Home Care U - How to Beat Your Competition on Indeed (Rachel Gartner Pt. 2)

Episode Date: March 14, 2023

In Recruitment 101, we covered Rachel's approach to creating a holistic recruitment strategy. In Recruitment 102, we dive into the most-used recruitment channel: Indeed. Come ready to learn everything about winning on Indeed, from setting budget to writing your ads.Enjoying the show? Send me a text and let me know!Learn more about Careswitch at: careswitch.comConnect with the host on LinkedIn: Miriam Allred This episode was produced by parkerkane.co

Hey, welcome to Home Care U, a podcast made by the team at Care Switch. Nobody went to school to learn how to run a home care agency, so we're bringing the education to you. Join our live audience by going to careswitch.com slash homecareu or listen on your own time wherever you get your podcasts. Home Care U is hosted by myself, Miriam Allred, and Connor Koons of Care Switch. Enjoy the session. Welcome to Home Care U is hosted by myself, Miriam Allred, and Connor Koons of CareSwitch. Enjoy the session. Welcome to Home Care U.

Our guest this week is returning from last week. Her name is Rachel Gartner. She's the CEO of CareWork, and we're excited to pick her brain some more on recruitment, one of the most challenging topics in home care. Before we dive into things, Rachel, for the sake of those who might be listening first time this week or didn't join last week, will you kind of give a brief intro to yourself and your background again? Sure. So I'm Rachel Gartner. I'm the founder and CEO of CareWork. I used to be a home care recruiter in Florida, and that went really, really well to

the point that in 2018, I launched my own company. And basically, we are recruiters for home care agencies. We work kind of on the front lines, as I call it, with agencies across the U.S. and run all of their online job ads, screen the caregivers, schedule them for interviews, and really advise them on their strategy. So anything that a home care agency has come across in recruiting, we have probably dealt with before. Awesome. And I'll second that. I've heard great things about Rachel's team, and she is really the expert when it comes to recruitment. So this week, we're going to be diving in more deeply. Last week, we talked about how to build your recruitment strategy from scratch and kind

of general things about recruitment. This week, we're going to dive specifically into the number one source of recruitment for home care agencies, which is Indeed, and also an area where Rachel is the expert in home care. So let's talk about that a little bit. First off, Rachel, why is Indeed so big for home care agencies? What makes it the number one source of hiring new caregivers? Yeah, I'll just be upfront that I have a total love-hate relationship with Indeed. There are pros and there are cons, but it is number one for a reason. And that's the ongoing leads. With most other sources, you're either getting cold leads, they maybe have a database of caregivers, things like that. But Indeed is, if you use it properly, a constant source of

new warm leads of people who are actively looking for a job and did choose to apply right now, which is the best way to spend your time. It's also the most scalable. If you get a really good Indeed strategy going, you can scale it very quickly and efficiently. It's going to be more expensive, but if you're using those leads while you're getting good results, you can invest more on Indeed and get more results. And then the last reason that it works really well for home care agencies is that it's flexible. With other sources, a lot of times you're locked into a contract or you're planning in advance. With Indeed, you can really go in on an even week-to-week basis if you need to, but certainly a month-to-month basis and

adjust your budget and your ads based on what you need right now. And that flexibility is a huge benefit, especially for new agencies that are still getting off the ground to really hone in on what they need and how much they can spend. Awesome. Thanks for that. And we'll definitely dig into a lot of the things you mentioned, like how much to spend and how to decide that and how to set your strategy and things like that. So looking forward to that. Yeah, let's just kind of dive in here. So my first question is like, how can you decide if the unpaid version of Indeed is sufficient for your agency and what you're trying to do? Or if you need to start paying what you get with free Indeed versus paid? We're starting off with some pretty basic questions, but let's kind of go from there

and then build off that. Well, the first thing to know is that some people can't use free ads at all. Indeed has really mastered the art of getting the most money out of individual markets, which more power to them. That's their business and it's how they keep it high quality for applicants, I'm sure. But in competitive markets, so often in big cities, you cannot post free ads. You may go on and find that it's not even an option for you. If you can post free ads, that's a great place to start is post a free ad, see the response rate that you get, and then go from there. If you're able, my best recommendation is to do some free and some paid. You don't want to wait to try paid ads until you're in a bind and

absolutely need to grow. You want to start it with a smaller budget sooner to see what works, what you're spending, what you're getting and target that money the best. So if you're able to post both, I would start right away with free and paid, but you can do a smaller budget on the paid ads. What are some of the advantages of free ads besides obviously being free? Yeah, I think some caregivers, when they're able to tell from the free versus sponsored ads, they may prefer the free ads. Indeed, it's obscuring that over time, it used to be easier to see a sponsored ad versus not. But the free ads, it's just great. Free traffic is great if you can get that.

