Breaking the Cycle of Unqualified Applicants

Why is it so difficult to find the right caregivers?

Finding qualified applicants is one of the top hiring challenges in home care. In the last decade, it’s become increasingly common to post and find a job on online job boards. In fact, by our statistics, somewhere between 70-80% of caregiver applicants come from just one major job board. Although job listings are more consolidated than they were in the past, recruiters increasingly struggle to find qualified candidates among the sea of information. What’s really going on behind the scenes, and how can your agency stand out?

Connecting with applicants isn’t just an important step for building strong relationships between your agency and your caregivers, it’s also important for your business to grow. Caregiver turnover and burnout are big problems in this industry, and they’re made worse when unreliable, unqualified applicants make it through the initial hiring processes – don’t let your agency spend time on the wrong matches.

In the past few years, Augusta has built a business on driving home care agencies to find and interview the top 30% of applicants that can grow their business now.. Below, we’ll break down why it’s become so important to be able to find the best applicants quickly and efficiently.

In this post we’ll cover:

1. Why do applicants seem disinterested in your agency? The reasoning from the applicant perspective may surprise you!

2. The dangers of spam. Spam applications are wasting your business time and money.

3. How to start getting your message to the right people. Job boards deal with quantity, not quality – if you want to cut through the crowd, start here.

Job boards give you quantity, not quality, of applicants.

It makes sense from the job board perspective. Job boards find you more applicants, then you or your recruiter will determine whether or not they’re a good fit for your agency.

Except, traditional hiring practices aren’t built for the scale at which they’re now working. Sorting through all those applications can take time – you’re spending most of your days chasing after applicants who end up being a bad fit.

Plus, if you end up stuck in a situation where there aren’t enough applicants and you’re pushed to hire a caregiver you know won’t stick around, that can cost your business more in the long run.

Your agency needs a way to filter out unqualified applicants before they get to the interview stage. By doing this, you save your business both time and money.

Why you’re getting so many unqualified caregiver applicants

How spam creates more unqualified applicants

Have you ever found an applicant that seemed confused about the job they applied for? Have you looked at an applicant’s resume and found zero relevant experience? Have you received applications from people who live 150+ miles away?

Here’s why…

Recruiters are being spammed with unqualified applicants, but applicants are being spammed too…and I mean spammed. This is what an applicant’s inbox looks like after applying to just one job:

To generate more applicants for your listing, job boards incentivize applicants to apply to jobs that they may not be qualified for. Because of this and other factors, the average caregiver is applying to 16 or more agencies at once.

Looking at data from over 600,000 applicants who apply to only home care agencies, only 30% of applicants are qualified for the jobs they applied for. Done manually, that’s a lot of time wasted trying to find the qualified applicant.

Finding the right caregiver can feel like finding a needle in a haystack: only 1-2% of caregiver applicants are being hired per position.

The Cycle of Spam

Without intervention, this is a self-perpetuating cycle. If so few caregivers are being hired, then caregivers will only apply to more and more jobs, you’ll get more no shows and cancellations, you’ll find more unqualified applicants in your pool, and the cycle continues.

As long as online job boards remain the top method of finding new caregivers, your business needs to invest in ways of finding the right caregivers in a sea of spam.

If businesses want to grow, they need to break the cycle.

Here’s the good news: your agency can make big improvements with some small, simple changes! Using straightforward best practices and adopting new, powerful technologies to engage with your applicant pool will all help you grow your business.

• Expect bad applicants — but don’t settle for a low hire rate.

  You’ll always get some unqualified applicants — that’s the nature of job boards. But don’t settle for low hire rates. Many agencies now hire 1 great caregiver from just 10 applicants by using better marketing campaigns and smarter screening targeted to caregivers.

• Do more interviews, but less screening.

  The more candidates you have to choose from for your current cases, the more discerning you can afford to be with your hiring. In the long run, it will be worth it to spend a little more time on a candidate to hire the caregiver that is a better match for your agency!

   

• Prioritize the loyal caregivers you have.

  It can cost your business $2,600 or more to replace caregivers when you factor in lost shifts, recruitment, training, and admin time. Home care runs on caregivers; if you’re already found a handful of great matches, supporting them will help your business in the long run.

Want to learn more about how to break the cycle?  Check out this video on Transforming your Hiring Strategy.