It’s hard to imagine that with the valuable work that caregivers do everyday, the average caregiver salary is only around $23,000 a year. That’s according to the most recent update in Glassdoor as of September 2020. It’s not surprising that with such a low salary, jobseekers might prefer to take a job at Walmart. 

You might also be surprised to learn that more than 1 in 6 Americans who are working full-time or part-time report that they’re also assisting with the care of an elderly or disabled family member. It’s a harsh reality that makes the caregiver job even more difficult. 

Caregiving has been labeled a national health crisis by the National Alliance for Caregiving. 

A recent study conducted by MyCna jobs showed that 57% of home care agencies struggled with recruiting caregivers in 2020. 71% of home care agencies turned down a case because they didn’t have caregivers available.

According to the same study, COVID has also had a major impact on caregiver recruitment. In fact, 72% of the respondents said that the pandemic has made caregiver retention more difficult, and 87% said COVID made caregiver recruitment more challenging.

Listen to “1/27/21: Karina Tama-Rutigliano from Senior Care Clicks | THE CHALLENGE OF RECRUITING CAREGIVERS | Aging in Portland with Mark Turnbull from” on Spreaker.

What are the challenges that senior care businesses face when recruiting caregivers?

There are many challenges that senior care businesses such as home care agencies face. 

The most common ones are:

It’s tough to find qualified candidates:

Every individual that applies won’t necessarily be qualified to be a caregiver. Either they don’t have the appropriate experience or they’re not licensed in the state they want to work in.  

Finding local caregivers:

Chances are good that caregivers live in your community, but the challenge is finding them. The method of recruiting caregivers has changed in recent years. You’re not likely to get a good response from newspaper ads or forums like Craigslist. Caregiver recruiting today requires home care agency owners to be more active and involved in the process.  

To be effective, they need to create strategies that will help them to locate and retain the best workers. For example, it helps to develop a profile of the best caregivers.

What qualities do your best caregivers have? Look for similarities as you search for new caregivers.

 List the qualities of your best workers and look for similarities in their characteristics.

 Note how they became acquainted with your agency. Ask them what motivates them to continue working for you. 

Once you have a profile of the ideal caregiver, it should be fairly easy to create a recruiting strategy that attracts caregivers that match your ideal caregiver profile.  

Retention:

Turnover is a big issue for home care agencies. Once you have a solid team of quality caregivers, you want to incentivize them to stay on long term. Caregivers may have many options of other places to work in your community and it’s important to motivate your top caregivers to remain in your employment. 

Quality caregivers enjoy their work, so money will only motivate them so much. 

Actually, Here’s what the Home Care Pulse Benchmarking Survey had to say about the top reasons caregivers chose to work for an agency:

  • Good working environment and benefits
  • A work schedule that meets their lifestyle
  • A company that has a good reputation
  • A company that someone else recommended to them 

What steps can home care agencies take to resolve the problem?

As we know, the challenges that home care agencies face to recruit and retain caregivers are pretty steep, but they’re not too difficult to overcome. 

Based on my experience, I suggest tackling the problem by using the internet to reach more potential caregiver applicants.

There are many strategies and channels that work really well to recruit caregivers. 

Facebook and Google ads. Why? Because they deliver fast results. Facebook has 190 millions users in the US and it offers a huge demographic to target your ads for recruiting caregivers. 

Email and Text Message marketing – They’re both great because they allow you to follow up with every applicant. Let’s say you run ads, and in one month, you received 100 applicants. From these 100 leads, 50 were qualified. From these 50, you were able to hire 30 new caregivers and put them to work on your caseload right away. 

I also suggest engaging with the other 20 qualified caregivers via email and text messaging so that you have applicants in the pipeline for when you need additional caregivers to take on new cases. In this way, you’re not wasting any of the resources that you already paid for. 

I’ve seen that many home care agencies don’t use email or text messages to engage with caregivers at all. In my experience, they can be very effective.

Referral Program: I love referral programs because they’re a great and affordable way to get more caregiver applicants. I’ve done many referral programs for clients and they have really worked. The key is to define how much it costs to hire a new caregiver, and that can vary depending on the location.

Inclusive workplace policy: Do you know that 9% of caregivers self-identify as LGBTQ? It doesn’t sound like much but in an industry where there’s such a huge shortage of caregivers, it counts for a lot.

Therefore, it’s important  to have an inclusive workplace policy and promote these values.

Education: Many caregivers want to learn more about caregiving in order to get better pay. Here are some ways to attract caregivers looking to improve their craft. 

Create educational programs: Whether you’re deciding how much of your budget to allocate to caregiver training programs or trying to convince your boss to allocate more budget to caregiver training programs, here are a few things to keep in mind:

  1. Providing options for online caregiver training allows caregivers to learn at their own pace, which makes a world of difference in keeping them engaged and helping them retain what they learn.
  2. Good caregiver training programs boost recruitment. They help you build a career ladder that can be a major draw for good caregivers in the area, if you use them properly.
  3. Providing paths for caregivers to upskill helps them to stay engaged in their work and they’re likely to see a long-term future within your agency.