One thing to keep in mind is that it drops over time. So it takes a lot more management and you have to know a lot more of the rules of Indeed because you don't get away with as much on a free ad. And I'm talking about putting things in the title or not in the title, how frequently you're reposting, how far apart the ads are. All of that, you have to be a lot more careful if you're running free ads, because if you violate those rules, Indeed can flag your account and then you won't get any visibility on your free ads. So you have to be a lot more

careful with it. But if you can get free leads, I mean, that's fantastic for anybody. We would all love free marketing leads and free hiring leads and all of that. It just takes a lot more work to stay within Indeed's rules. So let's say that your account gets flagged. Does it tell you that or do you just like lose visibility and not know what happened? A lot of people just lose visibility. So there are times that they flag your account and you know because you go in and you can't post any free ads but we have had multiple times where one of our account managers calls indeed about an agency hey they're not getting results what's going on and they'll find out from an indeed rep oh this account is restricted because they've violated the terms they don't always tell you and they

also won't tell you why so it can take a lot of digging in to find out if you're not sure if you've been flagged call indeed they can really help you with that and their representatives when you get them on the phone they are actually really helpful if you're willing to sit there and dig for the information ask follow-up questions and go into it with an open mind they can oftentimes find out if you are flagged or not and help you go from there. But once you're flagged, generally they're going to say, well, you have to post paid ads and it's hard to get around that. I'll say it that way.

And it sounds like the signs that you might have been banned that way are like if, if you have a really sudden drop in like views and applicants, things like that. And there's like really and like you didn't change anything on your side. Yeah. So it can be either that you go in and you can't post any more free ads. When that happens, it could be you're in a market where they don't let you post free ads or it could be that your account has been flagged. So you can call them to find out why can I not post a free ad? But yes, the other reason is if all of a sudden you have free ads running and you're just getting nothing or very, very little response to those free ads, it could be that your account has been

restricted or flagged and your results are going to go way down. How often have you seen this happen? Is it something that's pretty rare? No. I think last month, I know at least two of our accounts, our account managers called on new accounts we were working on. An agency signed up with us. We're looking into their ads and we look at it and we start to see just some little concerns and call Indeed and find out that account had been flagged. Interesting. That's a super useful tip. If there's someone listening to this who's feeling like this might've happened, just talk to Indeed and go from there. I don't know if I missed it, but do you know why certain markets don't allow for the free ads? I think it's just more competitive markets where there's

so many people trying to post jobs there that they know they can essentially, I assume. I assume it's just they look at a market and they realize there's such high demand there. Maybe there's not enough applicants in that area that they kind of don't want to, I don't want to say waste them on free ads, but from Indeed's perspective, it's just supply and demand. If they look at that supply and demand and there's a huge mismatch, they can absolutely make it that you can't post free ads. And it'll pop up when you go to post the ad and say, this is required, you have to sponsor it. And then the other thing that they do is they change the budget type as well in more competitive markets. Interesting.

Yeah, I don't know. My wheels are just spinning. Like you have a lot of accounts all over the country and it may be interesting to like analyze that. Like what, you know, where can you post free and where not and how big are those cities? You know, those cities collect some information on that because, you know, a lot of these new owners, they may be in a rural and be thinking, oh, I can, you know, run on free ads for the duration. But then some may be starting and thinking, you know, I can't even do this because I'm in this big metropolitan. It'd be really interesting just to like really understand that because that affects all these owners. Yeah, definitely. And to do a little bit of analysis there, I'm going to pass that on to

my team to say we need to look more into the details because it didn't used to be that way. And the thing is, anything with Indeed, this is a huge company with really, really advanced algorithms and a lot of resources. So they can do things like that without a human ever getting involved. And because of that, if you are working on your own individual Indeed account, you'll get advice from somebody in another town and go in and go, well, how are they doing that? How are they posting free ads? I can't figure it out. Well, maybe they can post free ads and you can't. And the same thing happens with budget types. How are they able to post a monthly budget? I can't

post a monthly budget. I have to pay per applicant. It's the market. The same thing applies to the data. When you go look at the data and analytics on an Indeed account, they have different versions of the analytics page that different accounts have. And so people may have access to data that you don't have. So it's just important to know whenever you're getting advice on Indeed, take it, listen to it, get the information and know that it may be different for your own account. And it may not be your fault. It may not be that you're not finding it or you're not doing it right. You just may not be able to do things the way one of your colleagues is able to do in a different town.

And you've mentioned to me before, Indeed does not post all of these requirements or criteria anywhere, right? So it's the tip here too is talk to your representative, you know, get a hold of an Indeed rep and like build a relationship with them because they will be your go-to, right? Absolutely. And it changes over time. And so all of the information that I have, it's not coming from one place

and it's not that I've found out, it's that I have a whole team. That's the only reason we've been able to kind of pull together all this information is I have a team of 30 and they get on Indeed and they'll send me an email or send a group chat to say, hey, I spoke with an Indeed representative today and they told me this or they told me that. And we've just over time been able to build that knowledge, which is why it's so helpful for agencies because you really can't build that knowledge, which is why it's so helpful for agencies, because you really can't build that extensive knowledge by yourself quickly. I mean, you can build it,

it'll take a long time. And so that's why we want to share it. It's these little crumbs of things that we get from different Indeed representatives. We've even had times where different reps told us different things. And then we have to dig in further and say, hey, can more people ask more reps and find out what's going on? Because it's not always consistent. A couple of questions here. So I guess, first off, this is maybe less of a question, but let's, as we continue this discussion, let's make sure and differentiate when the answers might be different in places that are rural versus Metro. I think that's one request that we get a lot is it's helped to understand like, you know, is this something that applies universally or does it look

very differently in areas that are more populated? So let's just kind of call those out as we're talking if the answer is like pretty different. My other question with that is, you know, just, and again, trying to kind of hit the basic questions here. First of all, is there, like, does everyone have an Indeed rep at their beck and call or do you have to be at a certain level of spend? To have that? No, I believe everybody does. It's in your account information. Honestly, I don't know exactly where, because they've changed it. And now my team is typically the ones doing that. But in your account information. Honestly, I don't know exactly where because they've changed it. And now my team is typically the ones doing that. But in your account information,

