HR 101

How the Home Health Care Industry Can Hire and Retain High-Quality Workers

Pat Brothwell
Pat Brothwell
Home health employees smile after revamping their hiring strategies.

Experts project that by 2025, 72 million Americans will be 65 and older. To meet this need, the home health industry is poised to grow 54% by 2026.

Despite that reality, like many industries, the home health industry needs help finding top talent to fill roles. Home Health Care News and Axxess surveyed home health care professionals and found three-quarters said they’ve had to turn patients and clients away because of staffing shortages.

Additionally (and unfortunately), the home health industry suffers from notoriously high turnover rates, hovering around 64% over the past few years. Home health organizations must be more strategic and meaningful in recruiting (which will help with retention). 

Hiring is arguably as competitive as it’s ever been, and for home health professionals, it’s exceptionally challenging. Home health agencies aren’t just competing for applicants with other industry peers, but often larger corporations like Amazon, Walmart, or Chipotle may be able to extend more competitive benefits or opportunities for growth to entry-level workers.

This post will provide tips for combatting home health care recruiting challenges and advice for increasing retention based on best practices, the latest data, and what’s worked for our home health clients. 

Tips for Recruiting Better-Quality Home Health Care Workers

Approach Recruiting Like Marketing

86% of recruiters agree that recruiting is becoming more like marketing these days. They’re not wrong. You must figure out what your ideal job candidate is looking for in a job and market to them accordingly. It’s a job seeker’s market, and savvy organizations will sell themselves to job seekers just as much as they are expected to sell themselves to companies.

  • Create candidate personas for your ideal job candidate.
  • Ensure you have a strong employer brand. 
  • Create a strategy for making your job candidate experience a positive one, even if applicants don’t get the role—today’s applicants leave reviews on sites like Indeed and Glassdoor and share their applicant experience on social media.

Create a Compelling Career Page

A compelling career page will set your brand apart. You want to give job candidates a taste of what it’s like to work for your organization. You can create a more dynamic career page by:

  • Including testimonials from current or former employees on why they love their role and the company. 
  • Walking potential candidates through the application process. 
  • Posting a video: a day-in-the-life video can be particularly engaging—job candidates spend triple the time watching video content than reading written content. 
  • Sharing your company values.
  • Highlighting your company’s diversity and inclusion policies (today’s job seekers want to work for organizations prioritizing DEI).

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Write Job Postings That Stand Out

A job posting is the first impression job seekers have of your organization. Make sure yours stands out.

Optimize Job Postings

According to CareerBuilder, 70% of job searches start on Google. This means you’ll want to optimize your job posting with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques to ensure Google searchers will find your post. Utilize keywords your job seekers are using to optimize your job postings. This Monster.com article is a useful guide to optimizing job postings.

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Post to Multiple Job Boards

60% of job seekers utilize job boards in their career search, so you’ll want to post your ads to job boards to reach them. Indeed, Glassdoor and ZipRecruiter are some of the most popular job boards, but there are thousands of job boards available.

Utilize Sponsored Posts

We surveyed our users, and 70% utilize organic job postings. Organic posts are a great option, but sponsored posts can take things to the next level. Indeed reports that employers are 4.5x more likely to make a hire when they sponsor a post, while ZipRecruiter finds that sponsored posts receive 11x more applicants than organic posts. It’s also a way to give yourself a competitive edge since most employers aren’t sponsoring jobs.

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Post Jobs to Social Media

79% of job seekers use social media as part of their search. Additionally, 58% of U.S. consumers follow brands on social media, and a study by The Aberdeen Group found 73% of millennials found their last job through social media.

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Remove Barriers

According to CareerBuilder, 60% of job seekers quit in the middle of filling out online job applications because of their length or complexity. In comparison, 40% of job seekers will opt not to apply for roles if they can’t access applications via mobile devices. It can’t be repeated enough that today’s job seekers have more options than ever, so they don’t like to feel like they’re jumping through hoops. You want to make the process as easy as possible for them. 

We suggest going through your application process. How many steps are there? What are the paint points? What might frustrate you if this were another organization? What barriers could you remove to ensure that your application is inclusive and accessible?

Include Mobile Hiring Options

According to data from Glassdoor, 58% of job seekers are looking for jobs on their phones. Mobile job seekers tend to be women, less educated, and mid-career individuals (33-44 years old), who are often target demographics for home healthcare careers. Making your job application as accessible as possible will increase the number of applicants you get.

Speed Things Up

Nearly half of all health care organizations have experienced an increase in the time it takes to fill open positions. 

Today’s candidates don’t want to feel like they’re wasting their time. If the interview process is slow and clunky, it could send a message that all operations at your organization will be slow and cumbersome, which employees don't want. 

60% of recruiters say they regularly lose candidates before they can schedule interviews because the scheduling takes so long. Find a way to automate and streamline your hiring processes—especially time-consuming administrative tasks—so that recruiting feels quick and efficient for those applying for your roles.

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Conduct Remote Interviews

Consider that a job seeker may still be working another career or have personal caretaking duties they can’t drop with short notice. Conducting remote interviews (at least for the first few rounds) shows that you don’t expect a job candidate to rearrange their entire schedule.

Take Advantage of Asynchronous Video Interviewing

Asynchronous video interviews are self-recorded videos candidates can complete on their own timelines. Asynchronous video interviews put every candidate on the same playing field (it’s also an inclusive practice that means you’ll get more candidates to participate in the first round of interviews) when you ask them the same questions in the same cadence.

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Use Background Checks and Pre-Employment Testing

Background checks ensure candidates are who they say they are and pose no threat to your workplace. They’re crucial since you must ensure potential employees don’t harm those they’ll care for.

