Home Care U - How To Build A Recruitment Strategy (Rachel Gartner Pt. 1)

Episode Date: March 7, 2023

Rachel Gartner started off as a recruiter for a home care agency. Her methods were so successful that within two years, she was running her own company handling recruitment for home care agencies nationally. Come learn about these methods. 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 CareSwitch. Enjoy the session. Welcome everybody to Home Care U.

Hello for those of us joining live on Zoom, those of us joining live on Facebook Live, and welcome to everyone that listens to the recording after this event. For those of you live here today, don't forget to drop your questions and comments in the chat on Zoom or on Facebook. We'll ask them as we go, and we'll also get to some of them at the end. Today, we're going to be covering Recruitment 101. Recruitment is the number one topic in the industry, as everyone is very well aware. But today, we're not here to give you the keep on recruiting fluff, as we call it. We're going to go deeper today. You can find that fluff elsewhere.

Today, we want to really get into the nitty gritty and show you and tell you the things that you're looking for. So for that reason, we brought on Rachel Gartner, the CEO of CareWork. She was a former recruiter who was so good at it that she started her own recruitment agency. So Rachel, thanks for being here. And before we jump into the nitty gritty, tell us some of the juicy details of your background. Tell us about the successes that you've had in home care and what led you to

starting CareWork. Yeah, well, thank you guys so much for having me. Thank you everyone for being on today. I love to see agencies that are committing the time to learn about recruiting, especially from the get-go for a new agency to start out wanting to learn more, wanting to get the training. There's just so much that if you have it set up from the beginning will help your agency start off on the right foot. So I'm really happy everybody's here today at Home Care U. My background, I was a recruiter in Florida and it was going really, really well because from the beginning when I was a new recruiter, everything was really organized, everything was tracked, it went super well and it helped those agencies that I was working with

increase their results when they had people who'd been doing it for years and really struggling. So that's why I started my company, CareWork. We only work in home care. It's such a need. And for me, it's really, it's about increasing access to care because recruiting is so tough now that a lot of agencies are turning away cases. So we want to help people get better recruiting so they can increase access to care. And since that time, I have a team now of about 30 employees and we get thousands of caregivers hired every year so it's been quite the journey through the pandemic and everything else but it's going well awesome and that's why you know you were a recruiter in kind of a past life and

now you're still doing it day in and day out and training your team to do it so it's all top of mind and so the pain points that the agency owners are going through, you're still in their shoes experiencing it day in and day out, which is amazing. Absolutely. And all over the country too, like all the different markets, anything they have faced, we have probably been through. Exactly. So that's exactly where we're going to start today. I want you to put yourself in the shoes of a new owner or a new recruiter at an agency and walk us through

what you would do if you were literally like starting from ground zero and building a recruitment strategy. So I'm going to just turn you loose. What would you do if that was your position right now? Absolutely. Well, I can think back to when I was a new recruiter for a home care agency. And that's basically what they did is they said, nothing we've been doing is working. So we're not going to train you on how we've been doing it. Here's our login for Indeed. Here's how we like the requirements that we need. Go try and figure this out.

My background is in actually biomedical science is my master's. So nothing related to recruiting, but a lot related to data and organization. So that's what worked for me from the get-go. And that agency that I worked in as a new recruiter was I got really, really organized and process-based from day one. So the first thing I would tell a new agency or new recruiter is to get really organized. And if there's a couple of systems that if you set up, they're going to make your life easier and they're going to actually make you better at recruiting over time. So the first thing I want you to do is set up applicant tracking. Please do not be tracking all of this in your mind. Like who do I need to call today? Or sorting through your texts like, oh, is there

anybody else I could get back to? Is there anything else I needed to do today? From day one, I want you to get organized with your applicants and have a way that you track them all so that you know who you need to call and when, and you're not having to run through that mental list every day. And then that allows you also to contact them all multiple times without losing your mind. So if you have a really good organized system, it's easy to say, I'm going to call this person three times over the next week because you're tracking it all in one place. The next thing I want them to track, and this is not a surprise to anyone that's worked with me, is the data. So this could be a software that you use.

This could be as simple as a spreadsheet for a new agency. But every week, how many applicants are you getting? How many are you talking to? How many book interviews? How many show up? How many get hired? When you track that over time, you'll be able, first of all, to see your progress, which is really encouraging for a new agency or new recruiter. But you'll also be able to see where you have room for improvement and be able to see the trends over time. So this actually doesn't take that much time. I know a new agency owner in particular, if they're doing it themselves, they don't have a ton of time to be doing this. But this could be every Monday for 15 minutes, you fill out this spreadsheet

or you update the tracker so you have that data there. And then following on that, a daily routine for what you're going to do as far as recruiting. For a new agency, this absolutely has to be a daily priority. This cannot be something that you're just getting to throughout the week when you have time. You are going to have fires you're putting out every day in the new home care agency. You have a lot going on. So with that organized applicant tracking that we're talking about, you should know every day I'm going to sit down. I'm going to put my new applicants in there. I'm going to call all the people on my list for today and update everything. And I'm going to do that every single morning or even better twice a day.