you should always have it assigned in DeepRef. And you can just call them anytime. Now they're always gonna say, you need to spend more money. So go into it with that perspective. You wanna have specific questions, not just, hey, I'm not getting enough applicants. What do I need to do? Their typical answer is going to be, you need to spend more money,

but your D rep is always there. Go with specific questions. Like, can you tell me what titles are performing better in my area? Like CNA, HSA or caregiver. Can you tell me I had this ad that's not getting good visibility? Am I doing something wrong? Is it too close to another ad? You know, just go in with specific questions that they can help you look into. Gotcha. And you mentioned having had times where different reps told you different things. Are there any examples of that you can share? I can't think of one off the top of my head.

It usually has to do with these little Indeed best practices. And it's probably because those reps work in different markets or different types of accounts that we don't know what the differentiator is. We don't know how they are putting different markets into different buckets because it's not clear, but they're seeing different information. And so then we start to dig in to say, well, hey, if you're calling Indeed today, can you ask them about this to see, is this a representative that told us something different? Was it really just specific to this one account? Or is there more information that we need to figure this out? That makes sense. So let's talk about the job ads themselves and kind of dig into first, you know, what does a great job ad on Indeed look

like? What are the components of that? Yeah, I love to talk about this because I get so many questions about it. The first thing I want people to understand is I cannot come in and flip a switch for you and make you get a bunch more applicants, which I have to clarify because we have people that call us and they're like, well, just look at my ad and tell me what to do differently. But it goes into so many things. You really, for Indeed ads, you want to see the results over time and continue tailoring them for what your applicants are telling you. But just a couple quick things off the bat for making a better ad. Mobile friendly. So that means you have bullet points, you have short paragraphs. It's very easy to skim through, see what you need. The other thing we

talk a lot about is being caregiver first. So in the ad, are you speaking directly to the caregiver? Are you putting the information that matters to them at the beginning of the ad or the end. So things like pay, benefits, hiring timeline, culture. Are these high up in your ad or are you first going through, here's the whole history of our agency and here's all of the requirements and here's what we're looking for. You want to start with the caregiver. What are they looking for? What do they want to see in a job ad? This also goes into specific logistics. Being caregiver first in an ad means you don't give vague statements like great pay, competitive pay, but you give specific statements. This is our pay.

This is the range. You can give specific information about the career path. After two years, you can expect X, Y, and Z. There's really clear information of what you know caregivers are looking for. That would be caregiver first. The next one that's very similar is speaking directly to the caregiver, not just corporate speak.

I see this a lot. Corporate things, here's a history about our agency and they describe everything in overly clinical terms as far as what you'll be doing and what matters. We want to speak directly to caregivers. And this is something I know Miriam and I and you have all talked about before, not just copying and pasting one job ad, but speaking directly to different populations of caregivers that you want to attract can be really powerful and using you language. So instead of whoever is hired in this role, we will be doing this or caregiver role includes with a list of duties. But in this role,

you will be doing X, Y, Z. You will be paid this amount. You can advance over the next couple of years, but really using that you language to directly connect to them versus a corporate, just copy and pasted job ad. A couple of questions there. Let's kind of zero in on the headline first. So the stat that I've heard is that you have something like five to seven seconds to grab the person's attention as they read the headline or else they'll move on. That actually sometimes seems high to me, you know, based on how much there is to scroll through Indeed. What specifically needs to be in the headline? And are there things that agencies often put in the headline that don't

need to be there? Yeah. So again, on Indeed specifically, if you have a free ad, you really only want to put the job title because anything else Indeed can get particular about. And I mean things like $500 sign-on bonus or working right away and things like that. Sometimes if your account gets flagged to where a human comes in and reviews it, they might look at that and think it's what they consider spam-like. So on a free ad and the title, you just want the actual position. In a paid ad, you can do some more things like starting pay $17 an hour or weekly pay, daily pay, sign on bonus, you can put some of that information in there. And then in the body of the ad, what I like to call attention grabbers. So at the very top of your ad, not complete sentences,

but in bold, just a couple quick things at the very top, separated by a star or something. But we'll do like daily pay available, start work within a week, all shifts available, or $17 an hour, $300 sign-on bonus available, working by next week. These should be things that are based on what we know caregivers are looking for. So within the industry, there's a lot of different sources for this information for what caregivers want in a job. If you're not sure, even talk to your caregivers that you're interviewing

and hiring, you know, what made you choose to interview with us. Thank you're not sure, even talk to your caregivers that you're interviewing and hiring, you know, what made you choose to interview with us? Thank you so much for showing up today. I'd love to know what about our company stands out to you. Things like these, these kinds of questions to see what is actually drawing in the caregivers that are qualified and then putting those at the top of that ad and that just quick attention grabbing format. And is it best to have ads for specific shifts, you know, saying we're trying to hire someone for this night shift or whatever, or is it better to have kind of ads that are more general? I would say you can do both, but you, and you can do just general ads, but you cannot do just shift specific ads because it is very hard to maintain that in a way that is sustainable and scalable for most agencies. So you always want to have some good general ads and you

typically want a few different ads running with different titles, some different language in the ad, different budgets, different locations. So you're always kind of testing out to see what's working. And then if you do have a specific shift that is hard to staff, a specific ad can be a great way to do that. You just want to be really clear what you're looking for and careful that you are not over-focusing on specific shifts because you really need to be always recruiting, always talking to more people, and then go from there versus, oh, we just need people on this shift. If they're not for this shift, I don't want to talk with them. And that's why I say, don't only do shift specific. Are there advantages to having some shifts specific ads?

