Duration: 32m 25s
Right at Home has been serving clients and communities for 30 years. During that time, we’ve seen firsthand the incredible growth in awareness of, and demand for, home care. The number of people who are choosing to age at home with comfort and dignity continues to rise. This means that the work we do through our Right at Home franchises grows more important all the time.
That work begins and ends with the compassion and excellence of our caregivers. So as a franchise owner, before you can even begin to think about courting clients, serving your community, and growing your business, you need to focus on caregiver recruitment and retention.
Fortunately, Right at Home provides all franchise owners with the blueprint, and a whole bunch of time-tested best practices, for attracting and keeping caregivers. In a recent episode of Tuesday Talks, VP of Franchise Development Jen Chaney sat down with Right at Home Director of Franchise People Strategy Jessica Schultz to learn more.
Filling the Recruitment Pool
Just how important is caregiver recruitment to what we do?
“It’s 100% of your business,” says Jessica.
The reality is that you need to start filling your pool with qualified caregivers before you can begin the process of acquiring new clients. And once you’ve done that…you have to keep doing it! A huge part of running a franchise is keeping that pool warm with potential caregivers at all times.
“The role of recruitment is actually evergreen,” Jessica says. “You will never stop recruiting. It is 100% going to be what your office will be doing constantly, because in order for you to not only sustain your business, but to grow your business, you’re going to need more caregivers along the way.”
Using the Right Tools
The good news is that Right at Home offers some excellent tools to help you do exactly that. The most important of these tools is the Applicant Tracking System (ATS). This is especially valuable when it comes to job posting.
“The ATS will take that one job posting,” says Jessica, “and spread it around to all of the job boards that are associated with your ATS.”
Jessica cites popular job boards like Indeed, Zip Recruiter, and CNA Jobs.
“There are a lot of ways to recruit,” Jessica says, “We don’t want to be just on one job board. We want to be on several. The ATS will not only spread that job posting, but once those candidates come to you, you can move them through the process seamlessly, and start to deliver messages to them.”
Your ATS is also an invaluable source for data and insight on how your job posting campaigns are performing. Your ATS can automatically track valuable metrics like time-to-fill and conversation rates, which makes it possible to lean into recruitment strategies that are working and pivot away from those which are not.
“You can also pull reports from within your ATS,” says Jessica. “So it’s kind of like a one-stop-shop to bring the caregiver all the way from applying for the job up to the moment that they’re hired with you.”
Like most resources available through Right at Home, the ATS is optional. However, Jessica notes, “it’s a really cool tool. We highly recommend that franchisees use the ATS.”
Job Posting Best Practices
So your ATS can help to distribute your job postings. But what about creating job posts that actually work? It may sound simple, but the truth is, recruitment is a form of marketing. This is something you’ll need to learn to do effectively in order to keep qualified caregivers flowing through the door.
Jessica advises that effective job posting is “really about learning how to build your marketing strategy and understanding what you’re going after, and then coming up with your recruitment plan.”
“In order to understand what that marketing strategy is,” she continues, “you have to go out and look at what your competitors are doing, and how they are marketing some of those jobs that you’re also going to be marketing.”
This means doing thorough market research on what other home care providers in your region are paying caregivers, how they’re framing their messaging, and what else they’re doing to improve the visibility of their job postings. Fortunately, Right at Home does provide a lot of helpful tools, templates and resources to make job posting easier and more effective.
For example, “you’re always going to be recruiting with different titles and such,” says Jessica. “So what’s really cool is our system actually has different demographics that you can target and go after. So let’s say you’re in a community that has a military base, or you have a nursing hospital or something like that. These are different demographics that you can target in your job postings.”
This kind of direct messaging, says Jessica, “really can help you elevate your job posting and get more candidates into the pool.”
Prioritizing Diversity
Right at Home’s job posting tools make it easier to focus your messaging on specific demographics. However, the goal is not to favor, exclude or deprioritize any demographics when recruiting.
Indeed, caregivers may be students, stay-at-home parents, or retirees. They may be 19 years old or 90 years old. Truly, the biggest qualifications are neither age nor background, but compassion, patience, and dedication. So the goal of targeted recruitment messaging is to speak more directly to the experiences and goals of individual candidates.
“I would say the target demographic is going to be anyone who is looking for a job,” says Jessica. “This is an entry level job. It all will depend on your community.”
Retention Strategies
Naturally, recruitment is only one piece of the puzzle. The other piece of the puzzle is retention. As any Business 101 professor will tell you, it’s always more cost effective to keep existing employees than to go out and hire more.
However, Jessica notes, the average caregiver tenure is just around 6 months long. So anything franchisees can do to keep caregivers around longer is good for the bottom line and good for the clients. Naturally, effective retention begins with thoughtful recruitment.
“That’s where we try to really target some of those nursing students who need those contact hours, or folks that really want to just work long-term for your business,” says Jessica.
But there are also some great programs that Right at Home uses to help improve retention among current employees. For example, Right at Home is partnered with Caribou Care, which Jessica describes as a way of rewarding caregiver dedication and excellence. The reality is that this industry often sees high turnover because the work, though rewarding, can also be demanding and lonely.
Jessica explains that Caribou Care “will award caregiver points, and then caregivers can redeem those points for various gift cards or add additional income onto their paycheck. So if they go above with their client, if they get a kudos, or maybe they have perfect attendance…it’s kind of fun for them to gain points and then turn those points into actual gift cards.”
Jessica notes that this type of incentivization can really improve morale, “so it’s been fun and exciting to watch.”
Happy Caregivers Have Happy Clients
Caregivers are the heartbeat of Right at Home. The recruitment tools and best practices we provide here at corporate are just some of the many entirely optional support resources we offer. Whether or not you use them is up to you.
But there is one thing that is not optional. You have to build a culture that caregivers want to be a part of, because ultimately your caregiver’s experience will shape your client’s experience.
“It’s just kind of the rule of thumb,” says Jessica. “If we’re amazing with our caregivers, they’re likely going to be amazing with our clients.”