When it comes to recruitment and retention, disorganized processes are one of the main reasons home care providers often see a revolving door of caregivers.
That was one of the key takeaways from Activated Insights’ — formerly Home Care Pulse — 2024 Benchmarking Report.
The report found that home care turnover has increased by more than 12% over the past two years. The current industry-wide turnover rate is 79.2%.
This often results in home care providers having to turn away new clients.
Activated Insights also reported the hiring rates across various home-based care sectors. Only 16.4% of home health and hospice nurses applicants were hired in 2023. This was a 25% decrease in applicant-to-hire ratio compared to the previous year.
Additionally, only 12.8% of home care applicants were hired during the same period.
When looking at the home care providers’ main methods for recruiting professional caregivers, Indeed.com came out on top at 39.3%.
Even though Indeed is favored by home care providers, it is generally ineffective at producing long-term gains.
“Although Indeed continues to be the most popular recruitment source, it produces the highest turnover rate of 88%, ultimately producing a short-lived ‘quick win’ for recruitment numbers but a devastating retention rate,” Activated Insights wrote in the report.
At 14.6%, having an employee referral program in place was the second highest utilized method of recruitment.
Word of mouth or reputation was the third most popular method at 9.4%, and an organization’s own website was the fourth at 7.0%.
Rounding out the rest of the list — 4.3% of home care providers are utilizing myCNAjobs.com, 4.1% social media, 1.1% reactivation of previous employees, 1.1% Career Builder and 0.9% job fairs.
Plus, 5.7% of home care providers said they are utilizing “other recruitment sources.” These included things like church or faith-based newspapers, corporate TV advertisements, radio, chambers of commerce and more.
The report also looked at home health and hospice recruitment methods. The top responses for these providers looked similar to the methods that home care providers are utilizing.
For home health and hospice providers, Indeed was the top answer at 31.5%, and 9.4% of respondents said word of mouth. A company’s own website came in third at 6.0%.
Companies featured in this article:
