What is Inbound Caregiver Recruiting? And Why it Matters for your Home Care Agency
Introduction: Why does Inbound recruiting matter?
10 years ago, caregiver applicants might have walked into your home care agency off the street and applied to work for your agency on the spot. The world has changed in some pretty significant ways since then. Caregiver job seekers today typically begin their job search online, first. The search term “caregiver jobs near me” has nearly doubled in popularity compared to 5 years ago, according to google trends.
Google Trends shows popularity for the search term “caregiver jobs near me” has nearly doubled over 5 years.
When caregivers search-up jobs online, they may find larger and franchise home care agencies websites that have a lot of caregiver related content (blogs, videos, etc) on their website. The quantity and quality of your website content is how you rank organically on google, afterall.
But, for the sake of this blog post, we’ll assume that your agency is like most and doesn’t have a very high organic search traffic on google from your prospective applicants. In this post, we’ll cover:
What is inbound marketing and inbound recruiting
how to get started with inbound recruiting
Identifying your ideal candidate persona
Content creation for home care
Creating a delightful candidate experience
Thanks for reading!
What is inbound marketing?
Hubspot coined the term inbound marketing more than a decade ago. They define it:
“Inbound marketing is a business methodology that attracts customers by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them. While outbound marketing interrupts your audience with content they don’t always want, inbound marketing forms connections they are looking for and solves problems they already have.”
In practice this means two main areas of focus that their definition touches on:
Your home care agency needs a strategy to attract and engage visitors on your website (more on that as you continue to read).
You need to delight your audience with excellent experience when they engage with your agency.
What is inbound recruiting?
Inbound recruiting is simply put, using the strategy of inbound marketing but specifically for the purpose of attracting, engaging and delighting applicants and candidates. Hubspot defines inbound recruitment as:
“Inbound recruiting creates a remarkable candidate experience through employer brand content and marketing strategies that help companies build relationships with top talent. By taking an inbound marketing approach to recruiting, companies can connect with passive and active job seekers, engage with their network, and delight candidates throughout the application process.”
For your home care agency, attracting and engaging candidates and applicants means:
Creating helpful and interesting content on your website like blogs and videos on your website that show your applicants you understand what their needs and desires are and how you can help them achieve those. There’s a bit more to it than just that and I’ll explain below in the how to get started section.
And, importantly, creating an applicant experience that is simple, delightful and reinforces your understanding of who your applicants are and what they want.
How to get started with inbound recruiting for caregivers
Identify your ideal candidate persona
A marketing persona is:
“...a fictional character that communicates the primary characteristics of a group of users, identified and selected as a key target through use of segmentation data, across the company in a usable and effective manner.”
This can be a very complex, data-driven exercise to discover your ideal candidate persona. But, as a first step, you can simply write out the characteristics, goals, wants and dislikes of your best and worst 5-10 employees and look for general themes.
Think about the following questions to develop a candidate persona:
How close do they live to your service area?
What is the segments’ age range?
What is the segment’s educational level?
What is the segment’s social interest?
What is the segment’s job status?
What is the segment’s typical work experience? Are they already working as a caregiver in some way?
What is the segment likely to get their information? (friends/family, which social media sites)?
What three adjectives would the segment use to describe themselves?
There are many ways you can think about the persona that you target, but you will need to get clear on it to be able to move on to the next step: content creation.
Here’s an example ideal candidate persona:
Meet Maria Caregiver!
Maria Caregiver is a 39 year old woman
She has a high school diploma and has taken a couple classes toward an associate degree in business administration
She lives up to 7 miles from our main service area (let’s use Pasadena, CA as our example)
She has a family with 2-3 younger kids, still in school
She is already working at least 1 other job and is looking for a second source of income frequently
She trusts her friends, family and Facebook and Instagram to keep her up to date on what’s happening in the world
She’s hardworking, reliable and feels deeply connected to caring for others
Start creating website and social media content, targeted to your ideal candidate persona
As mentioned earlier, the key to enhancing your organic rank on google is content like blogs, pictures and videos that speak to your ideal audience. To create content that performs well with your audience, put yourself in their shoes. When you think about your ideal candidate, what do they want to know about you and your agency? What will they get out of working with you? What can’t they get from other competing home care agencies?
Using the above ideal candidate persona of “Maria Caregiver in Pasadena, CA” these are blog and video topic ideas to create and post on your website and social media:
How our Home Care Agency cares for Caregivers
3 ways our Home Care Agency helps caregivers with busy family lives
What to look for in a home care agency when getting a 2nd job
How our home care agency makes it easy to give older adults the care they deserve
In addition to written blog content and video content, on social media, consistently post pictures of real people that your ideal candidate cares about:
Have you had parties, gatherings or events for your employees' families? (holiday parties, lunchones, etc)? Post those pictures slowly, over time on your social media accounts
Do you have a caregiver of the month award? Take their picture and post it each month.
You probably do regular training and orientation with new caregivers. Snap some pictures of your caregivers in the training room and post those regularly as well.
Here’s an example from one of Augusta’s customers:
There are thousands of ways to incorporate your candidate persona into the content you make for your website and social media! Get creative!
What is an applicant or candidate experience?
Linkedin defines candidate experience this way:
“Candidate experience is how a job seeker perceives a company’s brand throughout the hiring process — from the job description to the interview process to follow-up communications. Each step provides an opportunity to build stronger candidate relationships and show job seekers why they should want to work at your company.
A positive candidate experience can help you convert your top-choice candidates into employees, while a poor candidate experience can cause them to drop out of your hiring process altogether.”
How to start delighting your applicants with an amazing candidate experience
In Augusta’s research with hundreds of home care agencies, we’ve found that a recruiter usually spends 50% of their time chasing down candidates to find out whether or not they’re qualified and match your ideal candidate persona. That’s essentially outbound recruiting and interrupts the candidate’s day – afterall, the typical ideal caregiver persona is already working another job and has a busy family schedule.
Here are three simple steps to improve your candidate experience:
Make sure your application is easy-to-use and works on the types of mobile devices that caregivers actually use today. Most caregivers do not have the newest smartphone, but applications that build-in on indeed and other job boards are designed for the newest devices. This means it takes too long to load and candidates drop off.
Make sure you’re gathering enough accurate data about the candidate to sort caregivers into three categories: Qualified, Needs further review or disqualified. If your application is too long, candidates will drop off. If your application is too short, your recruiter will chase the candidate down to find out that they’re not qualified. A lot of information on a typical home care agency employment application can actually be collected later in your hiring process and it’s actually needed to determine whether or not a candidate should get an interview. Additionally, most candidate profiles on job boards and social media are old and outdated, you need to collect their current, correct contact information and location to know whether or not they’re actually qualified.
Finally, do not make your candidates wait AT ALL for an interview. Caregivers apply for an average of 16 jobs at one time, according to a study by Hireology. You need to be the first to interview the best candidates because they have many choices in the job market. If you take more than 12 hours to get back to every candidate, they will be gone.
Augusta helps you get up to 80% of your ideal candidates to self-schedule an interview without any chasing through texts, calls and emails. No more incomplete or out of service area applicants, you spend your time on the best candidates.
Come talk with us at Augusta and we will help you get your candidates interviewing with your agency the same day that they apply. It’s a truly delightful candidate experience. :-)