That's what I have my recruiters do at a minimum. They need to be on there once in the morning and once in the afternoon. But when you boil that down to a daily routine versus just, we're going to work really hard. We're going to try and call everybody. We know this is really important, but hey, this is our process. When somebody applies, we call them the first day, we call them the third day, we text them the fifth day. And then you have a way to track that. Every day when you sit down, you have a daily routine. Here's all the people I need to call today. I'm going to do this in the morning. In the afternoon, I'll put our new applicants in and do that again. When a new agency creates that routine, they are starting off better than some agencies that have been around a long time. And it simplifies it so that again, you're not doing all this mental tracking, you're not

having to dig through things, whether that's papers, whether again, that's text messages, or you're looking through missed calls. Twice a day, I'm going to block off 30 minutes on my calendar to sit down and call these people. For a new agency, it's usually not that much volume. So it wouldn't take that long if you do it twice a day. But I would actually block off that time on your calendar of this is what I'm going to sit down and I'm going to put new applicants in. I'm going to call people that I need to call, text people that I need to text, and make sure you have that time set aside every day. And even better, like I said, twice a day. If you block off a chunk of the morning, a chunk of the afternoon, you can get back to your new applicants

within a couple hours all the time. That's how my team does it. We have a seven day a week response rate same day. And that's because we have people that that is their job this time and this time each day. And it's a simple routine. So that's what I would do if I was a new agency or new recruiter. The first thing I would do, get organized, set up a process and create your daily routine. I go in. Here's my list of people I need to call. I call them all. I'm now done until later this afternoon when I come back in. It keeps it really organized so that you can actually live out the recruiting best practices without losing your mind. Because agency owners in particular have a lot they need

to be doing. You have to get your recruiting down to a process that is very simple to keep track of. Awesome. Great stuff. Let's drill a couple layers deeper. And I want to kind of go maybe in the order that you explained. Let's start with the ATS. Tell us about your experience using an ATS. Some owners may think, like you said, the volume is not very high. So I could start with a spreadsheet and then eventually get to an ATS. Did you use like a spreadsheet or some other method before using like a formal ATS? And how did that go? Yep, I did. So I, I would not track your applicants in a spreadsheet. I know people that do that. I think it gets really complicated. I would track your data in a spreadsheet. But as far as applicant tracking, before I use an applicant tracking system, I use something called Airtable.

But I basically built an applicant tracking system on that. What you want is something where you can mark easily the stage that somebody is at. Are they a new applicant? Have you already contacted them? Are they qualified? And then mark somehow connected to a calendar. So when I used Airtable, you can have a calendar view. And I created a calendar field that said next contact due. And what that did is all of my next contacts due, whether they were new applicants, whether they were somebody I was following up with, somebody I was trying again, they all showed

up in one place on a calendar view. That to me is the most essential thing that you're looking for is a way to mark a calendar field of this is when I need to contact that person. So now if you are using an ATS, look for something like that, that is really easy to mark, when am I going to follow up with this person again, and that then correlate to some kind of calendar view for the day to keep it simple. That's what I personally think is most important. And that was really powerful for me as a new recruiter because eventually I was recruiting

for five or six locations. I had a lot going on. I would just go through each one. Here's my calendar. Here's the people I need to call today. So again, you're not digging through and refinding them. Just every time you call somebody, if you don't reach them, you move that contact date to two days later, you call them again. It keeps it really organized. So it sounds like it can be done, but I'd imagine you'll outgrow that system really quickly. And

you were way more proactive and had designated time to this. So you were able to build something out. But I'd imagine right now you advise people to get set up on an ATS pretty quickly. I would. I mean, I'm biased because I have an ATS, but it's built actually off of what I had built on Airtable. We used that for like 60,000 applicants and it was free. And we used it for 60,000 applicants and then built something. And we used it for 60,000 applicants and then built something that's really simple that just does that. So you will outgrow it. But I also think it's an investment. I mean, of time, you have to invest something in recruiting. If you don't have money to invest, you have to invest time in it somewhere. You're going to have to invest in this process

and setting that up for me, it probably took me an hour or two, really, to get something like that set up. It wasn't very hard. And that paid off dividends for years of being able to easily track my applicants. Nobody was falling through the cracks. So things like this, they are going to take a little bit more effort upfront. But I think if that's, again, if you're new, you're a new agency or you're a new recruiter, this is the time to invest more time and more effort in setting up those processes and organization and all of that routine so that then it pays off as you get more and more busy and you grow, you have a foundational system and plan that can grow with you. Rather than if you don't invest the time in

it, it's coming down to just working really hard and trying to keep up with everything that will not grow with you. And it will fall to the wayside when something else comes up in the agency, because it's much harder to make those decisions. So some questions on follow up and things like that, that you'd mentioned first, I'm kind of interested, you mentioned that your team is able to work seven days a week to make sure that people are getting followed up with and that kind of thing. Have you noticed a difference in like response rates from applicants on weekends versus weekdays? Are they faster or slower or more or less likely to respond? They seem to be way more likely to pick up the phone.

So if you are a new agency or new recruiter, and you want to go the extra mile to really get results faster, even an hour or two on a Saturday can make a really big difference of getting people on the phone because typically, not as many people are working, they're more available, they have less going on. So yeah, definitely a difference on the weekends. It's just about implementing it in a smart way that you're not going to burn out really quickly. So if you are going to do that on the weekends, I would set just how much time you're going to do it. Don't sit down and go into a full work routine and let them once you're working, then okay, now I'm going to check my email and I'm going to do all these other things. Just from a burnout perspective, I would recommend setting, I'm going to do an hour of calling people and that's it.

And then I'm going to go back to my family time. What should a target goal be for how fast you're contacting applicants when they first apply? Definitely same day, Monday through Friday. Absolutely. If you can on the weekends, that's great. But definitely the same day. And again, that's where our daily routines of once in the morning, once in the afternoon, contacting people becomes really helpful.

