The home care industry has a massive labor shortage — and 2022 is the time to get even more creative with staffing strategies.
To fill their teams now, agencies are trying a variety of approaches, some of which include massive spending on contract labor, offering large signing bonuses to new hires, and paying existing employees overtime wages to pick up the slack created by being short-staffed. But one challenge that these approaches do not address is the talent pool itself.
An agency seeking to attract new workers must change its approach to hiring. Maryland-based Arena Analytics recommends that employers across health care, especially within home health care, apply predictive analytics to their hiring processes. Arena combines analytics and artificial intelligence to help agencies identify which applicants will stay in an organization.
In short, the company is focused on expanding the hiring pool and using data to match people to roles where they’ll stay — reducing costly turnover that’s plaguing all home care agencies alongside staff shortages prevalent across the market.
But more than finding workers to address staff shortages, Arena strives to stabilize the workforce and help organizations find workers that will stick around for the long term.
“With Arena Analytics, we have augmented our applicant pool by more than 20 percent,” says June Altaras, Senior Vice President & Chief Quality, Safety & Nursing Officer, MultiCare Health System.
Here is a look at four steps agencies can take to expand the talent pool in 2022.
Recruit from untapped population segments and nontraditional talent pools
Providers need a more innovative approach to sourcing talent. There are potential home-based care staff members who are not yet in the industry and may even feel, for one reason or another, that the industry is not open to them. It’s time to begin recruiting this talent.
One untapped segment is senior workers. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that by 2029, those 55 and older will make up 25 percent of the total workforce. Based on data alone, it makes sense to begin recruiting from this demographic, especially considering that seniors have the time to provide companionship and personally understand the nuances of aging in a way that other caregivers might not.
Workers with experience in the hospitality and service industries, including restaurant, retail and hotel settings, are also strong contenders for home-based care staff. After all, customer-facing industries share the same goal as agencies: to provide quality service.
If finding talent in unfamiliar talent pools sounds daunting, workforce solutions like Arena Analytics’ Talent Discovery offering can help.
“We source candidates from a variety of places, including within a client’s ATS, the nearby community, and nontraditional candidate pools,” says Karen Antrim, Director of Talent Discovery, Arena Analytics. “These initiatives, especially when paired with Arena’s retention prediction, can quickly stabilize your workforce by finding talent predicted to stick around your organization.”
Clarify each job’s real requirements to lower the barrier to entry
Today’s new approach to home-based care hiring is not simply about data and technology. It’s about using these predictive analytics to support a philosophical change in approach.
Home-based care agencies must start from the ground up in their hiring philosophy, re-evaluating each job’s actual requirements and necessities compared to how they’ve traditionally framed the job.
Perhaps direct experience in home care isn’t a necessary job prerequisite. Instead, consider whether a candidate’s volunteer experience with children, the elderly, disabled, or years caring for one’s own ailing relatives could suffice.
For some roles, a high school diploma may not really be needed. If the candidate shows compassion and demonstrates understanding and basic comprehension, a diploma is just a barrier to entry. Especially in this tough labor market, it’s critical that you carefully consider whether each of your job requirements is a nice-to-have or an actual requirement.
Remove bottlenecks in the hiring process
With increasing competition for staff, it’s critical for home care agencies to tighten up their recruiting and hiring processes to increase time-to-hire. The demand for labor is only continuing to rise. Any friction in the candidate hiring journey risks losing interested job applicants to other agencies, or even other industries.
“With so many industries competing for the same talent, providers must thoroughly prepare internal teams in order to move candidates through the hiring process as quickly and efficiently as possible,” Antrim says. “But this doesn’t mean providers have to sacrifice the quality of their workforce.”
Various tools can help home-based care providers remove bottlenecks in their application and hiring process, thus giving them smoother access to vital workers. Solutions can be as simple as implementing a calendar scheduling software, like Calendly, so candidates can quickly schedule interviews and reduce back and forth with recruiters.
Offering a “Quick Apply” option can also speed up the application process. Arena uses Quick Apply in tandem with its retention predictions, serving candidates a quick, four-minute questionnaire to assess and predict organizational fit, followed by four easy screening questions. This feature expedites turning candidates into applicants and helps shorten time-to-hire.
Optimize candidate pools by rerouting talent to other hard-to-fill positions
Given the severity of the labor shortage in health care, providers must make good use of every qualified candidate who expresses interest in their organization. Only one person is hired for each job, so what happens to the other applicants? Optimize all of the talent in your hiring pool by considering individuals for other open roles.
Having access to the data around your hiring practices and service-level agreements will greatly help this process. But implementing talent rerouting can be a complicated and time-consuming process. Arena’s new Talent ReDiscovery offering utilizes existing retention predictions to reroute candidates from the job in their application to another hard-to-fill position that might also suit them.
“If you don’t capture applicants and you don’t hire and assess them for other open roles, you’re missing out!” says Solange Jacobs, Chief Marketing Officer, Arena Analytics. “We help our clients do the heavy lifting, mining their applicant tracking systems to identify, nurture and deliver former applicants for current hard-to-fill roles.”
Despite the challenges of finding, placing and retaining key talent in today’s workforce, providers don’t have to go it alone. Partnering with workforce technologies like Arena can help ease the burden of finding qualified candidates and help providers more quickly stabilize their workforce and deliver high-quality care.
This article is sponsored by Arena Analytics. To learn more about how Arena can help your organization hire candidates predicted to stay, visit Arena here.
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