There can be. Again, I just think for the average agency that's trying to grow quickly, this is not sustainable. Because typically when people want to do that is when they get a new case that they can't staff right away. So yes, sure, go post an ad. But you can't rely on that to staff your cases. Because what will happen is by the time that you get the ad up, get in touch with people, get them through the hiring process, you're going to have too long of a delay to when we can get that caregiver working to meet that shift. And so that's why generally, I don't think it's super effective because people are, it's really only useful for situations like that. We just got to do a case, we can't staff it, let me go post it. And then you're going to

have a delay. The stronger strategy is to have good ads running all the time that attract people for a variety of shifts. And it's harder, especially for new agencies, but to keep a good roster of caregivers with various shifts available so that you're not in a moment of desperation posting this shift specific ad that you may or may not be able to fill. Now, for some agencies, they may get to a point where they have a good roster, but there's maybe night shifts or evening, something specific that it's not one case they're looking for. It's a general across our roster. We need more night people.

In that situation, that's a good time to use an ad like that to say, we really don't need anybody else working days right now. So we'll have a general ad running to get some day, some night, and then we'll have a specific night ad. That's the time that that would be helpful. That makes sense. You've kind of stressed the importance of having several ads at all times, even if they're all advertising for the same shifts and everything.

What are some of the differences that should be between those ads? Like how come it's important to have multiple? And if you have, you know, four at any given time, like what's different about them? Just as a general principle, I want people to have different ads because I always want them to be evaluating what's working because it changes over time. So if you just have one ad, you can't test out different things, whether it's different locations, titles, ad copy, budget. It's just, this is our ad, and if it's working, it's working. If it's not, it's not. So that's why we like to have multiple ads. The different things you can test. Most agencies need to test different locations. They need to be

at least 25 miles apart, but for a lot of agencies I've worked with, if they're rural, they need to test different locations. They need to be at least 25 miles apart. But for a lot of agencies I've worked with, if they're rural, they need to be testing things in different areas to get where will people drive from to get to where my cases are. So you need to have different ads running. And you can get really granular about, I chose this town because I know based on the housing prices there, it's more likely caregivers would live there and it's within 15 minutes of my cases. You can get really granular like that.

For more metro areas, they often need to be testing different ads on different sides of the city that they're in to see, again, where am I going to get caregivers that will actually drive here? So if you have a big city, sometimes posting it maybe on the western side of the city, you're going to get people that actually live an hour away because that's the next closest area. They're not going to drive in. You post on the eastern side of the city, you might get people who actually live in suburbs that are really close. Those are the kinds of reasons you want to be testing different locations all the time to see where are we actually getting caregivers that work out for us because sometimes it's not what you expect. You know, it's easy to think, oh, I know I'm going to post it right here. That's where people

will drive from. If you don't test it, you don't really know. So that's a reason to test different locations. Another reason that you want to have multiple ads running is to test different titles. So you might have one that's caregiver, one that's CNA, one that's HHA. You can have different job ads and titles for the different types of caregivers that you can hire, and you can test them that way. So all of this, the multiple ads, is to give different visibility to different people, whether they're in different locations or whether a different job title applies to them. But it's also just for testing to see what's working because it will change over time. So on a monthly basis, you want to sit down and see what are we spending on different ads? Where did we actually get hires from? What's most effective? And shift your budget

around based on what's working versus what you need. Really good tip on the location, especially. Thanks for that. A question I have when you talk about testing is like, so generally speaking, so I come from a marketing background and there's a lot of talk of like testing different things like with ads or with email marketing, things like that. And they always say like only test a single variable at once, you know, so for instance, if you're trying to do like an A B test with emails, you wouldn't change a bunch of different things, you wouldn't change the subject line, and the text and the button, you know, you,

you'd only change one things, you can zero in on what made the difference in results. Does that apply here too? Or is it not realistic to only change a single variable at a time between different Indeed ads? It definitely applies. Most agencies aren't able to execute that super well because of the level of time that it takes. The other thing is with Indeed, you do have to be careful about how similar your ads are.

So, for example, if you had an ad with the same title, the two locations would have to be 25 miles apart. For some agencies, that works. For some, if they're in like a really close area with a small service area, they don't want to post 25 miles apart. So they wouldn't be able to test it at that level. So they may be testing different things at once. But yes, the principle absolutely applies of only changing one thing. It just can be hard to execute, particularly on Indeed, where you have to be careful about not getting flagged as spam. And if your ads are too similar and too close together, they will get flagged as spam.

That makes sense. And then you also talk about like watching the different metrics and using that to test your headlines, to test your ads, things like that. I'm assuming here that the ultimate North star metric is the number of people that you hire from each ad. And I mean, like maybe even getting any retention or something, but like what are the different metrics that you should be watching in the Indeed platform to be testing ads? Well, if you're doing paid ads, it's really cost per hire. If you have an ad that you spend $100 on and you get one person hired,

that's $100 cost per hire. If your other ad, let's say you're writing $500 and you get two or three hires, you've got more hires, but it's just because you spent more. So you want to look for which one is getting the most competitive cost per hire and a caregiver that actually works out for you. So you do have to kind of look at the nuance to say, well, we got a higher, but then after a month, they said it was too far to drive. So that ad does not work for us. But in general, you're looking at the cost per hire to see which ads are getting us the best bang for our buck, as they say, that's what you want to be tracking.

