Home Care U - How To Hire When Hiring Is Tough (Jeff Wiberg Pt. 1)

Episode Date: March 21, 2023

In summer 2021, the CEO of Family Resource Home Care called an emergency meeting to address their rapidly dwindling hiring pool. The strategies they chose became a case study in how to hire competitively when recruitment feels impossible.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. Okay, let's go ahead and get started.

I say this every time, but today's episode will be a particularly good episode, and I mean that. Likely one of the best or the best that we've done. As a bit of background here, so last fall I went to the annual conference for the Home Care Association of America. And right at the end of it, I was sitting in a session. And it was kind of that time of the conference where you're starting to get a little bit burned out. It takes a particularly good speaker, I think, to engage you. You're kind of tired, you know. And I sat down in Jeff's session and started listening and started to get on my laptop

to do something. And I realized in, you know, frankly, seconds that this was an important session, maybe the most important one that I had listened to at the conference. And when we launched this event series and podcast, I knew that we had to get Jeff on to share this. So today's topic is how to hire when hiring is tough. To tell the truth, that doesn't fully do justice to the breadth and depth of what we're going to talk about today. Jeff is the CEO of Family Resource Home Care based in Washington and also the president of the board for the Home Care Association of America. So he has kind of this unique combo of perspectives of the on the ground, helping with the management of everything, and also seeing things from a 10,000 foot view at the industry level. And

this combined just in general with his hands-on approach to things makes him one of the best people to talk through the challenges in recruitment today and also what we can do to improve. What are the strategies that aren't being used that should be? Things like that. So just a couple housekeeping things to remind you all of. First, this is both a live event and a podcast. If you are joining live, make sure and submit your questions in the chat or the Q&A in Zoom,

and we'll get to them either as we go or at the end, depending on the nature of the question. One more thing that you'll be familiar with hearing me say if you listen to podcasts much. So just by way of introducing myself, I do have a stutter. Sometimes it shows up, sometimes it doesn't. You might have heard a little bit just a minute ago. The reason I mentioned that is because if you hear a pause when I'm speaking today, that is probably not your internet buffering. That is probably not Zoom buffering. That is me buffering, just letting you know. Everything is fine. So all that being said, let's get into things here. So Jeff, if you maybe want to briefly kind of share the story that forms the background of how we got today's content. Let's go from there. Yeah, sure. And first of all, thanks for having me, Connor. I appreciate the opportunity to be able to chat with you today. And it's always a pleasure to be able to chat

with you. And you're very, very kind about and effusive in your compliments. And I appreciate that very much. I hope to not make you a liar. And I look forward to being able to answer any questions that folks have over the course of this conversation, because it is so absolutely critical. We've heard at the National Association, as well as amongst my own peer group, that this has really been one of the most defining challenges that our industry has faced in the last several decades. And we don't necessarily see the data supporting that it's going to get any better anytime soon because the Bureau of Labor Statistics points out that an in-home care provider is still going to be one of the fastest growing jobs in America. And so it's something that we are all acutely aware of. And in our industry where our ability to meet the demand is really the dictator of our revenue, that's

always going to be an important topic. And so I'm hopeful that as we converse over the course of this hour and again next week, that we'll be able to really give some practical advice and tactics that people can use. So the reason why that this has become really a hot topic for our organization is stems from a story that might be similar to any of you who are listening. We discovered that in early 2021, that we're not getting as many applications as we had previously been used to. And for our organization, we had been blessed over the course of several years to have a sufficient number of applicants and a sufficient number of hires coming in to be able to continue our growth as a company. And that started to change in the early part of 2021. So the real date, actually, and I have this memorized because it's a date that will live in infamy, was November 14th of 2020. that we were receiving week upon week started to tip back down.

So we had always been going up, generally speaking, from a trendline perspective, always been going up until that day. Now, I hadn't been watching as a standard KPI. I hadn't been watching the number of applications that we were receiving, certainly not from what channels we were receiving, certainly not from what channels we received them from or how good we were at converting them or how good we were at connecting with them or process around speed to hire, anything like that. As a company, we just got the applications, we processed them as normal, we would do a couple of interviews. If we liked them, we'd invite them to come in for orientation.

