Building and sustaining a home-based care workforce is vital. It’s also exhausting for providers.
Having a well-thought-out strategy can alleviate some of that pressure, however.
“The real elephant in the room for all of us is that I think most of us in this space are really trying to recruit our way out of a retention problem,” Kevin Kirkland, a senior business strategist with MissionCare Collective, said during a National Association for Home Care & Hospice (NAHC) webinar Thursday. “I met with a home care agency owner just last week and he told me that he’s operating two businesses: one business is a recruiting business, and the second business is his home care agency business.”
MissionCare Collective — the parent company of myCNAjobs and CoachUp Care — is a staffing and recruiting company focused on caregivers.
To change the way the home care industry tackles recruitment and retention, it has to change the way it thinks about it — both from a business perspective and an operational perspective.
It’s usually pretty easy to point to human resources as the arm of any business that handles recruitment. Retention, on the other hand, is tougher to pin down.
“What I’ll usually hear from agencies is that retention is something that’s owned by the entire leadership team, or every employee of an organization,” Kirkland said. “I think all of us can understand that if everybody owns it, no one really does truly own it at all. So my advice and my direction would be to ensure that someone in your organization owns retention. Make it assignable. Make it accountable that someone on your team is owning retention.”
Home care agencies should also be changing the way they track new hires, Kirkland said.
The days of getting as many candidates in the door as possible are gone. That shouldn’t be the barometer for recruiting success anymore.
“Net new employees is the new metric for success,” Kirkland said. “I challenge all agencies to start thinking about measuring your net employee growth, as opposed to measuring new hires.”
Another important factor is making sure new hires are placed in the right situations in the first 30 to 60 days.
“The reason that my CNA jobs tend to be stickier and have a higher success rate of candidates that stay with the organization is because we do a more effective job of matching the criteria and the quality of those candidates on the front end with the opportunities that we’re looking to hire for on the back end,” Kirkland said. “When there’s a greater alignment of the candidate’s interests with the opportunities you place them in, they’re happier. Happier candidates and happier employees translates to a better and more positive memorable service experience with the families and the patients that they’re caring for.”
Business development hires
Aside from caregivers, hiring a dedicated and focused sales and business development team is also hugely important for an agency’s bottom line.
However, offering business development and marketing positions to a broad audience is not the best use of resources, especially in home care.
“A lot of folks are hiring people who want to do email marketing campaigns or social media management,” Home Care Evolution CEO Steve Weiss said during the webinar. “Those things are great and those things do help, but to get the high-need home care clients that can eventually boost revenue, you need direct referral marketing.”
Home Care Evolution is a business development and training company specializing in home-based care.
Marketing to new sales team members should explicitly say the job requires building and establishing relationships with referral partners.
“I can’t stress this enough,” Weiss said. “I have seen a very high number of folks turnover because they don’t want to do the business development — but that is what’s required to bring in the right type of caregivers. Building relationships, business development, community relations — that’s the first step to make sure you have skyrocketing revenue in 2024.”
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