If they have access to metrics like views or click through rate, do you have any tips on using metrics like those to make those decisions too? We really don't focus on those very much because they can get people distracted. If you get a lot of people who click on your ad or even apply to your ad, but they don't end up being qualified caregivers that work for what you need. It's really not helpful. And for most agencies, just from an efficiency standpoint, I don't recommend getting to that level of detail unless you are already an agency with enough people on your team that you can afford to have somebody spend that much time on it. That makes sense. And I appreciate the fact that you kind of speak to the agencies who want to improve their recruitment, but don't realistically have the time to do everything perfectly that could be done on Indeed.

Because obviously, like, that's very intimidating, not always realistic. I appreciate you making the distinction of like, you know, here's here are things that are good to do that you have time for. And here are things that are good to do that probably aren't worth that level of time. Right. You always have to look at the trade-off. I mean, that's so much of what I do in my role because we're recruiting at scale. So we do a lot of, okay, well, if we add an extra phone call on this day, does it actually move the needle enough to make it worth it? Because I have to provide top tier recruiting at an affordable price. So we could go to the thousandth degree, but at that point,

it's not going to get a good return on investment for our customers. So we're always having to make those decisions about, there are always more things you can do, but what's going to actually drive meaningful results in a way that's effective, cost effective to get a good return on investment. And especially for agencies that are newer, they have to be really mindful of that, of what's actually worth our time that's going to drive results. The more you grow, like

I said, if you have more people on your team and you have a multi-million dollar agency and you want to have somebody that really gets to that level of detail, that's fine. That's great. I'm sure there's value there. It's just not going to be for most agencies. They're not going to get a good return on that. Speaking of striking that balance between what is helpful and what is helpful, but it doesn't have the time or like doesn't have the return on investment. What is a good, I guess, rule of thumb for how often agencies should be changing and updating their job ads? For most agencies, once a month is plenty. You put your ads up, you have a good strategy and set a monthly time that you're going to either sit down with your team or for a newer owner that's doing it all themselves, still set a monthly reminder to sit

down, look at all of your ads. Now within that month, I typically recommend for people to repost one of their ads every week. So every individual ad doesn't get posted more than once a month, but you can spread that out throughout the month because you'll sometimes get a little bump of applicants when an ad is new, but to actually sit down and dig into the results and look at all of that once a month is fine. Gotcha. Now might be a good time to talk about budget too. You know, I think new owners are asking themselves, you know, how much am I allocating towards Indeed and all these other sources?

What's a ballpark? What can a new owner expect to dish out on Indeed? And does that vary as they scale? Absolutely varies because ultimately, again, what you're looking at is the cost per hire. So if you need more hires, you have to spend more. For a new agency, I personally would not post an ad with anything less than $50 to $100. And in most markets, Indeed will not let you sponsor an ad for less than that. So when you go on to post an ad that's a paid ad, Indeed may have a bottom threshold. And so for some agencies, that bottom threshold might be three or $400. And they might look at that and go, okay, I can only post one paid ad. And if you're in that situation, that is fine. You post what you can,

if you can only afford one paid ad because of that minimum they're giving you, that's totally fine. But for bigger agencies or agencies that can invest a little bit more there, it's going to be at least a few hundred dollars to drive noticeable results. Any less than that, you're probably just going to get frustrated. So if you have a few hundred dollars you can invest, I would say anywhere from three to five hundred dollars is a good place to get started and test it out. But again, you're going to come back in a month and you're going to look and see, did this work for us? Because if the problem is somewhere else in your recruiting pipeline, if you're a new agency and you just can't keep up with your Indeed applicants, don't invest five hundred dollars in, if you're a new agency and you just can't keep up with guaranteed applicants, don't invest $500 in applicants that you're not going to be able to call in a timely

manner and get through the recruiting process. You know what I mean? That's the trade-off. You want to invest at least a few hundred dollars in it, but you also then have to be ready to handle those applicants well, or you're not going to get anything for that money. I'm curious too, you work with some mid and like larger agencies. I'm putting you on the spot, but any reference of how much they're spending and how many applicants or new hires they're getting based off that spend? Yeah. I mean, I work with some agencies that are hiring 25 to 30 caregivers a month and they're spending thousands of dollars. I mean, it's just at that

level, that's what you have to do to get enough because the cost per hire doesn't change drastically. So for newer agencies, the way to test that is you take a month, you find out what is our cost per hire and how many hires do I want? Can I afford that many hires? It's just math. And the same math applies to these larger agencies. When they tell me I need 25 hires per month, that's often one of the first things I ask is, well, how many applicants are you getting and what are you spending to get that many applicants? Because it is going to be a larger investment. And at that level, they also don't get enough results from free ads. You get to a point where you really have to have effective paid ads and be willing to invest in them if indeed it's going to be

your primary source of applicants. So thousands of dollars. And in general, when I talk with an agency, I break that down. How many applicants are you getting? And I always ask, how many hires are you getting? Because we want to see that you're hiring 5% to 10% of your applicants. If you are not, the question is not how much more should you be spending. It's what is broken in your recruiting process and how do you fix that first? So that's a rule of thumb I use. If I'm doing a call with somebody to just evaluate, how many applicants are you getting? How many hires?

