Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other social media channels are quickly becoming more important tools for recruiting home care workers.
That means agencies need to start building their online brand now to stay competitive, Hireology CEO Adam Robinson told Home Health Care News.
Hireology is a talent-technology platform that provides candidate marketing and recruitment CRM services to home care and home health agencies, along with companies in other industries.
“It has become table stakes — an effective multi-channel marketing effort,” Robinson said. “Recruiting via social media certainly includes potential applicants that read your post, click on a link and apply to a job, but equally important is brand building. Word of mouth is heavily influenced by a company’s online employment brand.”
In the past five years, the use of social media for job searching in the health care industry has nearly doubled, according to Hireology statistics. Meanwhile, about 42% of home health care job seekers engage in social media for job searching purposes.
About 84% of companies across all industries currently use social media as part of their recruiting efforts, a recent Society for Human Resource Management poll found.
“Nearly half of candidates leverage social media as a channel for which they learn about companies, learn about jobs or interact with employers. That’s huge,” Robinson said. “It’s half the labor pool.”
To best use social media for recruiting, home health and home care agencies need to identify and join the right conversations on Twitter, job boards and various other challenges. On Twitter, for example, that might mean monitoring activity around #CaregiverJobs or #HomeCareJobs.
Additionally, Robinson said, when not actively recruiting, agencies should still keep up their online presence by commenting on other posts, sharing agency updates and promoting company culture.
“[Social media] is not something you can do once or twice every quarter or so,” he said. “You have to be consistent with it. It’s really less about the agency and more about why working for that agency is going to be a good thing for [the applicant] relative to the other job opportunities.”
In part, millennials more often applying to become caregivers is driving the increased use of social media recruiting as well.
Roughly 73% of millennials found their last position through a social media platform, a past study from the Aberdeen Group suggests.
Broadly, industry insiders have carried mixed opinions on how effective social media is at recruiting new hires. Some, however, have previously touted the benefits of a social media recruiting strategy to HHCN.
They include, for instance, Interim HealthCare Chief Administrative Officer Sonya Hinds, as well as BrightStar Care franchise owner Gary Ratkiewicz.
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