And then if they showed up for orientation, then great, we got a new employee. But in November, it started to shift back down. Now, it took a while for that to actually show up in our numbers because applications are kind of a lead indicator, right? You got a little bit of a pipeline that you're working with and you bring them on board. And then as turnover started to increase in 2021, kind of germane to what we are now calling the great resignation, we started to find that our process was not keeping up with our turnover, not allowing us to grow. And when we finally put two and two together and realized that, wait a second, we got to really take a look at this, was in the summertime of 2021. So we held an emergency meeting on August the 4th and pulled all of our best minds in our company together and really just started to talk about,

okay, what is it that we need to understand about our process? How do we want to change it? How do we want to invest? And we developed a multi-pronged approach to try out a bunch of new ideas. And those all got launched in September of 2021. And the rest is history. We've been on an upward trajectory since then. And we're not doing the same thing as we were back in September of 2021 because it's an iterative process. We've been able to identify what works. We've been able to really hone in on, hey, how are we going to manage this? We went from an average of about 20 applications a week to now we are averaging 600 applications a week. And so that growth in our pipeline has

really compounded our ability to then really examine the process that we had in screening those applicants and onboarding them and training them and then retaining them. And now we've got a big numerator for us to really identify where we're seeing leakage. And all those lessons have compounded into our ability to now be growing at a beautiful growth rate of over 20% just because of our organic growth in our census. And that's 20% on a pretty big number. So we're proud of where we are. Last week, we literally finished out our best week ever of hiring. We hired 70 caregivers. And that's meaningful for being able to add a lot of hours to, to our company. And so it's just continuing to get better. It's it hasn't slowed down in terms of

improvements and more iterations. So maybe if we were even talking about this in six months, it'd even be better still. We'll see. Wow. Yeah. So first off, I mean, that's awesome to hear. I want to repeat those stats for those who may not have heard that the first time. So you said that when you held this emergency meeting to figure things out, and especially figure applicant volume, you were seeing about 20 applicants a week. And today you're seeing about 600 applicants a week. That's incredible. Are there any stats or measurements you can share with me to kind of address maybe like the applicant quality side of that? Are the applicants you're seeing, you know, still the same quality generally as what you were seeing when you had lower volume? Great question, actually, Connor. So back when we were doing about 20 a week, we hired closer to 40%. And today we are hiring closer to 10%. Is that a function of quality? I don't think so. I think that it's more that when you don't have a lot to choose from, you become a little bit more desperate. And I think everybody in the home care industry kind of knows what it feels like to be in

a position to do desperation hiring. So when you have a variety to choose from, you can be a little bit more discerning. Think of it a little bit like a buffet. If you think of dinner as being a buffet and you get a plate before you, you don't necessarily think of that as being a lot of options. You eat what you get, at least if you grew up the way I did. But if you're going to one of those beautiful buffets that have a million options, then you can really eat what you want versus being in a position where we kind of feel like we need to bring on as many as we possibly can, just because we need, we need the warm body, you know, to, to fill the chefs that are, that are there for us.

Love it. It's a great feeling to not have to use having a pulse as your primary criteria for whether or not you hire someone or not. So glad to see that you've been able to make those changes. So Christopher in the chat is asking, you know, would you be okay to share some of the changes you made? And I'm excited to say that is what today is all about. Exactly.

We will go into that in detail. Jeff has been awesome in not trying to hide what's worked for them and in pretty freely sharing what's been beneficial to them in the hopes that helps other agencies. So we'll dive into the details on those things. How we'll do this is we'll kind of move sequentially through the recruitment and hiring process. At each stage, we'll talk about the improvements he's made. And we'll also compare and contrast that with what might be considered the best practices or even just kind of like what the prevailing wisdom is around how to do a particular part of hiring and recruitment and get Jeff's perspective on what's worked for him and why that prevailing wisdom

might be behind the times or not what we need anymore. So let's kind of start with like how you're casting your applicant net. And what I mean by that is, what are the places that you're advertising in and how? And how do we normally think about doing that? And what have you changed to become more effective in that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I appreciate that. So, oh boy, that's a big question. I recognize, so let me start here. I recognize that not everyone is going to be in a similar circumstance to, say, family resource home care. We're operating in three different states and we've got multiple different locations, et cetera. And in some circumstances, there's going to be a single site location in a major metro or maybe a single site location in a more rural area, non-urban area. What I would want to say is that I have discovered that what

works really well in some of my more non-urban branches can differ from my more urban branches. So I want, as I describe how we're doing it, I want everyone to hear that you really do need to discover what is the best in your local market. So, for example, one of our main operating areas is in the Seattle area of Washington. And everybody probably is familiar with the fact that Seattle is a fairly techn, saturated market. So, uh, uh, for example, Glassdoor, um, which is a large national platform, um, is based in Seattle. And so there's a lot of users and adoption in Seattle where we can recruit directly using Glassdoor. But if I were to say, even just across the state in Spokane, Glassdoor is not as adopted. So bear in mind, I'm going to describe some of these concepts, but I would say that it's important for you to be able to really feel out