And it doesn't even have to be calling all of them. It can be texting them. It can even be sending a message on Indeed. You can set up a template. Hey, I can't wait to speak with you. I'm going to call you soon. But if you're ready now, here's my phone number. You can get that done really, really quickly. And if you do that twice a day, the most interested candidates are going to get that message right away and they

will call you. And then when you have time, sit down and call everybody else you haven't heard from. Which of those have you seen the best results from? Are people more likely to respond to a text, to pick up the phone, to answer through Indeed? What works the best results from? Are people more likely to respond to a text, to pick up the phone, to answer if they're Indeed? What works the best? Or should recruiters try and do all three? A combination is great. I'll tell you from our team, we've measured this over a long time of calling versus texting versus calling and texting. At the scale that we work at, we don't see a huge increase in results from calling versus texting actually. But for a new agency, that's one of those areas that you can invest more time and even little changes are going to make a big difference for a new agency. So I

would recommend start with if you only have time to text them, text them, copy and paste, text all of them and then pick up the phone when they call back. If you have a little bit more time, you are going to get better results from picking up the phone and making a call, but not everybody's going to answer. And so then again, if you call them and they don't answer, send them a text that they can get back to later. I wouldn't call them without texting, but I would text them without calling, if that makes sense. Because just this generation, people are a lot more open to texting. So if you don't get them on the phone, send I would text them without calling if that makes sense. Because just this generation, people are a lot more open to texting. So if you don't get them on the phone, send them a text. If you don't have time to call everybody, even a text works great as long as you are

communicating who you are, what agency you're with, something along the lines of we have great pay, we can get you working quickly. I'd love to talk with you. Here's my number if you're interested. And then empowering those caregivers that are really interested to get back to you. How different might this look if you're recruiting, you know, maybe not through Indeed or maybe through a demographic of caregivers who are, let's say, instead of being 20 to 30, maybe they're 50 to 60. Yes. So we actually work with some offices that specifically recruit seniors and we still get some good results with texting. Actually, I think it's just become more and more common, but picking up the phone is great.

And again, the text that we're sending, I don't try and do full scheduling or something through a text. The text that we're sending is basically, I got your application. I'm really interested to talk with you. Here's my phone phone number and we always say you can call or text me so somebody wants to text back and ask questions they can but most people especially in the older demographic are going to see that text and they're going to click on the phone number and give you a call anyways you're just kind of saving your time by letting the interested caregivers call you instead of you calling everybody to find no interested caregivers. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, it does. And then

have you found it to be more effective to try and get them in for like an in-person interview or is it faster to resume or phone interview? Like what's your take on that debate? I think in-person interviews are the best because for most markets, not all, but for most markets, even if you have a slightly higher interview show up rate with virtual interviews, which actually most people don't, they're not going to show up for orientation. So what we have found in most markets, again, I would test this and the interview, what you're going to test here is you're going to test what percentage of our interviews show up and what percentage of those actually get hired. It may be different in somebody's market, but generally in-person interviews are more likely to get people who are really interested in following through the process.

As long as you can get them in for that interview quickly for a lot of new agencies, they may not even have a great physical location for interviews yet. So if you need to do virtual interviews, that's okay too. But I would just move in the direction of doing in-person interviews when you can. And the other caveat here is some of our offices now are doing what we call straight to orientation, where instead of doing a phone screen and then bringing them in for the interview and then bringing them in for orientation, you're doing the phone screen and scheduling them directly for orientation or onboarding. This works well if you don't have a ton of paperwork that has to be done before the onboarding or orientation. So it depends on your state. In some really high regulation states, they have to do an interview to just get the candidate in there and build that relationship

because they know it's going to take a couple weeks to do the paperwork. But if you can, that's another option as well. If you are not able to do a lot of interviews, which typically a new agency owner is limited on time, do the phone screen with them and just schedule them directly for onboarding. That's another option as well. Okay. That totally makes sense. Last question here, and then we can kind of move on to the next thing. As far as texting candidates goes, have you had success or seen agencies have success texting them like a link where they can just select a time to do the interview? So just like sending them a calendar link, basically? biased here because my system is built on the belief that you need humans in the recruiting process. But definitely some agencies do that. And I think for an agency owner that is balancing a lot of things at once, that's definitely an option. You just have to go into it knowing there is a trade-off. For every decision you make with recruiting, you have to weigh, okay, are we going to lose a few more people in this funnel? But is it going to be worth it to free up a lot

more of my time? So for some people, the answer might be yes. Hey, a couple people might not click on this. They might not schedule it. That's okay. The other option there is I'm going to send this to everybody, but I'm going to try and call people if I don't hear back from them. So you can kind of have a typical process and then a backup. So there is some success there. It's just going to be a less of a human interaction. So you might have a trade-off somewhere else in the process, but if you get the results that you need and it frees up more of your time to focus elsewhere in your agency, that might be a good trade-off for you. Okay. That makes sense. Thanks for all that. This is really great detail that we're getting here.

I wanted to ask one more question. You mentioned the follow-up, you know, a day one, a day three, a day five, what you do on those days. Can you break down, you know, once you've got an applicant, what, you know, the next seven days of communication looks like? Absolutely. So at CareWork, we have two processes. one we call incoming and one we call incoming and outgoing. So incoming is going to be when we add people to our applicant tracker, they're automatically sent a text with the recruiter's information. If they're on an incoming only process, which means they're already getting more people than they need through the door and we don't need to push, we need to self-select for the most qualified and interested candidates. We do an incoming only process where they're just going to get text messages that say, I'm really interested in speaking with you. I'm from this agency. Here's my phone number.

With our applicant tracking system, they get those when they're added. They get them three days later, seven days later, and then they actually continue getting them for up to a year. Hey, are you still interested? I'd still love to talk. And then what we call it incoming because we're answering incoming calls. So we're really only speaking with the caregivers that are the most interested that are picking up the phone. That is something for an agency that is already hitting their goals or is very strapped for time. They don't have time to call every applicant that they get. So they're going to send out this automated text and they're going to speak with the carriers who pick up the phone and call.

