By Stephen Tweed
If you are like most home care companies, the biggest barrier to growing your business is caregiver recruiting and retention. We’ve been studying this issue for the past two years during the COVID Pandemic to get a better understanding of the issues. We’ve learned that you can improve your recruiting and retention by looking at your own data.
What is working for you in recruiting?
What’s not working?
What is working for you in retention?
What’s now working?
How do you know?
These are questions that can only be answered by analyzing your data from this past year. You’ve heard me say it a hundred times … “What gets measured gets managed, what gets rewarded gets repeated.”
What did you measure in 2021 that will help you figure out what worked and what didn’t in your recruiting system?
Let’s look at the Recruiting Funnel, and the metrics you can use to measure the progress of applicants through the funnel.
Perhaps you have heard of, or even used the “Sales Funnel” as part of your sales and marketing system to take leads and turn them into referrals, and to convert referrals to clients.
The same principle applies to your recruiting system and the Recruiting Funnel. Using various proven recruiting methods, you put high quality applicants into the top of the funnel. Then using the various filters that are part of your caregiver selection system, you filter out those applicants who do not meet your criteria. At each step of the process, you track how many applicants completed that step.
The Metrics of the Recruiting Funnel
Here are the metrics we have identified to track your Recruiting Funnel. 
- Inquiries
- Application Completed
- Pre-employment Assessment Completed
- Interview Completed
- Drug Tests & Criminal Background
- Offers Made
- Orientation Completed
- First Shift Attended
- Ninety Day Retention
- One-year Retention
By setting up a system to track each of these metrics, you will have the raw data you need. By tabulating this data, you will get information that helps you understand what actually happened. They by analyzing and synthesizing your information, you will get the knowledge to fine tune your recruiting and retention systems for improved results in 2022.
Analyzing Your Recruiting Metrics
Set up your tracking system so that you can analyze each of the metrics in the funnel by source. You want to know the specific recruiting source for each applicant who enters the top of the funnel. Then you can set up a spread sheet to track each step in the funnel by recruiting source. For example, you want to know:
- Applicants by source
- Interviews by source
- Offers made by source
- Orientation by source
- 90-day retention by source
- One-year retention by source
The ultimate goal of your recruiting process is to hire a large number of high quality applicants that stay with you for at least one year. By analyzing the metrics you have tracked, you will be able to determine which recruiting sources bring you the highest quality applicants that stay with you the longest.
Caregiver Retention by Source
Using data from the Home Care Benchmarking Study from Home Care Pulse here in the US, and data from Care Friends in the UK, we have learned that applicants coming from online job boards are least likely to be with you at the end of 90-days and one-year, and applicants from your employee referral program are most likely to be with you.
Once you have this data and the analysis of your data, you can refine your recruiting system to attract higher quality applicants who will more likely stay with you.
Benchmarking Your Metrics
One way to assess the effectiveness of your recruiting and retention systems is to compare your results to the benchmarking data from the Home Care Benchmarking Study from Home Care Pulse. You can also compare your results to other companies your same size who are not competitors. The best way to do that is to be a member of a Home Care CEO Mastermind Group. Explore becoming a member today.