Well-trained caregivers provide better care to clients, who in turn become more likely to stay with your agency longer, and they’ll probably refer their friends to your agency as well. 

Honor your best caregivers: Create a caregiver of the month recognition program and honor the best caregivers by giving them something special.  It could be a gift card or something similar. Or, you could offer a certificate and take a photo of the honoree that you can post on your blog and social media platforms.

You’ll find that your best care workers are motivated by recognition, rather than money.

How can digital marketing help to recruit caregivers?

Digital marketing is a key component for hiring caregivers because it offers the benefit of greater visibility through implementing different channels and strategies to reach new applicants, engage with previous ones, and ask for referrals.

Benefits of Digital Marketing: It’s low cost, gives measurable results, offers a global reach, and helps you keep up with the competition.

Another benefit of digital marketing is that it can be measured in real-time and it can be optimized accordingly. Let’s say a home care agency is running Facebook and Google ads to recruit caregivers. After a week, the data shows that Facebook is delivering more caregivers at a lower cost. The agency could then decide to pause the Google ads or increase the budget for Facebook ads.

Can you provide examples of successful recruitment campaigns?

Of course, I have many. I’d like to focus on a few that yielded great results.

We offer Facebook ads and advertisements on job boards where we know that caregivers are looking for jobs. Everyone is looking for jobs! So, the conversion rate for jobs is good–at right about 30% from job ads.

One client that invested $3000 a month in Facebook ads to recruit caregivers got around 4500 unique clicks to online job applications. Around 1350 caregivers applied for the job. 

Let’s assume that 30% of this number are qualified caregivers, which would give you around 400 new caregivers. I dont have the exact number of how many caregivers my client hired but 30% is a decent assumption.

Another of my clients that has a lower budget invested $20 a day in advertising in a job board and obtained about 50 applicants. About half of the 50 applicants were qualified caregivers. They hired 25 of the applicants after spending only $550 which amounts to about $22 per new employee. 

As another example, one of my clients has a home care agency in a small county in California where recruiting is really tough. They invested about $500 in advertising and in an email marketing referral program. They acquired about 20 applicants and 8 of them were qualified. They also got 8 more caregiver leads through referrals from the same campaign. The cost per new hire was about $31.

As you can see, the cost of acquiring caregivers varies a bit depending on the location. Digital marketing makes recruiting more affordable regardless of your location.

Why might a senior care business consider outsourcing the recruitment process?

Recruiting caregivers can be very expensive.

MyCNa jobs reports that the cost of recruiting a caregiver in 2017 was $469 per hire.

To get the best results, it’s best to assign one or more people that are dedicated solely to the task of recruitment. Agencies also need the appropriate software to be able to advertise job positions. 

Outsourcing this task to a digital marketing agency can lower costs. Digital marketing can deliver caregiver applicants directly to your inbox by using strategies and channels that demonstrate proven results.

Sources:

https://bit.ly/3bdx7N4

https://arrow-solutions.com/top-caregiver-recruiting-challenges-home-care-agencies/

https://www.caregiver.org/pilotIntegration/indexPersistent.html?uri=%2Fcaregiver-statistics-work-and-caregiving

https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/caregiver-salary-SRCH_KO0,9.htm

home care industry

Perhaps one of the most challenging issues in the home care industry is finding strategies to ensure a steady stream of new prospects. With the baby boomer generation aging, home care agencies have never been busier. 

Sales tact, sales skills, and experience are no longer enough for home care agencies to be competitive against other agencies that are leveraging data in their marketing strategies. With the baby boomer generation aging, home care agencies have never been busier. 

Between the growing need for home care and strong competition, customer acquisition is a growing priority for home care agencies. To effectively keep up with the evolution in the home care industry and the challenges that come along with it, data-driven strategies are the way to go.

Challenges Associated with Senior Care Marketing

The first step in combating the challenges that home care agencies are facing is to identify them. Here are 5 key challenges that should be getting your attention:

  1. Lean marketing budgets. As the saying goes, it takes money to make money. Advertising budgets for home care agencies vary significantly based on the company’s size and phase of business development. If you’re not getting the results you’re after, a boost in your advertising budget could give you more avenues for home care marketing. 
  1. Increasing the flow of qualified incoming leads. Word of mouth and random referrals are always good, but it’s more effective to set up machine learning marketing to generate strong results from online paid ads. Email marketing also leverages automation to increase the flow of qualified leads. 
  1. Aligning your sales and marketing efforts. When you’ve clearly defined your audience, your marketers will target the right leads and you can set up a workflow that leads prospects flawlessly through your sales funnel.  
  1. Timely follow-up. When prospects are making inquiries about home care, they’re ready to buy. Inefficient processes could mean that salespeople are wasting time following up on cold or old leads. The right marketing strategies will position your home care agency to follow up on leads within an hour of the first contact. 
  1. Effectively using CRM, sales software, and machine learning marketing strategies. CRMs and marketing outreach software are big time-savers. They can help your home care agency to gather and record new data with every customer contact. Automation effectively engages prospects and customers and promotes brand loyalty.