And if it's less than 5%, I don't advise them to spend more on Indeed until they get that number up. I honestly love that. You can reverse engineer it. And I think that's where there's a level of sophistication. I think of, we were talking to Debbie Miller a couple of weeks ago and she knew exactly how many new hires she wanted and she was reverse engineering that. So she knew exactly how much she needed to spend and that's where these new owners you know you see in these facebook groups saying i need as many as i can get or anyone that can come my way but you know put a number to it know your cost per hire and then work towards that and you can honestly accomplish it

because you know exactly what you want and what it takes to get there. And none of us are mathematicians, but it's really, you know, just a really simple formula to get to where you need to be. Absolutely. It is simple. And that's why we tell people two things to be able to do that. One is to track those metrics. As you probably know, I recommend weekly. How many applicants did we get? How many booked an interview? How many showed up? How many were hired? Once a week, take a couple minutes to look at that.

And then the other thing is to try paid ads before you're desperate because you want to know what it costs to get a hire. And if you wait till all of a sudden you're turning away cases and you can't staff them and now I'm going to go try paid ads, you can't reverse engineer it because you don't know how much it's going to cost you to get a hire. So you want to be testing those things early in your business so that then when you start to have those growth opportunities, you know, okay, well, I know it's going to cost me $400 to get a hire, which by the way, that number didn't come out of nowhere. It's not exact, but it's not crazy. A couple hundred dollars to get a hire is pretty normal. So you want to know that number and know then, is it that I need to

increase my ad budget or that I need to get better at turning them into hires? And the only way to do that is to be tracking that data before you need it. So I assume that how much you pay per applicant and hire depends on a lot of things and you'll kind of varies a lot from agency to agency, from region to region. But is there kind of a general ballpark of like, this is acceptable, you're doing a good job. And then like, this is too much unreasonable, you need, it does. It varies a lot. And the other thing that's happening is Indeed is rolling out a new type of budget where you just pay for an applicant and they set the price and they will tell you, you have to run a pay-per-applicant. It's going to be $30 per applicant. In one area in Washington, we were told $80 per applicant. That is unreasonable. That will not work for most home care agencies. So when I talk to an agency, if they tell me they're paying less than $10 per applicant,, I think I said per hour a minute ago, but per applicant, they're paying more than $25 per applicant. It's not that that is impossible

to overcome because in some market, it just is going to be like that. And especially in, I work in California with some agencies, they're in really high cost of living areas and their cost per applicant is a lot higher. So if you're in one of those areas where it's over $25 per hour or per applicant, you want to focus on bringing that down. And that's when I talk about testing different ads. That is what you're testing to see if we post in this other area, do we get a much lower cost per applicant? And do we still get people that are hireable and will work for our agency?

That's what you're looking at. But at that level, if you're in a very expensive area, you have to be really, really good at turning those applicants into hires. You cannot afford to be lax about the rest of your recruiting process. Okay. That makes sense. As we've talked through this, you've mentioned kind of lots of little things to consider with Indeed. You know, so for example, the fact that if you're only using free ads, you might get banned and not even realize it. You know, you mentioned kind of some different things as far as like what happens if you're spending certain amounts. Are there maybe more of those like those little things that you just have to understand with Indeed and how it works or maybe how its algorithm works or something that if you have two ads that are identical title and text, and you post them five or 10 miles apart from each other, that can get you banned, or it can just give you less visibility. So that less visibility, we're talking about the algorithm, and we're talking about how far up in search results your ad shows. If you have poor visibility, you'll be

on the last page. And in some markets, that might be the 10th or 15th page of ad shows. If you have poor visibility, you'll be on the last page. And in some markets, that might be the 10th or 15th page of ad results. It's going to be really hard to get applicants there. So if you need to post them less than 25 miles apart, you need a different title and different text in the ads. That's one thing to keep in mind. The other thing that I think I also mentioned is you can get away with more with paid ads than you can with free ads. So in a free ad, you have to be really careful, especially with your title, that you're not posting things that sound spammy. This could be about a sign-on bonus or pay or things like that. You can put some exact things like $17 an hour or things like that, but not more.

Another one that is coming up a lot is people are using third-party platforms to push out all of their job ads. These are very popular. Some of them work really well. Some of them don't. So if you are really concerned about your ads, try pausing them there and posting directly on Indeed. And that's also how you get access to an Indeed rep who can help you with all of that. But if you are posting directly on Indeed, or I'm sorry, if you're posting through a third party, some of that information does not populate into a job ad the way it does on Indeed. So you may want to go in to Indeed and try and edit those ads to post things specifically in the fields that are

searchable on Indeed, like the pay, full-time or part-time benefits, no benefit. These are things that when you post a job ad, you can go through and click them all yourself and they will be searchable on the ad. People can filter by them and find exactly what they're looking for. And they also show up on those nice summaries at the top of an ad. But when we were posting through a third-party platform and we just figured this out, some of that information does not auto-populate. So you have to actually then post it through this third-party

platform, but still go into Indeed and edit the ad to put all of those things in there. So a couple of really interesting things in there. I was actually about to ask you about those platforms that you kind of post a single job ad and then it broadcasted out to all the different job sites. If I'm using something like that, how can I identify whether it's doing a good job of that or if I shouldn't be using that platform to post my Indeed ads? There's a couple of different ways. First of all, if you're not getting any traffic or if you have a very steep decline in your traffic, that's the first place that I would look. Because sometimes those integrations break and the ads lose organic visibility on Indeed.

