Attracting the right number of caregivers to meet client demand is challenging. Your growth is limited by not having great caregivers available when the client is ready. And, keeping those caregivers requires that you've got a job they want when they're ready. Growing agencies are figuring out how to keep the right supply of caregivers to meet client opportunities. An insight from the 2020 Benchmarking Study points out a critical way to boost your effectiveness.
The largest agencies recruit at least twice as many people from their own websites as smaller agencies. Not only is that less expensive than using a job listing service, it has another benefit too, it allows you to tell your story in a way that connects with the caregiver.
What's blocking better caregiver recruiting? The ads you rely upon to attract them.
It's a simple fact that a job listing or an advertisement can't tell the unique story of your company, or engage a potential caregiver in the special culture of your company. That's one reason that getting caregivers onto your website is critical, it's an environment in which you can focus their attention long enough to tell them about more than just the details of a job. You can do "show and tell" about why they should want to work for your company.
Ancient Proverb: Whoever delivers your message can make things better or worse for you
In the case of job listings, this saying certainly rings true. The way you deliver your employment message can either help you or hurt you. Relying upon job listings to communicate what's unique about your agency is like asking the food coupons in Thursday's paper to tell the whole story about the quality, ingredients and features of a food item - not to mention the financial story. Job listings and employment ads can reduce your company to just another commodity to be shopped. That is not the pathway to building a sustainable recruiting pipeline.
This is one of the reasons that employee referrals are so valuable. They tell the company story in a personal way that is trusted by the prospect. Are you effectively supporting referrals in your home care website?
A steady flow of caregivers means reaching them before they go shopping for a job
While many home care agencies dedicate just one page to recruitment, or take people to an offsite location to look at listings, winning agencies do more to recruit on their own website. They understand that they have to reach caregivers at all stages of their journey toward a new job.
- Cold - reaching caregivers who are just in the beginning stages of thinking about a job change. You become a valuable source of information for potential future employees.
- Warm- reaching caregivers who are warming up to the idea of your company, and who want to be convinced that there really is something better out there.
- Hot- reaching caregivers who are actively looking for work, but instead of winning them to just a specific job, you win them to the culture of the company.
Can home care agencies own the job search space?
While there is heavy reliance in the industry upon job listings and ads, the path to a consistent flow of caregivers means taking them out of the job market listing space and onto digital properties that you can influence or control. What's important is not whether the industry can make this shift, but rather, whether you can make it happen for your company.
The faster and more effectively you move job seekers at all levels of readiness to your own digital space, the stronger your recruiting pipeline. That is, if you've prepared the home care website to be an effective digital recruiter. But for many companies, even if they got the job seeker on their website, it wouldn't help because they aren't telling their employer brand story on their website anyway.
Making the right kind of investments in your online presence can not only reduce recruiting costs, it can also move your from having to "rent" job listing space for every opening, to having your own digital asset that moves this process into the "owned" column. This does not need to be a painful or difficult process.
Digital Recruiting & Your Home Care Website
- Take a few moments and put on the job seeker's hat. Go through the process of starting on a job listing to see just how much of your company's story is really coming through.
- Look at your website and ask the same question. Would a potential caregiver "get the story" of your company just from what they can view online? This will also answer the question above about whether employee referrals are being backed-up and supported by your website.
- Ask yourself, "why would a caregiver be interested in our website?" Do you offer anything of value that might attract or keep them beyond a job listing?
- Take few moments and schedule a game planning discussion with someone from our team to discuss how a website redesign or microsite might help your website work harder to improve caregiver recruiting.