what is right in your particular market. So conventionally, like everybody, I used to get a lot of caregivers from Craigslist, and that seems to have gone. It's still existent, and we still use it as a pipeline, but it's not as prevalent as it used to be. My favorite right now is social media for applicants. And the reason why I like social media so much is unlike a job postings board, it's an audience that can be both active and passive. And what I mean by that is if you are personally looking for a caregiver job on Indeed, for example, you're an active candidate.

You're looking for a job, right? And of course, that's an audience that you want to engage as an employer. But what we miss out on then is all the people who aren't necessarily looking because they didn't know about you. They didn't know to look for you. And the reason why I feel like that's super critical today in today's world is because there's a lot more jobs, it seems, than available workers. And so, if people have the need to become employed and they have a whole host of options, then it's a

matter of, are they aware of the opportunity that you have? So, I'll give you an example of something that I saw just today coming into work. So I pass by a McDonald's restaurant. Everybody in the world knows McDonald's, whether or not they even like it, they are aware of it, and they have their very prominent marquees that say, now hiring all shifts, starting wage at $16 an hour. Now, if I'm in the job market and I see that, and I'm in the entry-level job market in particular, I'm going to be A, aware of McDonald's, B, have a rudimentary understanding as to what that's going to be like, and then C, now I have the value proposition of how much money I'm going to be making per hour. That is hard to compete with if we are an industry that people don't think of

and that our value proposition is a little bit hidden. And so I like social media because I can get my messaging out for fairly inexpensive as well to an audience that is made up of both active and passive candidates themselves. But also, as importantly, I'm also reaching advocates, people like your mother, who's on Facebook, sees a little bit of this opportunity on a quick ad as they're scrolling through, and then they think of you. And now they're forwarding something and saying, hey, check this out. And then you have the opportunity to be able to articulate more of the value proposition that is way more rich in terms of an experience than, say, a marquee sign. So we use a lot of video

content that looks like found video where we have caregivers who are new to the industry or had come from a different type of a role, had been considering other types of entry level work that we compete with. And they just tell a very brief 30 second story. And they do it with their cell phone, just literally hanging up in front of their face. And they're walking around their house because that lends credibility. So they just are saying, yeah, my name is Janet and I had been working in food service or hospitality and I ran across this opportunity to be able to care for others. And I thought, well, I need to take a look at this. And now that I work for Family Resource Home Care, my life is wonderful. And it is totally unscripted but they they say these amazing things um that tells a story that is both believable and then appeals to something

that mcdonald's will never ever have and that is the meaningfulness of the work that we do and uh when we when we think about demographics in the country and what our workforce look like, we have to acknowledge that the folks that are born after 2000 tend to care more about the meaningfulness of the work that they're doing. They want to know that it's giving back. And yes, that's absolutely true of the generations before, but psychologically, there is a unique difference there. And we all have a need to finance our lives outside of work, so we all need employment. But in this circumstance, I feel like telling the message is super, super important. And it's really hard to do that on a job board, having that kind of rich message experience. But social media really offers that

quite well. So utilizing social media and then promoting your ads or boosting your ads or what have you can really be effective. And there's even a question here in the chat about how much do you spend on monthly ads to be able to generate what I generate? And I want to break that down to the individual application level. So I'm spending roughly around $8 for every application to generate an application. So if you're an organization that you can reverse engineer your numbers and you realize, boy, I need to bring in 50 ads. Well, then you could roughly multiply that by 10 and say that your spend should be about 500 bucks. So you don't have to spend like I spend in order to be able to generate a lot of applications because you got to remember, I have a lot of different geographies. So if you

break down an individual branch of mine that is roughly the same size as the ubiquitous home care agency throughout the United States, that in and of itself is very comparable. And if I'm doing a big ad spend, bear in mind that recruiting is all local, local, local, local. So it really matters what I'm spending for that particular branch. And I believe that that's a very achievable number for every organization out there and that you get your ROI in spades. So I don't want people to get too worried about that. Sorry, I'm waxing a little bit long here, but social media is phenomenal. That being said, you can't ignore the job boards. Places like Indeed are super, super important,

