Between a tight labor market, high turnover rates, and significant compliance requirements, there are serious challenges to finding and securing top talent in the home health care space. From the right perspective, there is an opportunity here. If these are your challenges, they are your competitors’ challenges as well.
Flip the script! If you can turn these challenges into strengths, you can find an edge in the hiring market and help bring on the best talent among the applicant pool.
In this blog, we’ll take a look at the three largest challenges in recruiting home care professionals and offer ways to turn these dynamics to your advantage.
The Top 3 Challenges
Perhaps your organization is growing and wants to bring on more home health care workers. Perhaps there is a vacancy after turnover. Home health care organizations face three key challenges as they enter the job market. Before we confront the problem, let’s take a moment to understand the issue.
Tight Labor Market
There is always a need for home health care workers, and demand continues to grow. 77% of adults over the age of 50 prefer to age in place rather than in a nursing home, and according to PRB, the number of adults age 65 and older will grow by 47% to 82 million Americans by 2050. The supply struggles to meet demand today, let alone in coming years as the senior population grows.
Compliance Requirements and Managing Certifications
As you know, home health care is a heavily regulated industry with strict requirements around licensure, certifications, and continuing education. Beyond this, many healthcare positions require specialized skills related to medical disciplines or even technology.
These factors limit the applicant pool considerably. Job experience and a cultural fit with the organization are just the beginning. That applicant must also have valid licensure and certifications in order to legally perform the duties. Too often, recruiters discover midway through the hiring process that the candidate lacks the official documentation to qualify, thereby wasting the time and resources of the hiring team.
High Turnover Rates
Even after an organization hires an interested applicant with the right skill set and certifications, they must still contend with a high turnover rate across the industry. According to Zippa the average home health care worker only stays in their position for between 1 – 2 years, and HCP, a research and education company, found the unemployment rate for home health care workers to be 77% in 2022.
This means that for every new hire the team brings in, they are likely to lose three more in the same period. Recruiters in response must always be searching for new applications and trying to restore a team in flux.
The causes for such a high turnover rate are varied. The work takes an emotional toll, compensation is modest, and travel times impose a constant burden, but one underappreciated contributor is the lack of connection between colleagues. Home health care workers do not spend their days together in a facility working together. They are on the road or in their patients’ homes. It is harder for them to form a connection with the organization in this environment. Meanwhile, management can struggle to recognize and reward good work when they are not in the home during care. Home health care workers can quickly feel isolated.
How can I improve candidate experience?
The most common reason candidates get frustrated during the application process is lack of communication from their potential employer. The best way to improve candidate experience and engagement is to send your applicants more updates about their application status and next steps—and the easiest way to do this is through workflow automation.
Flip the Script — Turn Hiring Challenges Into Strengths
The challenges we’ve identified here affect the industry as a whole and each individual organization to a lesser or greater extent. To compete in the hiring market, turn these weaknesses into strengths.
Offer the Best Hiring Process in a Tight Labor Market
In a tight labor market, the best hiring process wins. If you cannot compete on the grounds of compensation, having the most efficient and communicative hiring process goes a long way.
Leverage an applicant tracking system (ATS), such as Apploi Hire, to centralize and streamline your hiring process. An ATS can automate job listing placement on the top boards including Indeed, LinkedIn, ZipRecruiter, Google, HiredNurses, MyCNAJobs, Univision Trabajos, and more. This allows you to gather the largest pool of applicants possible while spending fewer resources to do so.
Meanwhile, automated workflows can both improve and accelerate the hiring process. Automated interview scheduling, responses, and follow ups keep the applicant engaged and your organization top of mind. By steadily moving applicants through the interview process, you can issue job offers more quickly than competitors and bring on top talent while your competitors fumble with Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.
Finally, the right ATS can create a superior hiring experience for the applicant. Branded career pages with clear, enticing job offers paired with one-click, mobile-first forms creates a friction-free application process. Garner more applications with a better experience.
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”When a home health care worker experiences burnout, continuing education or valuable paid time off helps them bear the burden and continue looking forward.
Automate Credential Checks in Screening Process
Gathering a larger pool of applicants can be counterproductive if the hiring team cannot efficiently move the group through interviews. To that end, an ATS like Apploi Hire is an essential tool. Apploi Hire offers automated medical credential verification for more than 10 roles. Applicants submit any licenses or certifications digitally to the platform. Apploi Hire then verifies the authenticity of the document before allowing the applicant to progress through the hiring process. In this way, the hiring team can filter out unqualified applicants without committing time and resources to their evaluation.
Furthermore, Apploi Hire also provides ongoing license verification. This feature documents the expiration dates for licenses and certifications on the team and emails reminders to employees and employers prior to expiration. This helps ensure compliance and avoid legal penalties and fines.
Make Employee Retention a Focus to Combat High Turnover Rates
Investing in increasing your retention rate is the best way to combat high turnover rates in the industry. Doing so requires a combination of initiatives to both retain employees and more quickly source and hire new ones.
When a home health care worker leaves, the most common situation is that they are leaving to pursue another home health care opportunity with a different organization. Something about that job offer seemed more appealing than the current position. Therefore, take some time to understand what makes your competitor’s offer more attractive and try to exceed it.
The best way to learn about the reasons why employees are leaving is by conducting a formal exit interview. Hold a short meeting before the employee’s final day on the team and ask them about their experience working with your company, what prompted them to look for new opportunities, and what enticed them to take their new position. This is crucial feedback to understanding how well your company competes in the hiring market.
Retention would be easy if financials weren’t a constraint. Rather than offering higher compensation, competitive employment benefits or continuing education opportunities can keep an employee engaged for longer. When a home health care worker experiences burnout, continuing education or valuable paid time off helps them bear the burden and continue looking forward.
The most important strategy to reduce your turnover rate is to optimize your “Time to Hire’ and “Time to Fill” rate, because they are not dependent on the decisions of your team. “Time to Hire” refers to the amount of time between a submitted application and an accepted job offer. “Time to Fill” on the other hand includes the onboarding process. It measures the time required to screen, interview, negotiate, and onboard a new employee.
If your processes are faster, you spend fewer resources executing them. If you can fill a position 50% faster than before, your turnover rate reflects that. An ATS provides analytics and reporting functions, so you can pinpoint the bottlenecks in your process and measure improvement over time.
Winning in the Employment Market
First impressions matter in the job market. If an applicant sees an orderly, modern, and digital-first hiring process, it speaks to the competency and legitimacy of the organization as a whole. In many instances, this will be the applicant’s first interaction with the brand. Make it a good one. From there, digitize your onboarding process with Apploi Onboard, which securely stores onboarding paperwork as digital files.
Get your offers out faster. Prescreen credentials to save wasted hours interviewing unqualified candidates and reduce costs across the board. The end result is a better applicant experience and a stronger team delivering care to your patients.
Learn more about Apploi Hire and Apploi Onboard and how technology solutions can help your organization construct an efficient, repeatable hiring process.