The other process that we have, we call incoming and outgoing. And this is where they're going to get that same text message on day one, day three, day seven, that is automated on our platform. So it's just sending them the information and the recruiter's information of who they can call. But then on incoming and outgoing, we're also going to call every single applicant, typically within a day from when they apply. We personally right now do not do outgoing calls

on the weekend. So that's an encouragement to people. You don't have to do that to get good results. We would like to do that. We're moving in that direction. Right now we do our outgoing calls Monday through Friday. So on Monday through Friday, twice a day in the morning and then the afternoon, my team sits down and calls new applicants.

And our standard is like if they apply before 2 or 3 p.m., we call them the same day. So that's what we're doing on incoming and outgoing. But we are really only calling once. And we are leaving a voicemail and then they keep getting those text messages. So for us, at the scale that we're at, we're able to get great results without calling them a bunch of times because we have them in that text that keeps texting them to say, if you're interested, give me a call. Super helpful. And if it's not made clear yet, you know, this is the difference of having an ATS.

You can automate so much of this process so you're not manually texting tons of candidates on an ongoing basis. So that's really helpful because like you said, it's this ongoing process and you need to be communicating with them basically on a daily basis, but so much of that can be automated. Yeah.

Even if it's just outgoing, you can automate a lot of the process or you can do like we do. We just automate that outgoing text message to say, I'd still love to talk with you if you're interested, give me a call. And we've come in on Monday mornings with a ton of missed calls and voicemails from caregivers that got those texts on a Saturday or a Sunday, not because we were working, but because that automation was working. And so for a busy new agency owner or a new recruiter, some automation can be really helpful

to make that possible so that then you're not chasing people down. You're getting incoming calls from people who are like, oh, I got your text message. I am interested. I do want to talk with you. It saves you a ton of time. Before we jump into the next topic, someone's just asking in the chat, Susan is asking where she can learn more about your specific ATS. Sure. It's at careworkus.com. And it is basically out of the box built for home care. It's really simple. All those texts are already automated and we've already created the templates for them. So it is designed for a new agency that needs something where they don't have to go in and build workflows. We've built them for you. And you just put the information in. Great. We can talk maybe a little bit more about that at the end. But let's talk about

recruitment sources or channels. I think upfront, everyone knows about Indeed, but there's a lot of other options and channels out there and approaches. And you've worked in a lot of different markets. And so the approach looks different depending on where you are. But how can an agency decide how many and which recruitment channels to utilize? I mean, just a guiding principle. You don't need very many at first. You need to focus on one or two at You can't do Facebook jobs anymore, but Facebook ads, or I'm going to try Karen Holmes and I'm going to try Indeed and I'm going to run a referral program

and it gets to be too much. And then what happens is you can't get back to all those applicants every day because it's just overwhelming that you have all these different places to sign into. And maybe you forgot one

and I got to Indeed this day, but I didn't get to that one. So for a new agency, one to two channels and do them really, really well. Once you have those going well, then you can build on other sources. So if I were starting a new agency, I kind of hate to say it, but I would definitely use Indeed. Depending on what market you're on, you may be able to start with free ads. You may have to sponsor an ad.

Just a little tip for a new agency. If you're considering free ads, call Indeed and kind of ask like I'm interested in sponsored ads, but I'm not sure what kind of results. Sometimes they will actually offer you a couple hundred dollars of a credit on your account to try sponsored ads. So you may be able to get your first couple weeks actually for free to see the results that you get. So definitely Indeed would be one that I would be trying. I would also focus on referrals. A lot of people think they can't build a referral program until they have a lot of caregivers, but that's not true. One of the strategies we're suggesting to people now is when you interview a caregiver,

have some kind of small bonus you offer if they will fill out a referral sheet right there. So if you have something in front of them that says, hey, if you know five other people who might be interested in working here that wouldn't mind you giving me their name and phone number, you can write them down right now and I have a $25 gift card for you. So right off the bat for referrals and then following up with them, you know, 30 days or 90 days later to ask again, do you have anybody you want to refer? The great advantage here is that turnover is way lower from referred caregivers. And also it's a warm lead. You can even ask them, would you text, you know, here's a copy

text message. Would you send this to five of your friends and let them know where they can apply? And so that way they're really putting it in that person's court. But you want to build a referral program from day one, because you're going to build a much stronger agency. And it's way more cost effective. So if it were me, first two things I would do is indeed, and I would set up some kind of referral program with financial incentives for the person doing the referring and the person getting referred, because it's one of the best investments you can make. And again, people think they have to wait until they have 50 caregivers at their agency. You don't, you can do this from day one and build your agency that way. This is really good. And I really like the idea of actually asking for referrals from people who aren't even employed

yet, but they're in the application or in the interviewing process. A few questions with that. I've kind of heard different like approaches to compensation for referral programs. You know, some people say, I just pay them a flat rate whenever they send in the referral. Some say, I pay half now and then half when their referral is hired and has worked 90 days or something. Some will even say like they get paid like progressively more for each referral that they bring in within a certain amount of time. What's your take on those things when it comes to the nitty gritty of paying people for referrals? How do you recommend doing it? Well, as a math problem, you want to look at your cost per hire

from online sources. So if you spend $300 a month on Indeed and you get one hire from that, your cost per hire is $300. Look into that, look at how much you're spending, how much time it's taking you to get a hire. And that gives you a target for, okay, if I can run a referral program where it costs me $300 or less, I'm matching the cost for my online job ads. And then you can distribute that money. If you're only using free online ads, don't fall into the trap of thinking that I don't want to spend on referrals because typically from referrals, you're going to get better caregivers that stay around longer. So even if you're spending more,

that's okay. I just give that target of ads versus referrals. The strategy that I would suggest to people is to do a combination. So when I mentioned earlier, if you just fill out this form or if you just text this to five friends, I'm gonna pay you a small bonus right there because that incentivizes them right off the bat to get you those leads.

