How Home-Based Care Agencies Are Boosting Staff Applications by 72%

Two new reports have contextualized the home-base care industry’s staffing crisis, and the numbers are staggering.

From PHI and the Health Workforce Research Center on Long-Term Care: Of the 13.7 million workers who, during the first three months of the pandemic, were displaced from occupations with similar entry-level requirements to direct care, only 9.1 million had returned to the workforce a year later — and “an immeasurably small” number of those workers are joining direct care.

From ShiftMed: Almost half of U.S. nurses are at least “somewhat likely” to leave their professions through 2023, with 31% planning on leaving health care altogether.

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These figures, which don’t even account for non-medical home caregivers, are compelling. So too are the results of home-based care agencies using Home Care Pulse to combat them.

The Rexburg, Idaho-based Home Care Pulse helps home care agencies set a foundation for sustainable, long-term growth by facilitating for them three key steps to improving staffing:

— Experience management, in the form of surveys

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— Care team and administrative team training

— Reputation management, in the form of an active online presence

“On average, agencies that used one of our three services got 72% more applicants last year,” says Connor Kunz, Home Care Pulse director of marketing. “Agencies that used all three got 106% more applicants last year than the average agency that does not use our services.”

These statistics were gathered as part of the annual Home Care Benchmarking Study.

Caregiver shortages are here to stay, and will likely get worse. The long-term solution for individual agencies is to build a strong employer brand — a reputation in their local market that helps caregivers see a particular agency as a place that they can grow and develop, especially when they have their pick of agencies to work for.

In this competitive hiring landscape, it is critical that home-based care organizations take a proactive approach to managing their public perception, specifically among prospective employees. Here is a look at how agencies can build an experience and a reputation that attracts a greater volume of high-quality caregivers.

Experience Management

The first step in building a strong employment brand is actively managing caregiver experience.

“The bottom line here is that even the best agencies, have blind spots,” Kunz says. “Surveys and other experience management tools help identify those blind spots. On top of that, data means more than opinion, and you can make better decisions about what to improve based on data and feedback than your own opinions.”

Home Care Pulse surveys more than 50,000 caregivers (as well as an even greater number of clients) each year to help agencies learn about the caregiver experience they’re providing and identify where they can improve. This is the only feedback survey program built specifically for home care agencies.

By gathering data from both the client and caregiver audiences, agency owners can take the pulse of their brand’s public perception and better understand everything that’s happening in their business.

Training

As part of their surveying, Home Care Pulse learns the areas of need for today’s caregivers.

“The data from this year showed that, for the first time ever, caregivers’ top complaint was lack of training,” Kunz says.

Specifically, caregivers wanted:

— More prep before their first shift

— A better introduction to new clients

— Increased ongoing training, especially as it leads to upward progression within agencies, Kunz says.

They preferred a mixture of online and in-person training. The agencies using training as a recruitment tool have a significant advantage when it comes to retention and employee experience.

Reputation Management

Similar to increased and targeted training, reputation management creates robust client-side benefits. Agency owners know that reputation management helps attract clients, but they often fail to recognize it attracts caregivers as well.

In fact, reputation generally ranks higher in the caregiver population because caregivers represent a younger demographic that places a greater value on our peer review culture. The role of reputation management in recruiting is highly undervalued, but it is important on both sides of the fence. By generating and managing reviews from across the web, agency owners can attract more clients and caregivers to grow their businesses.

Home Care Pulse’s three-pronged approach to workforce development ties experience management, training and reputation management together to help agencies become the home care organization caregivers compete to work for. They’ve helped thousands of agencies implement these tools, but many of them fail to see the three components as a single process.

When experience management, training and reputation management are siloed and treated as separate entities, the potential of each one is severely limited. To date, Home Care Pulse’s Care Intelligence Platform is the most in-depth tool combining all three designed specifically for home care, with the goal of enabling agencies to use all of their tools in tandem for maximum effectiveness and efficiency.

This article is sponsored by Home Care Pulse. To learn more about its Care Intelligence Platform, visit homecarepulse.com.

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