health care hiring. These include: limited interest in home health care careers and current home health care employees’ interest in roles outside the industry.
Given these obstacles, how can you ensure you’re staffing your home health care agency with qualified employees to keep up with continued growth over the next decade? Below, we’ve outlined several tips to attract and hire your best home health care team.
Maintain a strong employer brand
Your home health care agency needs to put in extra effort to attract CNAs, nurses and other prospective applicants for your open roles. This can be made possible with a strong employer brand.
The goal of your employer brand should be to answer the “What’s in it for me?” question for job seekers through your job descriptions and career site. Today’s job seekers are motivated by far more than pay and want to learn about your home health care agency’s benefits, career paths, training opportunities, and more. And while home health care positions require certain certifications, your job descriptions should also highlight preferred competencies, rather than only specific required experience. For example, let job seekers know you’re looking for caregivers who are compassionate and level-headed.
In addition to great job descriptions, your home health care business needs a strong career site, as the most engaged candidates apply through career sites. Your career site should include details on the workplace culture, career progression and overall benefits to help top candidates see the opportunity your team offers.
With effective job descriptions and a compelling career site, you can get top talent excited about the possibility of joining your team.
Follow a streamlined process for staffing your home health care agency
Not only is there stiff competition for job seekers to apply to your open roles, but quality applicants who are interested in joining your team are likely to be off the job market sooner rather than later. This means you need an efficient hiring process for your home health care agency – or you’ll risk losing top talent to competing offers.
Hireology data found that more than 10 percent of all applicants across home health care agencies and home care agencies are lost simply because they’re never reviewed or they’re reviewed too late.
You can jump start your efficient home care hiring strategy by streamlining the initial screening process.
Many employers today spend a significant amount of time manually reviewing job applicants – including those who aren’t a fit for open roles – which can slow down the hiring process and frustrate job applicants.
To avoid spending time manually reviewing job applicants, your home health care agency can leverage prescreen surveys. These surveys are automatically sent to applicants, helping your team save time instead of reviewing each applicant individually. Once prescreen surveys are automatically scored, only qualified candidates will move on to the candidate stage of the hiring process, helping you significantly decrease candidate review time.
Other steps that can help you speed up the hiring process for your home care agency include objective interview guides, integrated skills assessments, and automated reference and background checks.
Continuously improve your hiring
Once your home health care agency has a hiring process in place, it’s also important to track data related to your hiring efforts in order to continuously improve. Hireology customers have access to Insights, actionable Q&A analytics that answer questions such as: How fast am I hiring? Is everyone following my hiring process? Which recruitment marketing channels are driving the most quality candidates and hires?
Armed with this data, your home health care agency can better understand which steps you need to take to make the hiring process more efficient. If the data shows candidates keep getting held up in a certain hiring step, for example, you can identify ways to speed up this step. And if you notice a recruitment marketing channel – such as a specific job board – isn’t driving many quality candidates and eventual hires, you can eliminate this channel and only invest in those that drive results.
The rapidly increasing demand for home health care services shows no signs of slowing down. By having a proactive strategy in place to ensure you’re staffing your home health care agency with qualified employees, you can ultimately drive improved productivity, profitability and patient care at your agency.
Are you interested in learning more about how Hireology can help you attract top talent, hire qualified candidates and seamlessly connect new hires with your HR systems – such as scheduling and preboarding? Get a free consultation today.