And if you think about it, anywhere else that you're getting leads, you don't wait to pay until they're hired and stick around three months. You pay right off the bat just to have a lead of somebody who might want to work for you. So I would do a small amount then when they either fill out the form or they send that text to their friends or they post on Facebook or whatever it is that you're doing. Right off the bat, a small bonus, $25 to $50, depending on what they're actually doing or how many leads they're giving you. And then yes, you can break it up to when they complete hire, make sure you're incentivizing

both people, the person who is referred and the person who's doing the referring. But I definitely think if you're going to do a larger bonus at that point, like $100 to $300, it's very reasonable to say we're going to do this once they've worked their first shift or once they've worked here for 30 days. I wouldn't go longer than 30 days because at that point, people just aren't going to be interested in doing your referral program because the payout is so far away from them. So again, no matter where you get a hire, it's going to be expensive. If you can spend that money on a referral instead, you're going to get a better caregiver and it makes your team happy. It gives them a way to earn extra money. So definitely a small bonus for leads and then a larger bonus I would do either at their first shift or maybe when they've worked for 30 days or worked 100 hours or something like that. That's fairly short term. Okay, cool. And we're seeing a great question in the chat here from David, who's asking like, how different does this look in rural versus metro? Like, you know,

are these same strategies still going to be as effective generally? And then I'm going to add to that, like, is there a benchmark of what the typical expectation should be of what you'll pay for each hire? And does that look different in rural versus metro? It does. The strategies are going to look different. So in every market, whether rural or metro, you need to know your market's unique challenges. Is it getting enough applicants or is it turning the applicants into hires? Typically in metro areas, it's going to be easier to get applicants, but it's going to be a lot harder to get those applicants through the hiring process. In a rural area, you have to be really, really good at turning your applicants into hires because it's harder to

get applicants. So at that point, when we talked earlier about incoming versus incoming and outgoing, if you're in a rural area, you probably need to be calling every single caregiver the day that they apply because you're going to have a harder time even finding applicants. That also makes a referral program even more important because once you have caregivers that live out in this rural area, you need to know who else do you know that might want this job because a lot of people in rural areas get accustomed to applying for jobs in a nearby metro area. They may have to drive 45 minutes, an hour, or longer, but in their mind, they've accepted that that's where the jobs are. So, once you have applicants in this area, you want to ask who else do you know that would be interested in working here? Because I have cases that are in our rural area.

So the strategies are definitely different on what you need to focus on. But the underlying principles of recruiting are absolutely the same. And that's why we encourage people to track their data and know it. Because if you know what point in the process your agency is struggling, the strategies for that are going to be basically the same no matter where you are. Okay, that totally makes sense. And then like from the data that you've seen, is there kind of an average benchmark for what agencies should plan to hit for cost per hire? And have you found that to vary, you know, consistently like between rural and metro or any other type of actor? it definitely does. It definitely varies depending on where you are, especially on Indeed, because

you have to spend a lot in a rural area to even get applicants in the first place. So they have to be a lot more community focused and building the referral programs, building community engagements. And don't have off the top of my head a benchmark for cost per hire. The data is definitely out there and it does vary by source and it does vary by region. My best suggestion for people would be to track that over time so that they can bring it down. Because once you are measuring that, then you can bring it down over time. And again, it's that cost per hire comes from how much are you spending on your ads or on your referral and how many applicants or referrals are you taking to get a hire. So you can either get better at finding more applicants for less money,

or you can get better at turning more applicants into hires by having a really great process for communication, working through it with them, eliminating necessary steps. But once you measure your cost per hire, then over time, you can really make progress in bringing it down. Okay, that totally makes sense.

Thanks. Before we jump a little bit deeper into some of the data tracking. One question that I wanted to ask, I know indeed is your bread and butter. And that's amazing. And people like you said, need to start there. But are there any other digital channels that are worth people's time today? Yes, depending on where you are. I know one of the new ones we're hearing a lot about is Karen Holmes, which I've had some people are getting great results from. It's actually more challenging in metro areas

because they use a 25-mile radius for the leaves that they're bringing in. So if you're in a metro area, especially if you are with a franchise and you have a small territory, that can be a little bit more challenging on Karen Holmes, which you're going to face similar challenges on indeed. But definitely in care and homes, people are having a harder time targeting to a small area. But people are getting good results from care and homes. Some people still get good results on Craigslist. So I think it's worth at least giving it a try. People are finding caregivers there. But besides that, for online, most of the other tools people are using,

things like Hierology, Jazz HR, Apploy, they're actually pushing it out to a lot of sites. But a lot of them, the majority of the applicants are still coming from Indeed. We see people who have something like, oh, this is so great. I have this ATS that pushes my job out to 300 job boards. And then you look at it and 95% of their applicants are from Indeed. So if you're going to use one of those tools, I would just say, look at where the people are actually coming from and track that. Don't track the tool that you're using to push out all of the job ads. And just briefly, you mentioned something about, you know, you can't post jobs on Facebook anymore that may be news to people just highlight you know

what you know about that so what we're seeing is the actual Facebook jobs part of Facebook the jobs part of it is going away and I think it has gone away within the past couple of weeks so we do have people that were using that a lot and now they're having to shift to actual job websites what you can do is still have a social media presence and encourage people to go to your website, let them know you are hiring. You can go to our website to find out more, but Facebook no longer has the part of their website that is actually a job platform. Yeah, that's really good to know because just a couple of years ago, you know, it may have been reversed. A lot of people posting jobs on Facebook and now it's Indeed. So that's really interesting and good to know. So let's, I know we're grilling you. If you need

