How to Recruit New Caregivers to Your Home Care Agency

Need to recruit caregivers? Finding it difficult? Have you tried targeting non-caregivers who could be great at it? See how you can add more great caregivers to your agency's team!

Why not try to recruit caregivers from a service industry?

You might be using your recruitment marketing tactics to exclusively target and recruit caregivers with a wealth of experience, which is great. What if you could maximize your recruitment efforts to find non-caregivers who would be a great addition to your caregiving team?

With the current caregiver shortage, consider offering a career path that shows them the ropes of caregiving in your agency’s best light.

Is your careers page communicating openness to a variety of applicants? Your website is a representation of your agency’s mission, vision, and values, is it driving new caregivers away before applying?

Here are a few tips and tricks to help you start a recruitment campaign targeted toward non-caregivers who may or may not have a lot of relevant experience under their belt.

Target applicants whose previous experiences match the skills required for caregiving.

The skills that you put in a caregiver’s job description might be best found in applicants who don’t come from a caregiving background.

Customer service, compassion, promptness, team-oriented, communication skills, just to name a few, are common skills found across the healthcare industry and beyond.

Brainstorm some groups of people who come from backgrounds (within and outside of healthcare) that bring caregiver attributes to your agency.

Some places to start might include:

  • Teachers, bus drivers, dietary workers, and other school staff
  • Babysitters
  • Uber/Lyft drivers
  • Servers

This is just a start to a list that you can use, but many of the people who work in these industries will have the skills that you’re looking for.

By searching outside of the existing caregiver pool, you have an opportunity to show those who work outside of the healthcare field the infinite possibilities of taking care of seniors in their homes.

Start a caregiver internship/apprenticeship and mentorship program.

When you hire non-caregivers onto your team you need to set them up with a foundation of learning to work with the clients that you have.

The most important part of training your new caregivers is by assigning them a designated mentor. Look into your roster and see if there are any exemplary caregivers who have worked with your agency for a while and demonstrate the qualities of a mentor and supervisor. Have each mentor act as the mediator between new caregivers and your office staff.

One way to break the ice between your caregiver mentors and mentees is by having a new caregiver form that goes over their communication and learning preferences. Do they like to communicate primarily via text, call, or email? Do they learn best by doing or seeing?

This list of preferences can help to shape the training that you provide and make your new caregivers more comfortable with the work that they will be doing.

When you start your training, try and slowly immerse the learning that you’re offering to the new caregivers. Start with where their knowledge is, get a sense of what they do and don’t know— but go over everything.

Here’s an example: imagine you are going over safe eating for seniors with a previous server in the crowd who used to cut food into smaller pieces for patrons. Use this as a real-life learning opportunity. Lean into the knowledge and experience that your caregivers bring, especially when it comes from outside of caregiving.

Share these experiences and learning opportunities with each caregiver mentor. They can tailor their communication and mentorship to tap into those strengths.

Embrace the beauty in training new caregivers.

It can be easy to express preferences for experienced caregivers over non-experienced ones, however, there are a lot of benefits when you recruit new caregivers.

You are starting with a blank slate. When caregivers come from a facility background, they may be acquainted with medication administration and cutting residents’ nails when those tasks might not be within your scope of care.

When they come from other home care agencies, each one operates differently. Some may use paper charting while others use technology approaches. Some may only allow a caregiver to drive a client’s vehicle, while others allow caregivers to drive their own vehicle as well.

By training a new caregiver in your home care agency, you can show each caregiver the way that your agency operates from the ground up. From your communication policies, strategies to handle end-of-life clients, and ways to redirect clients living with dementia or Alzheimer’s, the caregivers are blank slates ready to be molded into a caregiver.

You are providing caregivers with the first step into a lifelong career in the healthcare field. When they progress in their career into caregiver mentorship or care management, they will remember that you supported their growth. The effort goes a long way in retaining caregivers.

Experience is experience.

At the end of the day, you’re working hard to recruit caregivers to serve the needs of your clients. By giving new caregivers an opportunity to grow and learn with your company, the morale of your company will improve, along with the happiness of your clients.

Each of your applicants, whether they come from a caregiving background or not, has valuable experience. Whether they took time off to be a parent or got a degree in business, each applicant’s unique background is an opportunity worth considering.

You don’t need to hire every caregiver that is seeking a job, however, don’t disregard applicants who don’t have the exact caregiving experience that you might be looking for.

Want to Recruit Caregivers but Need Some Help?

Are you having a hard time perfecting your recruitment marketing strategy? Work on finishing off 2021 on a good note with Home Care Marketing Pros. We will work with you and your team to determine what strategies are and aren’t working well for you, and help you craft a recruitment program that will propel your agency into growth mode. Schedule a 30-minute call here and one of our recruitment experts will help you get caregivers in the door.

Home Care Success Unlocked: Join Our Newsletter and Transform Your Business!

Read the latest senior care marketing articles and tips to help you grow your senior care business.