Building An At-Home Care Employee Referral Program To Boost Conversions, Cut Costs

Home-based care providers are always innovating new ways to recruit and retain care staff, but companies are still getting the most mileage out of internal word-of-mouth referrals.

Companies that heavily invest in employee referral programs, including creating social media groups, physical materials employees can hand out and email campaigns with current and former employees, have been able to improve retention rates. While word-of-mouth referrals do not always generate the most leads for in-home care workers, they result in higher conversion rates and lower acquisition costs.

Tribute Home Care hired 50% of the caregiving team through employee referrals.

Since employee referrals constitute a significant recruitment source for Tribute, the company is constantly seeking to perfect how it gathers and manages incoming hiring leads.

“There’s no one size fits all here,” Jeanine Desatnick, director of caregiver talent acquisition at Tribute, told Home Health Care News. “We’re constantly learning how to do this the best. We try to hit at every angle. We let our caregivers know from the very beginning of their employment here that they’re like ambassadors for us.”

Founded in 2012, Tribute offers personal care, companionship care, housekeeping assistance, dementia care and more. The company operates in Massachusetts, Maryland, Illinois and Northern Virginia.

One of the company’s techniques for gathering employee referrals is to give its staff a deck of cards with QR codes, which they can hand out to interested job seekers.

Tribute also uses email cultivation campaigns to foster referrals from employees.

The company also keeps in touch with former employees through a legacy campaign program. The program updates former employees about the current state of the company via email and includes a link to a referral form. The goal is to make it easy for individuals who want to refer employees to do so.

For Caretech, the percentage of internal referrals is relatively low, but the conversion rate is high, according to Chief Operating Officer Kerin Zuger.

“You’re going through 200 interviews with Indeed, and maybe 10% of those start,” she told HHCN. “With our employee referrals. I would say about 75% of them convert.”

Omaha, Nebraska-based Caretech is an independent home care company that offers a variety of non-medical services, such as personal care, companionship and household assistance. The company operates across Nebraska, Wyoming and Iowa.

Caretech relies on an engagement platform to collect employee referrals.

“It’s a platform that helps us build out our internal caregiver referrals,” Zuger said. “They submit through there if they’ve got a referral, so that we can track their start date, how many shifts they took. Because that’s the other thing, you want to track the quality of the actual applicant and make sure we’re constantly tracking ROI on all of our different methodologies of recruiting.”

In 2024, Activated Insights found that word of mouth was the third most utilized method for professional caregiver recruitment. The organization determined that these types of referrals resulted in the lowest employee turnover rate and had among the lowest acquisition costs of any recruitment strategy.

In comparison, employment website Indeed was the #1 method for recruiting for home care. However, it produced a turnover rate of 88%, according to Activated Insights.

Alison Jenkins — a recruiter at ProHealth Home Health & Hospice — explained that word-of-mouth referrals tend to produce stronger candidates because employees know what to look for.

“Birds of a feather flock together,” she told HHCN. “A good team member is always looking out for another good team member. They are stronger nurses, or stronger clinicians, if they’re referred here by a good team member.”

ProHealth is a Birmingham, Alabama-based home health, hospice and skilled nursing facility operator. Between home health and hospice, the company serves an average of about 1,200 patients per month.

In 2024, 40% of ProHealth’s hires were made through word-of-mouth referrals. The company uses an employee newsletter, as well as an internal Facebook group, to gather these referrals.

The success that Tribute has seen relying on word-of-mouth referrals has ​​led the company to prioritize repeat referrers.

“My team and I have gone back to them to ask them why they refer so many more people than others, and why their referrals get hired so much more than some other referrers,” Desatnick said. “What they say to us is that not only do they pitch the company as a satisfied associate, but they do these pre-screenings, and they’ll say, ‘Hey, these are the kind of things that are important to Tribute. Is this what’s important to you?’”

Rachel Gartner, founder and CEO of Carework, emphasized the importance of establishing a formal employee referral program.

“It’s a channel that you control and can directly impact, because online job platforms are always going to make changes,” she said during a recent Zingage, formerly Ava, webinar. “You don’t want your business fully reliant on that. You don’t want your business to be fully reliant on one channel. You always want to have a diversified recruiting strategy, just like marketing and just like sales. If your sales were all coming from one referral source, people would tell you that’s really dangerous.”

Carework is a Statesboro, Georgia-based home care recruitment company. Since launching seven years ago, the company has been responsible for 25,000 U.S. home care agencies hires.

Gartner also noted that companies that haven’t seen success with these programs are likely failing to prioritize them.

“If your referral channel isn’t generating a lot of consistent referrals, it’s probably either on the back burner or you’re not really doing it, or you’re not communicating it,” she said.

Ultimately, Desatnick believes that word-of-mouth referrals can speak to the state of a company.

“I think a caregiver referral is the biggest compliment to a company’s culture that there is,” she said. “It’s basically someone saying, ‘I’m happy here. I think that I’m treated well. I think that the mission, the values, the culture are such a good fit for me that I want to tell people that I love, and that are close to me, to join this community.’ We never take that lightly.”