to like take a drink or take a breath, go for it. I want to talk about the data, the tracking. That's probably what you're most passionate about here and what you have refined beyond probably anyone else in the industry is how to track and what to track and why to track it. So I don't know if you have like three KPIs or seven KPIs, but tell us the must haves. Like what do people need to be tracking on an ongoing basis? Well, since we're talking a lot about new agencies and new recruiters, I'll tell them exactly what I tracked when I started. And that was every week, I started with a spreadsheet. Now, have I built tools to make this easier? Yes, I've built tools

to make this a lot easier. But I started with a spreadsheet. And I went across the top every week. And then I went down and said, how many applicants did we get? How many booked interviews? How many of those showed up? How many got hired? And what did we spend on job ads? And from there, the KPIs that I was looking at, definitely you want to know how many applicants you're getting. And for a new agency, what you're looking for there is, is this number going up or down over time? Because your number of applicants is going to impact your hiring results like two weeks from now. And what you don't want to have happen is all of a sudden you get to a week and you go, why aren't we getting any hires this week? And the problem was that two weeks ago, you didn't get enough applicants. You want to see that coming. So number of applicants.

And then with that and how many booked interviews, you're looking at the percentage of applicants that book an interview. Good target here, around 30%, depending on your market, you want to get at least 30% of your people booking an interview with you. This is really going to show you the quality of your applicants and the quality of your recruiting process. So if you are getting like 5% to 10% of your applicants are booking an interview, you need to be calling them or you need to be texting them or you're not getting to your applicants fast enough, or your ads are getting you totally unqualified applicants outside of your area but it's really one of those two things and that's percentage of applicants booked the next one is

out of the applicants that book an interview what percentage of those show up and this varies I will say industry-wide 25 is pretty normal and that's the rule of thumb that I've always used with my team is for every successful interview we want, we need to schedule four. This means in most markets, we're going to be successful. And in some markets, we're going to get way more people than they need. And that's a good way. We're planning conservatively. So what percentage of your scheduled interviews are actually going to show up and complete the hiring process. And then by combining that with the cost that you're spending, you can see what is it costing us per hire right now. And what you want to look at over time is those trends to improve. And this also gives you a

baseline for anything new that you try. So that's why you want to track it. And if you listen to that list, it's really simple. Every Monday you sit down and go last week, how many applicants, how many booked an interview, how many showed up, how many were hired. This should take you 10 minutes at the most to fill out on a weekly basis. But when you do that over time, you have a very, very powerful picture for your agency. And then you can backwards plan anything you need. If you go, oh my goodness, next month, we got all these new cases. We need to hire 20 people. Well, how much does it cost me per applicant? And how many applicants does it take me to get per hire?

Let me go increase my job ad to that amount. And that should put me on track to get 20 people. You can also look at things and go, okay, I hired a new recruiter for the first time. I'm so excited. Wait a minute. My applicants that booked an interview, I used to get 30% to book an interview.

Now only 10% are and nothing else changed. It's something that my recruiter is doing. Or vice versa. You hire a new recruiter and you go, wow, it used to be only 10% of our applicants book an interview. Now 30% do, which means I'm going to get this many more hires, which means it's worth my investment. All of that can be quantified with that 10 minutes a week of here's the numbers from last week.

Then over time, you can do more and more and more with that data and get more into the nitty gritty. But that gives you the baseline for your agency. There's something you said that I really want to explore. It's not surprising, but it's still kind of scary nonetheless, which is you said that the typical benchmark that you see across industry is that only one in four candidates who are invited to an interview will show up to the interview. Yeah. Are there strategies you've seen that can help to increase that number? And if so, what are they? Absolutely. I don't know how else to phrase this, but you can be bad at one part of this, but you can't be bad at every part of this, or you will not get enough hires. And the parts we're looking at are how well are you selling

your agency on the phone? This is a great place to work. We treat caregivers really well. That's one part. Another part is how much do you pay? Are you competitive for the area or above the rate for the area? And another part is how quickly are you getting through this process? How easy are you making for it for them to get to that interview? So if you have really above average pay for your market, you can be kind of bad at the other parts because the caregivers are like, well, I can't interview until next Tuesday, but wow, this job pays better than any of the other parts because the caregivers are like, well, I can't interview until next Tuesday, but wow, this job pays better than any of the other ones I'm looking for. I'm going to really make it a priority. If you are not able to pay super well for your market, or you're not able

to compete against corporations in your area, you have to be really good at the other two parts, which is getting them through the process quickly and seamlessly and selling your agency. For us, this is something that, you know, we record all of the phone screens that recruiters do. This is one of the parts they are scored on numerically is did they sell the agency? Hey, at this agency, we have great benefits. And, you know, the person who founded this agency is a caregiver herself, so she understands and she has built an amazing agency to work at. And I just want to let you know right now, we have a great career path here where if you

stay with us, we will help you advance in your career, potentially even become one of the managers of our agency, anything, anything here. Okay. This is an example, whatever sets your agency apart, you need to be telling them on the phone screen to get that buy-in. And then you need to have them coming in for that interview as quickly as possible. And this is something for new agencies that can be hard. They want to set aside one morning a week they're going to do interviews. That is fine if you are paying really well or if you have a great reputation in your area. But when you are brand new, you have to be getting them through the door as quickly as possible. So that's three different components that all contribute