but what's really interesting to me is the data is showing that your turnover is a little bit higher from the candidates that you're getting from the Indeeds of the world and such. And the reason why is because Indeed generates all the revenue from pushing jobs to candidates. And so once they have you in their system, they're going to continue to push more jobs because they want to create a value proposition to the employers that are still looking. And caregivers are one type of employment experience that is always being looked after. So my advice with Indeed is it's really easy to get hung up on how Indeed operates,

that they have an algorithm that kind of promotes certain jobs and such. And you always want to be on the front page because if you're not in the front page, you're dead. And then what ends up inevitably happening is that an agency owner will get onto Indeed and they'll get all flustered because their ad is on the second page. And one of the things I had to learn the hard way is that a good ad buyer, if you're going to use a third party or if you do it in-house, is going to recognize that the quintessential CNA caregiver type person isn't necessarily looking on Indeed for a caregiver job during the same business hours that you have your office staff people in the office working and looking at Indeed to find out where your ad is on the page. So if you spend thousands of dollars in order to be able to make sure that you're the

number one that appears in Indeed at all hours of the day, you're not going to get a good ROI. So I had to learn the hard way that in the evenings and on the weekends, I do want to appear a little bit higher, but I don't necessarily need to appear higher at two o'clock in the afternoon. So I don't spend in Indeed sufficiently to always appear at the top at all times, even though you could argue that that would probably get me more candidates. I focus in on when is the audience that I care about most likely to be on Indeed, and that's when I'm going to boost my ads. So I was able to save my money a little bit, but get a little bit better ROI from that. So I think that last part is a particularly interesting insight. And I want to ask,

how did you figure that out to do that? A combination of two things. One, a little bit of trial and error. And then second, we were utilizing a company who's a third-party company who specializes in placing ads and then judging their performance. And then they can report that back to you. And that organization helped to teach us when we should be boosting our ads so that we didn't boost, boost, boost, boost all day long. And we could save a little bit of money on getting a higher ROI. Okay. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. And I also like how you spoke to the need to differentiate spend between different platforms and be mindful of your cost of applicant, things like that. Yes. You may have said this. If so, I missed it. How are you deciding how to break down your spend between sites like Indeed and then social media? this story. So going back in the day, and bear in mind that looking at spend per channel and

a volume per channel, and therefore ROI and applicants per spend, all that kind of stuff, none of that was KPI that I was paying attention to. We weren't measuring that at all. We would look at overall hiring costs. And we understood what basically it took us to cost per hire kind of stuff, but we weren't looking at those nuances until this really became a crisis. So we got really kind of rudimentary. We pulled out a spreadsheet and we recorded all the different various channels that we would try out. And we would actually put in a monthly budget on each line item. And then we'd start recording where are we getting our applications from? And it shows a little bit of trial and error.

And bear in mind that I already mentioned to you guys that each market can differ. You know, where your main audience goes to for information can differ. So one of our best is definitely Facebook. And we get a lot of traction from Facebook. It totally differs from market to market as to what is the most effective. And for us, we kind of had to do a little bit of trial and error and watch it over a couple of months and see where we'd get our ROI from. And then I gave full permission to the people that were responsible for doing this to say, hey, give it a couple of months. And if you end up finding that it flunked out, no problem. Call it R&D. I'm not going to hold you accountable for that. What I want you to do is discover the

best. And to be able to discover the best, you got to discover a lot. And so you go through that exploratory process and you find out where you're getting your best ROI. Indeed is definitely high. Facebook is high. Instagram is high. Zip Recruiter is decent. Craigslist is still decent. We're not talking about our internal employee referral program as being advertising costs, but that's still actually our number two highest volume resource for us.

There's probably 20 to 30 channels that we still use today. I could probably pull it up on my other screen here to give you a little bit more insight. But I would say, go ahead and feel free to experiment. Find out what is working for your local market. And then find out whether or not you need to kind of ratchet up or down to change that volume to get the kind of volume that you need. That makes sense. A couple specific questions with Facebook before we move on. Just kind of to make sure that we're understanding here. So you talked about especially the benefit of having these videos made by your care team that you're posting on there.

So it sounds like you have those just kind of as regular posts on your page. And then you also have paid ads alongside that. Are you boosting, like, are you paying to boost the job descriptions? Are you also paying to boost these caregiver videos or do those just sit on your company page? What's the breakdown of paid versus not and what kind of content goes in each bucket? Fantastic question. So we have some of the basic, hey, make a career of caring. Have you considered a career in home care type of word graphic? And then we have some gifts and then we have some videos and we, and then we have some videos, and we use all of them, and we boost them all. And I got to tell you that Facebook is actually pretty reasonably priced.

