Why are you rejecting caregiver applicants?

At Augusta, we screen hundreds of caregivers about potential employment with a home care agency. It gives us a unique perspective into the heartbeat of our industry: caregiver recruiting.  

It’s well documented that home care and assisted living are facing an unprecedented caregiver shortage now that will continue in the coming years. According to the US bureau of labor & statistics, there are about 3.4 million non-medical home care worker jobs in the US today. Some sources put our shortfall at over 350,000 caregivers in the not too distant future.

But, it’s not all doom and gloom. There is still hope for both home care & assisted living owners/operators.Today there are 53M family caregivers in the US doing unpaid caregiving. The post that follows gives some practical information about what to consider when hiring a family caregiver who has yet to gain professional caregiving experience. 

Family caregiving is a caregiving experience. 

Hiring practices of operators vary when it comes to the experience level that is accepted. There is a cohort of agency operators who only hire caregivers with several years of professional experience as caregiver and/or CNA. However, there are many home care agencies and assisted living operators today which are branching out into hiring family caregivers.  

Family caregivers or “informal” caregiving is: “care … for adult family members and friends with chronic illnesses or conditions that prevent them from handling daily activities such as bathing, managing medications or preparing meals on their own,” according to the Family Caregiver Alliance. 

While a family caregiver may not have had formal training, they’ve demonstrated something that cannot be trained which is the strength of character for caregiving. Instead of ruling out a family caregiver from your hiring process, consider asking these interview questions instead: 

• How long did you care for your relative?

• What type of care did you provide them with? How did you learn how to do it?

• Tell me about a time when your relative went through something difficult, how did you support them? 

• Tell me about a time when you learned something new?

Consider cultural differences.

In the US, the predominant culture is that older adults are taken care of by healthcare professionals whether in home care/home health, assisted living or skilled nursing.  In some cultures, it's commonplace for families to live intergenerationally and care for their own grandparents and other older relatives. In fact, some cultures place an emphasis on caregiving for their relatives.  

However, for many people, cultural differences may be obscured by unintentional or unconscious biases about the applicant’s culture or ethnicity. This article from the University of California San Francisco defines the term as: “Unconscious biases are social stereotypes about certain groups of people that individuals form outside their own conscious awareness. Everyone holds unconscious beliefs about various social and identity groups, and these biases stem from one's tendency to organize social worlds by categorizing.”

Unconscious bias is typically hard for people to accept that it exists. But modern neuroscience and research have shown its prevalence, according to UCSF.  This means that whoever on your team is screening applicants, recruiting, interviewing caregivers, and really interacting with both clients and caregivers should be trained in cultural competency and unconscious bias. This means anyone on your team who is interacting with your potential clients or caregivers may inadvertently overlook someone who could be of great asset to you and your agency.  

Assist with the state requirements to become a caregiver.

Depending on the state you’re in, the requirements for a caregiver to join your team may vary in regards to caregiver registration/licensure, training, health tests and more.  

It’s common practice today for home care operators to require caregivers to meet most or all of the requirements prior to joining the agency. This may be because they want a caregiver to have ‘skin in the game’ or believe their clients will not accept a caregiver who is still learning.

However, with the severity of the caregiver shortage, some home care agency owners are now thinking about this differently. Agency owners who are willing to guide a caregiver through the state requirements and invest in their training are tapping into a new pool of applicants who have the heart for caregiving. What if guiding a caregiver through their state registration process was a part of your onboarding process?  

"You don't hire for skills, you hire for attitude. You can always teach skills."

- Simon Sinek, Author of "Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action (2009)"

Consider what reliable transportation means for your agency.

Are you in an urban area where the caregiver can easily take public transportation or cheap ubers/lyfts? Or, are you in a suburban area where the caregiver may need a vehicle to get around? Does the caregiver have a relative with a car, but not a car themselves? How far are they going to be traveling for their client and how frequently? A great caregiver applicant could have a family member with a reliable vehicle, but if your agency is simply rejecting caregiver applicants when they indicate that they don’t have their own car on their application, you may lose out on a valuable team member.

Consider asking the caregiver some interview questions such as these: 

• When the relative you’ve cared for needed to go to the doctor, how did you get there?

• How about when the relative you cared for needed groceries, how did you get to the grocery store? How often did you do that?

Market to the right caregivers for your agency.

From our research, if you’re in an urban area, you should expect that caregivers will probably not travel more than 10-15 miles for a caregiving position. The rising price of gas and the typical caregiver wage in the US means that your caregivers need to be hyper-local to your clients.  

Using Facebook and other social media advertising tools, it’s possible to micro-target and geo-locate the right caregivers for your agency. It does take extra effort and social media experience to get your social media targeting right.  Augusta’s team of caregiver recruiting experts can help you target the right caregivers; contact us today to learn more.