How to Get Senior Care Leads with Digital Marketing

AI and machine learning in the field of digital marketing are core technologies that have the potential to give your home care marketing initiatives a massive boost. Machine learning gives you a distinct advantage over your competitors because it’s able to mine and organize huge amounts of data. Machine learning is a great tool for executing simple, routine tasks. It helps you to spot trends and optimize your results. It’s worthwhile to invest a portion of your budget in digital advertising. 

Here are three reasons why digital marketing is gaining in popularity:

  1. It’s cost-effective.
  2. It gives you an easy way to measure your results. 
  3. It’s easy to figure your ROI.

Obviously, you want to know that the investment you make in marketing is paying off. That concept leads to the importance of running paid search ads as part of an effective home care marketing plan. Pay-per-click (PPC) ads are a valuable way to reach your target audience. What’s so awesome about PPC ads? You only have to pay when prospects click on your ads. As a result, you’ll naturally get a higher ROI. 

In the home care industry, you’ll want most of your leads to come from within a reasonable geographic range from your facilities. The right digital marketing activities will help you to focus heavily on local searches which will lower your cost per lead. 

Another benefit of machine learning marketing is that you can leverage lookalike audiences once you’ve built a solid customer base. AI and machine learning technologies put data together to create the right target audiences which point in the direction of qualified leads. Machine learning collects data pertaining to location, demographics, and other information so you can target PPC ads to audiences matching those characteristics. Just imagine how painstaking it would be to try to sort out all that data manually! AI and machine learning save you hours and hours of time. 

Think of mining data as giving you a foundation to make good decisions about advertising. The more that you can learn about the types of people that will be searching around online for home care services, the better you can use it to establish accurate customer profiles. AI and machine learning combine data from your current target audience with interest groups and keywords to fine-tune your outreach. The algorithms automatically find new groups to display your ads. 

How to Achieve Results Faster

Due to digital transformation, the marketplace is becoming increasingly specialized. While it long made sense to manage advertising needs in-house, it often makes better sense now to partner with a marketing agency that has experience with home care agencies.  

An independent marketing agency has the expertise to bring in qualified leads and help you identify quality caregivers in efficient, cost-effective ways. An expert marketer will be able to look at your goals and objectives and develop a few strategies to help you meet them. It’s expertise that’s simply hard to match in-house. 

There is also value in working with a digital marketer like SeniorCareClicks that’s well acquainted with the home care industry. Our marketers that understand the joys and challenges of providing senior care have a good familiarity with the types of keywords and strategies that produce results and lead to conversions. Our senior care marketers have experience in setting up a well-rounded marketing process where they utilize the right personas and understand this market’s buyer journey. 

These are some of the ways we accomplish that:

  • We use current client data to feed AI and machine learning.
  • We create different audiences and run ads on different platforms.
  • We collect leads and guide them into inbound call centers.
  • Call center agents nurture leads and guide them through the sales funnel. 
  • As calls ring in real-time, call center agents can respond quickly and transfer the call to your home care agency, so you never miss a lead.
  • The call center then sends an automated email to the home care agency with all the customer details. 
  • Customers get a follow-up email a few days after the first interaction. 

Our marketing agency leads the way and keeps prospects engaged from the first contact to the conversion with a comprehensive marketing plan that sets your home care agency on the path to growth.  

Remember the Importance of Timely Calls

Inbound call centers are designed to handle large amounts of incoming calls. Our marketing agency takes a holistic approach to marketing and it has the expertise to drive lots of calls into the call center where call center agents can help prospects get answers about home care services fast when they’re ready to make a decision.

As expert marketers in the home care industry, we do much more than provide your agency with massive numbers of leads. Call center agents are trained on how to personalize calls which begins the process of building trust with customers which is so important in the decision-making process. They’re well-trained in the art of active listening, and they know how to respond in ways that assure customers they’re being understood. 

Wondering how it works in a practical sense? Let’s say that a prospect calls in and the call center agent discovers that the caller mistakenly believes they’ve called one of your competitors. Rather than correct the caller right off the bat, the call center agent will ask what they can do for the customer and guide them to the answers to their questions. The initial calls offer a good opportunity to engage customers in conversation. At the proper moment, the call center agent will clarify that the caller has actually called your agency and they’re happy to help them on the spot. 

The senior care industry is learning what other types of businesses have already discovered. Digital marketing works! Pay-per-click ads are highly effective as an inbound marketing strategy. The right strategies help you to develop detailed profiles of your target audiences and display attractive ads in online locations where home care consumers are most likely to see them and act on them in real-time. 
The best news is that you don’t have to spend hours and hours studying analytics and doing ad testing to see which strategies are the most effective. Leave your marketing needs to a digital marketing agency that understands the specific challenges connected with home care agency marketing. Call SeniorCareClicks today to learn how we use AI and machine learning marketing strategies by leveraging data from your current clients to get leads into your sales funnel and convert them expediently. 954-401-9058