You can boost a post for like 25 bucks. And if you start to experiment about when you boost them and what content gets traction, Facebook will tell you all about which one is getting more views, which one is getting more click-throughs. One of my advices on this piece would be Facebook, if you're going to be advertising a job, they want you to allow for single-click interest. And initially, I admit that I resisted that. I was like, no, because we only get like a name and a number. That's nothing. I mean, I don't want us to be wasting our time on people who we don't know anything about. So I had to go through a. That was the change in mentality. And then I freed myself to be a little bit more open to a change in process. So for example, I was attending a conference, boy, it was probably about a year and a half ago, in which a presenter shared a Harvard-based study in how many questions you can get

on an application before you get people to bounce. So the study yielded that you get seven questions. Every question thereafter, you lose 5% because human beings are human beings and we are all about energy conservation. And if I'm flipping through Facebook and I'm like, oh, I might be interested in that. And it's a three page, 20 question. I'm going to get frustrated at some point typing on my little phone, my information in for the eighth time I'm having to put my name in or something like that, eventually I'm going to bounce. And if I bounce, I don't submit the application. You never know about me. So making it as simple as possible. And that's what Facebook did. That's Indeed has done the same. One click of applications.

That's what the consumer wants. And so we're training the consumer to kind of think that way. And so we as employers kind of need to embrace that. So the way I've responded to that with a strategy is I have a follow-up questionnaire that I could just kick out over email or over text. And it's super simple. You're interested in me? Great. Fantastic. I got your name. I'm glad that you're interested in me. So now it feels conversational, although this is all automated. I've got a couple of follow-up questions for you. And we just ask a couple of additional questions, just a couple.

Because if I ask all of the types of interview questions that I would love to be able to ask, like the old days, then we would lose so many people who don't want to spend their time on that. So instead, we just ask very simple questions. What is it about caregiving that interests you? Because now they have to give a qualified answer. And it's very different, mind you, from asking, well, tell me about what your last job is. Because maybe their last job was working at McDonald's and that's not very applicable. But I'm sorry, I'm picking on McDonald's today. But maybe it's not very applicable to me. But what the resume doesn't always tell is the story about, well, yeah, but I also spent the last three years taking care of my grandmother who suffers from dementia.

So I want to let them tell me the reason why. Tell me your why you want to do caregiving. And that's not a typical application question, but I tell you that I have gotten more insight as to the quality of the candidate from that question than any other. Anything about their background, anything about their employment history. So I had to go through a big change, Connor. My personal history, by the way, before I became an owner of HomeCare, I worked in HR. So I've got a decade of experience prior to home care, all working in human resources management. And HR people chafe at the idea of, what do you mean you're not asking about the last three employers and give me three references? And are you legally

able to work in the United States? And are you over the age of 18 and toggle this box, yes or no? I realized that that really wasn't moving the needle. I don't lose a lot of candidates at the end when we finally do get around to making sure that everything's copacetic from that standpoint. The attrition rate at that point is so low that why in the world would I put that on the front end and possibly lose a huge number of candidates? So I had to go through a fundamental change. Love that because I think that's exactly the type of thing that we're all so used to these processes that in some ways, it's just like how everyone's done this for decades in every industry or something. And so we just kind of

do it because that's how you do it. I also want to kind of stop and appreciate what you mentioned as far as even if the text is not something you're actually sending in the moment, but it's a robot or it's automated, you still write the text or the email or whatever in a conversational kind of human to human style. So that even if they know that, okay, maybe there's not someone at this very moment, right in the text, they know that it was written by an actual human. And there's a human who is hoping to see them apply and, and, and wants to work with them. So love that one last question on social media, because I've gotten this one a lot lately, and this is on the topic of like making videos with your caregivers, things like that. One last question on social media, because I've gotten this one a lot lately, and this is on

the topic of making videos with your caregivers, things like that. Is your agency using TikTok as part of this strategy at all? Good question. What a debate. Wow. I confess we're not. We're not using TikTok today. I realize that is the up and coming and all that kind of good stuff. But admittedly, we have not made that investment to go down the TikTok route. I don't know. Maybe I'm going to kick myself I would say that so far, the team has concentrated their efforts on I don't have any experience in TikTok. So I can't say that it wouldn't work. And it is becoming a very ubiquitous platform. I just, we haven't gone down that road. Gotcha. Well, we'll watch for the videos of you and your staff dancing in the office or something. But all joking aside there, I am excited to see how agencies start to use tiktok as more get on it because i do think it has great uh potential in attracting and hiring caregivers so let's move on here i know that we have a lot to go over and thankfully we have next week too on that subject