to a good rate of interviews, either paying really well, having a great reputation, all of that, selling your agency really well on the phone screen and building that connection and getting them through the door as quickly and seamlessly as possible. Love that. A couple follow-ups to that. I'm going to test your memory here. So that's a really good number to remember of like, okay, like 25% is the benchmark to get to interviews. Do you happen to have numbers for what percentage they go through the interview, then like show up to orientation and not just that, but any more like kind of numbers from there as, as far as the applicant pipeline to starting their

shifts, maybe like a stat for like how many that go through the interview, make it orientation. And then how many from orientation show up with the first shift. My data here is not as good. And I'll tell you exactly why just to be transparent, my control of the process is when a caregiver shows up. And I'll tell you exactly why. Just to be transparent, my control of the process ends when a caregiver shows up. And one of the biggest issues we have with data is getting agencies to tell us what happened from there. What I can tell you is it definitely depends on the market, but the strategies from getting them from the interview to orientation and to first shift are the same as getting them to the interview. You are still selling them on the agency. You still want to hold their hand

through this whole process, follow up with them, make it as easy for them as possible, and continue to reiterate the pay and the financial reward for them. So what I have also recommended to some agencies, if you don't have a lot of steps that have to be done between the interview and the orientation or onboarding is just cut out the interview. If you're doing a phone screen with them, make that your interview and schedule them directly for orientation or onboarding. And then that 25% number becomes your number for orientation and onboarding instead of interview because you've just cut that out completely. That makes sense. I'm really curious.

I know a lot of this conversation has been geared towards startup owners. I think it's still applicable across the board. I'd imagine you work with more established agencies. I've heard a lot in kind of like the million to 2 million mark where they're like re-spinning their wheels on recruitment. I'm just curious, you know, if you've worked with them where, you know, they may be coming to you like, wow, we really need help, you know, again, right now, what, where are their pain points? What part

of this process are they struggling with and coming to you? Like, you know, we have all these applicants and we can't get them to show up or or etc. Like where are their pain points later on? There's several things that come top of mind. One of them is they never tracked their data. And so maybe they were almost not getting lucky, but they had a good streak for a year or two or a couple years where they were getting hires and things are going well. And then now they're not. And I get a lot of people that go, I don't know, we used to get eight to 10 hires a month. Now we're getting one or two. And I don't really know why.

Is it the market? Is it something? And I'm like, well, what has changed in your numbers? Nobody knows. So that's why you want to start tracking the beginning. And that's usually the first step I have to do with agencies of that size is let's dig through and see, you know, have your applicants dropped in

half. And some people they log in, you know, an owner maybe hasn't been doing this themselves anymore. They have somebody else doing it. And they're like, I don't actually know. Let's go dig into it. They go, oh, yeah, we used to get 200 applicants per month. Now we get 50. Well, that's your problem. In other agencies, what has happened is as they've added more people to their team, more people involved with recruiting and retention, it's gotten too split up and there's no clear responsibility. So they may have an owner and they may have a case manager and they may have a front desk person who are all helping with recruiting when they can, but it's not organized enough. Nobody is dedicated to this on a daily basis. And so then,

A, things fall through the cracks, and B, there's no accountability because nobody is owning this process. As they've grown, if they don't have a dedicated recruiter, they just have different people in different parts of the business doing different things. They need to reorganize that process and say, here's who owns this. Here's the data we're tracking. Here's when we're going to check in on this. Another reason that can happen is you may have somebody in your office that isn't great at working with recruiters. And sometimes in a growing agency, an owner delegates to a manager or someone like that. And that person has outdated methods of recruiting and outdated added towards recruiting, like kind of anti-caregiver without meaning to be that,

ah, nobody wants to work anymore. And this becomes this insidious thing in an agency. And the owner might even be contributing to it saying, yeah, I just know nobody wants to work anymore. They don't want to show up. We don't want them anyways. And what they don't realize is they've built a toxic attitude in their agency that comes out in the little mannerisms of their recruiter or their manager and the way that they talk to caregivers and the way that they write their job ads in the steps of their recruiting process. You get things like, we have this application that they have to fill out before an interview. And if they won't take the time to fill that out, I don't want to meet with them anyways. This is outdated and it's kind of disrespectful towards caregivers. But as your agency grows, these things can become just built

into the way you talk to caregivers. So sometimes for an agency at that size, what it really takes is a mindset shift that an owner has to really intentionally recraft the way that we talk about and to caregivers and correct this to get everybody on board with a new mindset towards recruiting that, you know, we need them more than they need us. Caregivers are great people. They're busy. We want to make it easy for them, not because they're irresponsible, not because they don't want to work, but because they have a lot of options of where to work. And if we want them to work at our agency, we have to be the ones that are inconvenienced. So that's several areas at that point of growth for an agency. It could be something logistical, like the number of applicants. It could be new tools that they're trying, and it

could just be as they've grown, they've gotten into a kind of rut and a bad attitude towards recruiting that might need to be corrected. I just want to jump in here real quick. I've been on events and things like this for five or six years and lots and lots of them about recruitment. And I've heard people maybe address similar things, but this is the first time I have heard someone kind of directly call out that specific outdated mindset and the ways that it can infiltrate your recruitment and hiring process in ways you don't realize that make it kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. I think every agency owner, whether they're listening live or listening to the podcast afterwards,

needs to hear that part and think about that because that is so important and it is not being said enough. And I love that you called that out. Yeah, I mean, we see it all the time and we see it in big ways and little ways. One of the biggest examples I can give is a caregiver that we thought was great and we scheduled for an interview with an agency. And the agency called us later that day and said, why did you send us that person? They stood up and walked out halfway through the interview without talking to us. We don't know why, but it was so rude. And my recruiter took it upon herself to call that caregiver and say, hey, I just want to check in. Is everything okay? The agency didn't. The agency was like,