So if you suddenly were getting good results and now you're not, that's the first place that I would look is should we try running our own ads on Indeed? The trouble is these platforms will advise you, and rightly so, not to post competing ads through your Indeed account and through there. It can get complicated, and again, can get your account flagged for spam. So if you're gonna do that, you have to stop the ads on the third-party platform and just go post your own ads on Indeed.

And then from a financial perspective, these platforms are always going to have an additional cost. So you need to look at how does that impact our bottom line in the time that we're saving? And in our cost per hire, are we making up the money elsewhere to make the cost of the platform worth it? For most agencies, they're still going to get pretty much all of your applicants from Indeed or from just a couple of sources. So if the software that you're using is saving you enough time to make up that cost and still giving you good results, then it's a good investment. But if you're getting worse results through there, so your cost per hire is going up and you're paying the additional cost of the

software, that's when you want to reevaluate to look and go, well, is it actually getting us applicants from all these places, which is typically the value add there. If we post here, it goes out to 80 different job sites or 200 different job sites. Look back at your results and see, are we actually getting enough applicants from other sources to make it worth it? Or are we still getting 95% of our applicants from Indeed and would be better served just spending more money on Indeed versus the cost of a third-party platform? Do you have any tips that are specific to particular third-party platforms?

No, and I try to shy away from them, to be honest, because we have great relationships with some of these and some of them are very helpful. And my recruiters work on a lot of these different platforms. So we try to give more of that general advice of here's what you want to look for to see if it's working for you or not. But I don't like to give specific advice. Also, because sometimes I'm privy to information about platforms that they may or may not have shared that isn't really my business to share. Okay, gotcha. That makes sense. Miriam, was there anything that you were going to ask with any of that?

I know we're kind of covering specific tips. One thing that we haven't really talked about today is posting the pay. I know we talked about the headline and some of the description, etc. Speak to the importance of listing your pay and why. Absolutely. First of all, it's just a better way to treat caregivers to not waste their time. But if you want to get beyond just treating people better and letting them know what they're going to get paid. The reason is that you can sometimes get more applicants if you don't post your pay, if your pay is not super competitive for your area. So, and I understand some agencies have limitations on what they can pay based on whether they're reimbursed or not based on the market,

things like that. I totally understand. So, it will feel like we're getting better results when we don't post our pay because we get more applicants. But you're going to get applicants that don't want what you're paying anyways. So they may even accept a job interview. And this is pretty common with agencies. They think, well, we're getting people to book interviews, but our show up rate is terrible. They don't realize it because of their pay and because they're getting people on the phone that may not feel comfortable saying, how much do you pay? And no, I'm sorry, that doesn't work for me. Some caregivers will, they'll say, oh no, that's not what I'm looking for. Thank you. They won't schedule the interview. A lot of people are not comfortable doing that if

they're on the phone with somebody. And so they'll say, oh, okay, yeah, that should work. Thanks. And they'll schedule the interview, but then they're still going to be looking for a job that pays what they actually want to make. And so they're not serious about your company. So then all you've done is spent a little bit more money online. You've got an applicant, but they don't want what you're offering. I think it's better for everybody to start with. This is what we actually pay. You may get fewer applicants, but if they're applicants that are actually interested in what you offer, that's better for everyone, less wasted time, more likely to show up for their interviews. So the temptation to not post pay, I get it, but

in the long run, it tends to just waste everybody's time and effort. And it can also be really emotional. We have to burn out from you and your recruiting staff because you're going to consistently get people that don't want what you pay. And you'll start to feel like nobody's going to come work for us. This isn't working.

Maybe you need to raise your pay, but maybe you also just need to communicate it more clearly so that you're getting people who are okay with what you're paying and interested. And this is really important back to what you said. Imagine if Indeed is going the direction of cost per applicant, you will waste a ton of money if you're not being transparent in your job ad. If you're not listing that pay, you're going to get all these applicants that don't even show up. And then, you know, that's

money out the door that you're wasting. So I think this is like full circle on that concept of being transparent, listing your pay so that the applicants are higher quality. And I just wanna say, in preparation for this call and in talking to you a lot the last few weeks, I spent 30 minutes on Indeed yesterday in our local market, just seeing what's out there. And I just wanna get on my soapbox and say,

don't copy and paste ads. I was like mind boggled by how many ads look the exact same across agencies, you know, and I'm in a small community, so there's only a handful, but the ads all look the same and all say the same things and are so generic. So I know you and I have talked a lot about this. Don't fall into that temptation of just copying and pasting what another agency is doing, assuming that it's working. This area needs your help. I need to contact these agencies and point them in your direction because they are doing all the things not to do. And so anyone listening to this and wondering what they should be doing on Indeed, everything that we've talked about today, I know these seem like pretty basic principles, but put them into practice and you'll see the results.