of like using caregivers to kind of tell your story, using their voice to attract more caregivers and combining that with this idea of needing to make sure that you're, you're streamlining the questions you're asking, things like that to keep caregivers engaged. There's this whole theme of the fact that they really aren't selling themselves to you. You are selling the agency to them. And there's this need to articulate the value proposition of why this agency, why us, why work here. Can you speak to how you are articulating your agency's value proposition and if there are any big changes you've made on that front? Oh, yes. Huge, huge changes. And I love that. I love that point,

Connor. First of all, let's recognize that statistically speaking, when somebody sits down to look for a caregiving job, they at least apply for three. And we know that there are many more that are available to them at any given time. It's a very high demand skill set. So what we had to do is recognize that the type of person who's interested in employment in this world of caregiving has a lot of heart. So if we were to do what is conventional, even my, I'm totally guilty of it, of taking my job description and posting that into a Indeed posting and saying, this job, you might lift 10 to 20 pounds and you need to be able to bend and lift and you need to be able to walk and you need to be able to do this and you need to be able to bend and lift, and you need to be able to walk,

and you need to be able to do this, and you need to be able to do that. And I'm articulating all this gobbledygook that is the job. I'm not speaking to the why. I'm not speaking to the heart. People who do this work well tend to do it because they care. We even call it care. So if we're going to call something by a feeling, then maybe we shouldn't be afraid to use feelings in expressing why they should come to us. So we used a theme that we call being the agency where caregivers choose to come and stay to thrive. And then we boil that down to the theme words of choose, stay, thrive. And everything that we do from an articulation of value proposition points back to that concept. And we reiterate it, and we branded it, and we put graphics behind it. And we, we use it in all of our

communications and all of our staff meetings and our orientation. And we really put a lot of messaging behind it, because it's all about trying to drive into the heart that we as an organization are going to care for them so that they can care for the clients. And I would freely confess to you that five years ago, I was totally 100% a client-oriented company. And today, I'm absolutely an employee-oriented company. Now, if you had asked my five-year-old self, not my five-year-old self, but myself five years ago, if you had asked me, are you an employee-centered person? I would have absolutely said, oh, yeah,

absolutely. That's totally me. And I'd be so distinctly different from who I am today. So I'm not trying to say that I was this, oh, I don't care about employees. Employers are dimes a dozen back at the day. I've always known that employees are important. But I really wasn't. If a client called and complained about a caregiver, I thought it was the caregiver's fault. That was my first inclination. I'm going to go investigate that. That's just a simple

indicator that I was a client-centric thinker. And that's not a bad thing. Bear in mind. I mean, heaven knows we want to provide good care to our clients. But by becoming a caregiver-centric thinker in every sense of the word, it's not that you're abandoning the clients. You're actually increasing the likelihood that a good caregiver is going to end up providing that care. Richard Branson said it really well. I take good care of my employees because my employees will then take good care of my clients that it's that simple.

And I really had to go through and had to lead my organization to go through. And I would even say that we're still kind of going through that transition to become truly employee centric. And there's a lot of strategies that we did that I could probably spend hours on associated with that. But coming full circle back to your question, articulating the true culture of being employee-centric speaks to the right kind of person who then says, okay, that's a little bit different. Practically speaking, I would say make sure that you're changing up your ads. The things, the value propositions, you're not going to get a lot of them. You can't articulate them all and expect that somebody is going to take the time to read

the whole bulleted list. So pick three and focus in on them. Like some people really care about whether or not you have benefits. Great. Well, then articulate your benefits on one ad and that's it. That's your only value proposition that you're speaking to. But you can't let that be your only ad. You got to have another ad that talks about upward mobility or education or the availability of your shifts or the flexibility of the schedule or the meaningfulness of the work or the ability to parlay this into a nursing job later in life or whatever the value proposition that you're going

to share, make those little micro messages meaningful and themed in your job postings and then rotate them. And some of them will perform a little bit better than others, but at the end of the day, different people who have different motivations will be responsive to different messages. So my main advice there would be change it up. Don't be lazy. Don't just post the job description and say, all right, that's our job posting. And bear in mind, I spent a lot of time looking at these postings on Indeed. So many of them read the exact same way. It's not differentiated. So changing it up, using graphics, using colors, using themes, values that are unique to your organization. I love the video testimonials because that's something that can't be faked. Super helpful. For an agency that is maybe like one or two or