Pre-employment testing refers to any assessments job candidates take during recruiting, including skill-based, personality, cognitive, aptitude, or integrity tests. Identifying key characteristics of your ideal candidates is crucial when picking top applicants. Given the lower barrier to entry and high degrees of turnover, scanning applicants for desired qualifications helps them rise quickly to the top.  

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Have Strong Communication

More than half of job seekers complained that potential employers didn’t update them regarding their application status. One-third of job seekers said they favor heavy communication during the hiring process and indicated that better communication would improve their candidate experience. 

Organizations could improve communication by:

  • Being transparent about how the process will look from the start of the recruitment process. 
  • After each step of the hiring process, send out meaningful communications via emails or text messaging, letting candidates know the timeframe for the next step. 
  • Communicating any status changes immediately. Don't leave job seekers hanging if you’ve taken them out of consideration. Let them know immediately with thoughtful, meaningful communication so they don’t waste more time and can move on to other opportunities. 

Encourage your employees to communicate with their networks. 85% of jobs are filled through networking, and your workforce probably has a valuable network you should encourage them to touch base with when you have open positions. 

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Monitor Results

You want to make sure your recruitment strategy is working. Ensure procedures and reporting are in place that will provide measurable metrics and KPIs. You’ll want to track the following:

  • External recruitment sources to see where you are getting your best applicants.
  • Cost-per-hire.
  • Time-to-hire.
  • Job post response over time.

Use the insights you gain from your metrics to analyze and modify your recruiting strategy. Be open and flexible to make changes to improve its overall effectiveness. 

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Use an Applicant Tracking System

An applicant tracking system (ATS) is recruiting software built to streamline and automate the recruiting process. An applicant tracking system can help home healthcare companies implement every suggestion on this list, from creating a career page to posting to social media to quick, meaningful, automated communication.

Organizations utilizing an ATS report quicker time-to-hire, better quality hires, and an improved hiring experience. 

  • 78% of companies using an ATS report experience easier recruiting.
  • Data collected by GetApp found 86% of ATS users say the software helped them hire faster, and 78% say it’s improved the quality of their hires.
  • According to Capterra data, 94% of ATS users say ATS use positively impacted their recruiting.

In addition to increasing applicant traffic, improving time-to-hire, and making recruiting easier, an ATS can:

  • Help businesses save time on administrative tasks by automating the hiring processes. 
  • Offer a better candidate experience. A good candidate experience reduces turnover and strengthens retention.
  • Make it easier for businesses to find stronger candidates and optimize their interview process to avoid costly toxic hires. 
  • Free up employees to focus on more pertinent, revenue-generating tasks.
  • Provide customers with a robust network of integrated job boards, social-media posting capabilities, and referral program tools.

A Private Label Applicant Tracking System Can Help Take Hiring Solutions to the Next Level

A private label applicant tracking system is created by another vendor (like HiringThing!) and outfitted with your branding, as well as customized workflows to match your business models and presented as proprietary recruiting software. A private label applicant tracking system is the perfect recruiting solution for businesses that serve the home healthcare industry and home healthcare industry businesses with multiple locations that do a lot of hiring. If this sounds like you, check out our demo below.CLICK HERE FOR DEMOTop of Section

Ways Home Health Care Companies Can Combat Employee Turnover

Offer Competitive Compensation and Benefits 

A competitive compensation and benefits package is one of the most significant factors that can attract and retain high-quality workers. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the median hourly wage for home health aides was $13.00 in 2021, which is lower than many other industries and can make it challenging to attract and retain a top-notch workforce.

To combat this issue, home health organizations can offer competitive salaries, bonuses, and benefits packages that are on par with or better than those provided by other industries or competitors. Widespread benefits include health insurance, PTO, or flexible scheduling.  

Last year, hourly pay rates for LPNs in home health agencies increased by nearly 10% from 2021-2022 (a more significant jump than in previous years); unsurprisingly, turnover rates fell.

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Invest in Training and Development 

An excellent way to retain high-quality workers is by investing in their training and professional development. Investing in training and professional development improves caregiver morale, job satisfaction, and confidence and can help your employees move up the corporate ladder. All of these lead to higher retention rates. 

Data released by Home Care Pulse indicated that agencies that invest in more training hours also generate considerably more revenue. Those who offered 8 hours of orientation and 12 hours of ongoing training increased their agency’s annual revenue by $6,814 per caregiver.

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Foster a Positive Work Environment

A positive work environment is crucial for retaining top talent. When workers feel respected, valued, and supported by their employers, they are likelier to stay with an organization. 

You can foster a positive work environment by providing regular feedback, opportunities for growth and advancement, and a transparent, supportive atmosphere. Additionally, organizations can implement flexible scheduling, PTO, and other policies that support their workforce.

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Encourage Employee Engagement

Employee engagement is essential in attracting and retaining high-quality workers. Workers who feel involved in and invested in their work are more likely to stay with organizations for longer. 

Home health organizations can encourage employee engagement by providing opportunities for workers to give feedback and input, hosting team-building events and activities, and encouraging open and honest communication. Home health organizations can help create a positive and supportive work environment that attracts and retains top talent by making employees feel valued and involved. 

Many home health employees report not having any opportunities to meet coworkers (they’re simply going from client to client and not meeting one another). Facilitating in-company networking opportunities (through mixers, message boards, professional development, etc.) can help them feel engaged with the company. 

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Related Resources

About HiringThing

HiringThing is a modern recruiting platform as a service that creates seamless hiring experiences. Our private label applicant tracking system and open API enable technology and service providers to embed hiring capabilities from sourcing to onboarding. Approachable and adaptable, the platform empowers anyone, anywhere, to hire their dream team.