By Stephen Tweed
Ongoing research at the Home Care CEO Forum shows that caregiver shortages, caregiver recruiting, and caregiver retention are still the biggest barriers to growing your Home Care business.
It’s been seven years since my book, Conquering the Crisis: Proven Solutions for Caregiver Recruiting and Retention came out. Back in 2017, we recognized that the shortage of caregivers in home care was going to be a major issue. We coined the term, “The Caregiver Recruiting and Retention Crisis.”
Since then, the caregiver crisis has become the number one burning issue for home care company owners and CEOs. Beginning in 2020, we spent two years conducting research and seeking solutions to help our Home Care CEO Mastermind Group Members figure out how to find and keep caregivers. We formed a Caregiver Quality Assurance Mastermind Group, and we had the members test out the lessons we were learning from our research. We gathered data to better understand what was working and what wasn’t.
Discover actionable insights to attract and retain caregivers, essential for growing your business.
1. Build a Better Company Culture – Your company culture forms the base for building a great place to work. Moreover, the leading companies in our industry have dedicated years to cultivating a culture that appeals to high-quality caregivers.
2. Define Your Best Caregivers – If you don’t know what you are looking for, you’ll never be able to find it.
Craft a targeted recruiting strategy by identifying the traits of your top caregivers.
3. Attract Better Applicants. Home care leaders widely agree that caregiver job applicant quality has notably declined in the last five years. To expand your business, adopt new methods to attract superior applicants. Furthermore, we’ve discovered that superior applicants are not actively seeking employment on Indeed.com. Our latest research confirms that the best new hires often come from your Employee Referral Program, with exciting new networking approaches emerging in the community.
4. Shorten Your Speed-to-Hire. Caregivers who are looking for work need work and pay right now.
Companies achieving recruiting success prioritize reducing the time from application submission to shift readiness for applicants.
5 Increase your 90-Day Retention. We learned from Home Care Pulse that 57% of turnover happens in the first 90-days. We conducted a major project to understand 90-day turnover and identified the Three Big Causes. You can enhance 90-day retention only by minimizing these three major causes.
6. Reward What Matters. The behavior that gets rewarded gets repeated. The leading home care companies are finding ways to measure performance and put in place reward systems that reward the behavior they want repeated. If you want caregivers to stay with you for a year, three years, five years, you need to find innovative ways to reward longevity.
7. Track Your Data and Refine Your Systems. Home care recruiting and retention is a moving target. What worked five years ago may not work today. To grasp this, every home care company requires systems to capture, calculate, and convert data into strategic decisions, enhancing recruitment and retention processes. One of the major trends in our industry today and going forward is “Data Oriented Decision Making.”
There are no silver bullets to solving the crisis. The top home care companies excelling in recruitment and retention are implementing these strategies.
Stay tuned for our ongoing research on caregiver recruiting and retention, as we uncover proven strategies to effectively find and retain the workers you need to grow your business and meet client demands.
Invite Stephen Tweed to Speak at Your Next Association Conference or Corporate Meeting
Having spent over three decades serving the Home Care industry, and being an award-winning professional speaker, Stephen Tweed is frequently invited to present keynote speeches and learning seminars at Home Care association conferences and corporate meetings. For the latest list of Stephen Tweed’s Hot Topics for 2024, visit www.homecareceo.com, or send an email to Stephen@homecareceo.com