three people hearing this and hearing change things up and have multiple ads, use graphics, things like that. I mean, it can sound kind of daunting. Overwhelming. What is kind of the minimum amount here as far as like, let's say, how often should you be changing your ads, things like that? Yeah. Yeah. I appreciate that. I appreciate that because I remember those days where you're the chief cook and bottle washer and everything in between. This is about energy, right? And where the only limitation on your resources is energy. So taking a half hour and brainstorm with yourself or with your team, why would anybody want to join home care? And then why would anybody want to join my agency specifically? And writing those

things down. From there, at least have three distinct messages leading with different points, main points of your value prop, and then rotate those messages. It will take you an hour to do the activity. And now you've got the tools that you can rotate through to appeal to different audiences from that point forward. I mean, if you can change it up once a quarter, that'd be even better. But at the end of the day, if you want to drive more resources into your organization, you got to grow. If you want to grow, you got to have the caregivers. So this is an investment. And if I said, hey, if you'll give me $100 in a month, I'm going to give you $300 back. You would do that all day long.

You'd say, okay, well, how many times could I give you $100? That's the way that you need to think about these types of activities. What could you do as an organization if you had double the amount of caregivers? What would happen to your company if you had a net gain of five caregivers every two weeks? What would that do to your growth? What would that do to your revenue? That's the kind of investment mentality that you need to have when you're looking at revamping your recruiting processes. I totally agree. We recently had Rachel Gartner from CareWork on here. And one thing that she talked about is the fact that for the majority of agencies, the constrained resource to your growth is caregivers. And it's like for most agencies, that is the single obstacle.

Like that's what holds you up. And if you could remove that or at least speed it up, you know, that helps everything across the board with your business most of the time. Unquestionably. I like that perspective. I want to dig more into the employee-centric idea that you talked about, because I think you make a good point here of, you know, like your five years ago self, I would have said, yeah, I'm employee-centric. And I think like every company, every business out there would say, yeah, we're employee centric. In your mind, what ask them their perception on things that we understood to be our value prop. And then ask them their perception as to like force rank what's most important to you out of everything that we could possibly do or everything that we do do and then force rank where if you could choose anything what where would you have us put our effort in to create more engagement with you as

an employee and that activity was super insightful because it taught me it taught me a different way to think about uh caregiver motivation so for example, the survey that we did and everything that we do, wages was number five on the list. When I would have guessed it would have been number one. Number one was, I want you to give me a good match. That makes the most difference as to my job satisfaction is a good client match. So we went through a huge process of re-identifying, okay, how do we do matching? How do we get feedback loops from our employees as to whether or not they're satisfied with the client assignment that they've got and so forth. And when you want to put employee-centric to the test here, Connor, give power to your caregivers as to whether or not you're going to keep a client.

That's when you do a gut check, right? But if in reality, if the limited resource here is the caregiver, not the clients, well, then if none of my caregivers are happy going to Mrs. Jones, because Mrs. Jones is a crab fest, well, then I guess Mrs. Jones doesn't match my employee-centric mentality anymore. That was a big shift for me. So allowing for caregivers to... We allow every client to fire a caregiver. I don't want to see Susie back ever in my house ever again. We allow that all the time, any day of the week in home care. But do we do the same with caregivers?

So I can hear the collective gasp of those on this now and those who will listen to the podcast episode in the future. And I want to break this down more. So let's talk about the specifics of that policy and what that looks like? Sure. The main way I articulate to the caregivers is you can request to be off of any client that you want with no questions asked. I'll confess to you that it doesn't happen very much anymore because we've gotten better at the matching process. So first of all, that means that I'm going to be investing some additional time up in the front end to find out more about you. Then I've got to make sure that I'm getting the reciprocal information from my clients. And so that resulted in some process changes. Then I sell both of you on each other.

Hey, you guys have a shared interest in this. This is where this works. This is where this works. And so they're already mentally building up an idea that, hey, okay, I've got a good match here. And when somebody goes in with positive expectations, guess what they typically find? They find a positive experience. I do promote the concept of a three strikes you're out. Like, hey, don't just do it on the first shift.

Nobody feels comfortable meeting a stranger for the first time. Give it a couple of days. Nobody feels comfortable meeting a stranger for the first time. Give it a couple of days. See if it will work out. And that's what we promote, but it is not our policy. So meaning that if you say, nope, nope, that felt way too uncomfortable. Okay, no problem. We're going to, we'll pull you off that shift.