this person walked out. They're clearly not a great caregiver. How rude. My recruiter thought, I wonder what happened. I wonder why, why did this person walk out? And she called them and the caregiver said, well, I was in this cubicle filling out my paperwork. And in the next cubicle, one of the owners, I think of the agency had come in, was talking to their staff and went on a rant about how we can't grow because caregivers don't want to show up. They don't want to work anymore. I'm so tired of dealing with this. They call out all the time. And that's why our business is suffering because they don't want to work. And the person interviewing, sitting there filling out paperwork, heard that and walked out. And to their credit, when we told them that, that owner, it made it to the owner who called us to

apologize and also called the caregiver to apologize. But that is something that he didn't know she was over there. That was just how he was talking about caregivers. That's what was happening in their agency. So that's a big example. But the little examples are things that you can't micromanage. If your agency is growing, you can't micromanage how every single person is going to talk to every single caregiver and what they're going to say in every email. But the way that you talk about caregivers absolutely will control how they do that. And it can even be things like another agency I worked with, if they were minorly inconvenienced at all for their schedule today, they would cancel their interviews. And the owner didn't realize that. The owner was like, well, how come nobody's showing up?

And we're going, well, you've rescheduled interviews, at least once a day, or at least once a week for the past month, those people aren't going to come back, you know, but it was the recruiter had learned from the owner, that they're probably not going to work here anyways. Why should I prioritize them? They don't want to work anyways. And these mindsets, I mean, it's just so toxic. and it's bad for the industry as a whole. So I could go on and on, but I'll stop myself. I literally got the chills after your comments and what Connor said. It's so true. Like my mind is just thinking of like dozens of Facebook posts that I've seen where people are in this toxic recruitment mindset and

it's unfortunate and it's got to change. And like Connor said, we appreciate you addressing it head on and calling it out because if we don't, it's never going to change. Absolutely. I do want to ask one more follow-up question here to this, which is, you know, so to preface, you know, as I said, I love hearing you call this out. I totally agree. At the same time, I want to make sure that we speak to the agency owners who are listening, who are like, yes, this is true, but I still feel like recruitment is so hard and I feel like I'm doing my best and I treat caregivers great. And I still am just struggling here, just on the side of speaking to the challenges of recruitment.

Like, what would you say just by way of encouragement or motivation to agency owners who are trying to be good to applicants and caregivers, but are still just getting discouraged? It's a numbers game. It really is. It's sales's sales and you know this is a funnel and what happens at every step of the funnel is you're going to lose people and I think one of the most discouraging things is when you're recruiting from a place of desperation and you start to hope I need these three people to show up today and then when they don't it is personal and it's upsetting. When you break things down to numbers, I think it's really empowering because it takes some of the personal part out of it. The other part of it is that this, it is hard. Recruiting is hard and it is discouraging. Like I

said, I've been doing this since before the pandemic. The pandemic was really hard and I understand the challenges. Like if you as a home care owner or manager think your business depends on getting caregivers hired, my business is getting caregivers hired. That's my only job. And there have been times it's been really challenging. So I definitely get it. But it is the number one function of a home care agency. People come to you for care because you have caregivers that can take care of them. So if you can't figure out recruiting or if you give up on recruiting or get discouraged, that is your job. And home care, owning a home care agency can be incredibly rewarding,

but it does take a lot of just putting in the work and keeping your team motivated. This is a numbers game. If we keep at it, it's going to work out. And when it is discouraging, focusing on the positives instead of the negatives. So instead of people don't want to work anymore, you know what? These people found jobs and that's good. And we're going to keep going and we're going to find the people that are meant to work here. And just accepting this is part of running an agency. It is going to be challenging, but when you can take a step back and look at the numbers, you can plan and you can win and you can grow your agency. It is possible. I work with people all the time that are getting incredible results and growing their agencies

and they got there by just step-by-step making incremental changes. Nobody can flip a switch. I can't flip a switch and make you get all the caregivers you've ever needed. But you can look at your data and make incremental changes over time that a year or two from now, you're going to be in a totally different place because you took the time little by little. We want to focus on our applicants booked and increase this by 5%. And we want to focus on our show up rate, increase this by 5%. And we want to focus on our orientation rate, increase this by 5%. Little by little by little, you build an incredible process that gets you the result. And then it all feels less stressful because now your agency is growing and you have at

least the caregivers that you need. It's much easier to make it less personal when you're not desperate. Amazing. I think this is a perfect place to end. Rachel, you're amazing. You already know this, but Connor and I are basically your biggest fans in the industry. And this episode has proved just that. Like you are, I don't even think you're going off notes. Like you are so knowledgeable on this topic. You could talk it all day and it's because you're living and breathing it,

you know, on a day in and day out basis. So thank you for getting to the uncomfortable zone. I think we reached that just a few minutes ago. We appreciate you being vulnerable and being willing to call out some of these things. So thanks for a great session and thanks for being here. Thank you guys for having me. I'm always happy to work with you guys. And at CareSwitch, you guys are doing a great job

of building a ton of resources for people that if they are willing to take the time and educate themselves, you guys have the resources there for them. And that is so powerful. So to everybody who's on today or listening to the recording later, you're doing the right thing just by showing up and taking advantage of the resources that they have here for you. A hundred percent. So join us same day, same time next week. We're going to go into recruitment 102.'re gonna do a

deep dive on indeed and the strategies that you need to be implementing there so we've got rachel back for another hour next week join us then thanks to everyone for being here take care we'll see you next week that's a wrap this episode was made by the team at care switch the first free home care agency management software if 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.