It's not rocket science. It's totally doable. Everything that you've talked about, and that's what I love when you talk about this, is breaking it down and making it seem really doable. Yeah, absolutely. It's not rocket science, but it is a lot for someone who's also trying to run the whole rest of their business. You don't have time to sit down and figure these things out by trial and error. And part of what I've learned as a business owner is being okay with doing things imperfectly because you can't do everything. You can know, but you can't always execute,

right? It takes a lot of time for newer agencies. It takes a lot of time to little by little improve each area of your business. So when you look at recruiting, you might be starting with the basic building blocks of we need to get applicants online and we need to call them. That is a great place to start. So everything we've talked about today is very doable, but don't get discouraged if you're struggling. You know, you hear this and you might have to hear it a few times and that's okay. You can still learn more today. And even if you just implement a few of the things we talked about, that is still progress and it's okay for it to take a long time. It is okay. You just stay in the game. You keep doing, you keep making

small incremental changes. And over time, those add up to be very powerful because you're building, you know, you make a little bit of improvement on your strategy this month, you make a little bit more next month in two or three years down the line, you are going to be one of those agencies that has a very complex ad strategy and is tracking all of this data and knows what to do with it and has these trend lines to go, well, last year we were spending this amount per hire and this year we're up 20%. Like you will get there by making small changes today, but it's okay if it feels a little overwhelming at first, just start small and build a little bit at a time. Something I want to add here too, is that our team actually wrote some sample job ad templates with Rachel's help too. She looked over them and gave us pointers and

helped us make them even stronger that you can download for free and use. We have one for caregivers. We have one for different office staff roles. To get those, go to faq.careswitch.com. And then there will be kind of a bunch of different topics you can's no one perfect job ad and if there were, everyone would use it and then it would stop being the perfect one. But these will also be examples of how to apply some of the tips that Rachel has suggested as far as speaking caregiver first and making it about them and being short and to the point and that kind of thing. So I would highly recommend checking out that resource. I want to go back a little bit in our conversation here, Rachel, in talking about posting pay.

I think you did a really good job of addressing that. There is one kind of pushback that I've heard a lot that I want to see if you would say anything specific to this. And that is the idea that the majority of agencies are going to have local competitors, whether or not they're agencies or other kinds of businesses that pay a lot more than them. And they can advertise that pay and show how much more it is. And I think some of those agencies kind of prefer to get people into the interview before saying the pay so that they kind of have someone there captive that they can convince of the various reasons why they should work there, even if the pay isn't as high as some of the other options. What would your response be to that?

Again, I think in the long term, it's a waste of time because when most people are looking at pay, they know what they need to make to pay their bills. And if you're not paying what they need for their standard of living, they're not going to stay anyways. So to me, it becomes almost an ethical thing. Just my personal opinion, I don't think that that's helpful. I think you get people in there and it's not a bait and switch, but almost. It's like, come on in, look how great this is. We're pulling at your heartstrings. Don't you want to do this? And some of those people will work out. Some of those people will truly love working with your agency, working with what you're

doing. And you may counteract that, which I would highly recommend with a great career path that shows, yes, you're making a little bit less, but here's this amazing career path and how we're going to support you over time and you can advance and whatever that looks like for you. But a lot of the people that you get, even if they accept the job, they're not going to stay because a month from now, two months from now, three months from now, when they're really tight on money, are they going to be willing to make that sacrifice to work for your agency? Or are they going to go, you know what? I tried this out. I really can't work for that amount of money. I need to go get one of the higher paying things. You want to be

honest with yourself and with your market about what you can pay and then stick to that. Otherwise, you're really not serving anyone. And if you are private pay, you're kind of kidding yourself that your rates are okay and what you can pay is okay. If you are private pay and you cannot recruit anyone for the amount that you're paying. Consider that raising your rates is a kindness to your clients if it means that you can continue to staff the care that they need. Keeping rates low to the point that you can't reliably staff them with high quality care is not a kindness to anyone. So for private pay agencies, that's also what I would throw out there. Great tips. Thanks for that. And I agree, definitely. I know that we're almost at the end of our time here. Are there things that we haven't

asked you about in regards to Indeed or hiring in general that we should have? I think we've covered a lot of ground today. And certainly for anyone who didn't watch last week's webinar, I would say they go well together to cover a lot of information. But the only thing I would just want to drive home is start tracking your data and start looking at it every month because you can put together some really powerful data with just a couple minutes every week.

And then again, you'll get there. If you're struggling today, I promise it is possible to succeed on Indeed. Here's a nice little rhyme for you. Because I know a lot of agencies I work with that are successful long term, their agencies are growing quickly. It is possible, but they didn't get there overnight. They got there through a long time of testing and tracking and seeing what worked and just making those small incremental changes. So if you feel overwhelmed today, start small, start with a few actionable steps today, start tracking the data and just improve a little bit every month. You'll be amazed how far you make it in a year or two. Thanks for that. For people who are listening, who want to contact you and or just learn more about CareWork, where should they go?

I'm going to try to say this with the list that I have right now, but it's careworkus.com. It's not CareWorks. It's careworkus.com. Highly recommend Rachel and her team. They do great work. I've heard great things about them. Thank you for joining and sharing your wisdom and experience with us here today, Rachel.

Super useful stuff. I know recruitment is one of the most challenging parts of running an agency and indeed is one of the most central parts of that for most agencies. So thank you for joining. Thanks for sharing all this information. And thanks everyone for listening. Join us again next week, same day, same time. We've got some more great content for you so we'll close things out thanks again thank you guys for having me thanks rachel take care that's a wrap this episode was made by the team at care switch the first free home care agency management software if you're tired of running your agency on an outdated software that looks and works like Windows 98 and you want to save a little money for your bottom line, check us out at careswitch.com.

Thanks for listening. See you next time.