We'll get you another assignment. Have you had caregivers who go through like four clients in a row and kind of reject them all and you have to work out that situation? Probably. Probably. But the fact, Connor, that I don't know that that's a problem means that that's not something, that's not the thing that our management team or our staff in the office are complaining about. The fact that that's not bubbling up to me tells me that that's not a common issue. Because if it were, trust me, I'd hear about it. And then is there a policy or is there a way that you factor in, like if a client has been rejected by so many caregivers, like how do you decide at what point do you stop sending them caregivers?

Great question. I'm a big proponent of not putting a specific number to it, but rather empowering the staff to say, hey, if you're finding that caregivers A, B, C all want out of this particular shift, trust me, it's the client. It doesn't mean that you can't find the perfect scrappy caregiver that just loves a challenge and they're going to be a perfect match, but maybe you can't. So I want to give complete authority to you in the branch to say, yeah, this is no longer a good client for us. We're going to give proper notice and go our separate ways.

And for me, that doesn't mean a number. That means teaching principles and then allowing them to choose how they're going to apply those principles to the situation. So I'm not a fan of quotas. I'm not a fan of saying, oh, give them four caregivers and then after that, it needs to be dealt with. I'd rather say, hey, who's your problem children? If you could force rank all of your problem children, take your bottom 10% and ask yourself the question, is the time, energy, and resources that I'm dedicating to these individuals giving me an ROI? Because if the answer is no, if you could then maybe handle

20 more clients because you got rid of these three, then do it. We can't be all things to all people. We're not the Walmart of home care. So that's, that's what, that's the hill we died on. Okay. And that's a good hill to die on. I think one, one more question that I have with this, and then we'll start to kind of wrap things up for today. Boy, that went fast. I know, right? There's so much more to cover. Hearing this policy is obviously daunting to a lot of agency owners. And I can think of lots of different arguments against it,

things like that. You've already touched on this, but let's hit this kind of more directly. What are the benefits that you've seen of having that policy in place that allows caregivers to ask to be transferred from a client, no questions asked? I'm going to give you a recent story to answer this question. So we now, we do a all staff meeting. And when I say all staff, I mean all staff. So all caregivers are invited and we recognize that caregivers are working at all hours. So we record it and we push it out and we give everybody about three and a half weeks in which to view it. And then they complete a affidavit once they've watched it so that they can get paid for it. And every single one of the affidavits come to me

personally. And I tell them that there's an opportunity to make a comment or ask a question, and that I will personally read every single one and respond to every single one. And this is one of the sacrifices that I chose to make in my own time to really promote this concept of being an employee-centric company. And I can tell you that over the past couple of weeks, we just had an all-staff meeting a couple of weeks ago. I have read now probably in the neighborhood of 200 comments from caregivers that say, I know this company cares about me and that I therefore care about this company. I am so glad to hear about our success and how we're growing because I know how much you care about me.

Some iteration of those words has come to me and it fills my soul. So how do I know? How do I know that this is making an impact? Sure, I could point to the fact that the average family resource home caregiver has a lifespan with the company much longer than the average agency and our retention is better and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. At the end of the day, it's sentiment. It's do they feel supported? Do they feel like I've got their back? Do they feel like I legitimately care about them? Because if so,

they will stay with you and do anything you need them to do. If there's a problem, they're going to bring it to your attention. That to me is the best measure of this coming to full fruition. I think that's a great place to end for today. So thanks again, Jeff. This has been awesome. Like you said, went by really quick. So we'll be back same time, same place next week for the part two of this. We'll continue down the hiring pipeline and also get into some retention strategies too. Just as a reminder, this is both a live event and a podcast. You can always listen to the podcast afterward by looking up Home Care U wherever you get your podcasts. A couple more things really quick here. First of all, remember this is put it on by CareSwitch. We are an agency management and scheduling solution. What makes us different? We're designed to be learned in minutes rather than days.

We also are freemium, which means that you can use most of the system for free for as long as you want, no cost. And then there are certain things like having us process your payroll for you, that if you want that, then you can choose to pay and get that. It's an amazing system. I joined after seeing the feedback from users on it. So I highly recommend you check it out. You can go to careswitch.com and try it out in less than a minute for free without talking to a salesperson. So that pitch aside, thank you to everyone for joining. Thanks again to Jeff.

And we will see you all next week for part two. Love it. Thanks so much, Connor. That's a wrap. This episode was made by the team at CareSwitch, 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.