As the new year lays open in front of us, we are all wondering what to expect from 2022, especially when recruiting caregivers.
It might be a good opportunity now to stop, look at caregiver recruitment and consider how to refresh and recharge your “recruiting machine” for the year ahead. What’s your plan for caregiver recruitment?
How will you approach this new year in your business?
Will you start with excitement? Excitement is fun and brings positive energy, but it is fleeting – and what’s worse, it is unfocused.
We often get excited about new things: NEW ideas, NEW business models, NEW opportunities. But these often turn out to be NEW distractions that reduce our level of focus, clarity, and momentum. We get excited about new ideas but end up spinning our wheels in frustration because the new ideas have no traction or framework to be turned into results.
Implementation is permanent – It is about focusing on a plan and focusing on the daily activities that will help keep that plan in motion. Think about the satisfaction you get from moving things – one at a time – from your “TO DO” list to your “DONE” list! The more you implement, the more you will find yourself having greater levels of focus, clarity, and momentum.
Action leads to more action. The path emerges as we move forward. One step leads to the next, and pretty soon, you have accomplished more, gotten better recruitment results, and built a new foundation for doing even better in caregiver recruitment.
Implementation is a muscle – When you use it, it gets stronger and stronger.
Recruiting Caregivers Requires Disciplined Implementation
I have asked my friend Jason Yu of Levo to chime in. His expertise is on improving efficiency in caregivers. The platform he has developed provides the tools to find and hire qualified caregivers.
How to Implement Better in 4 Steps
- Test, Test, Test Your Caregiver Recruitment Activities
You are living in a dynamic environment where what worked yesterday won’t work today. It means that you need to have an ongoing process for testing new ideas. You need to test the various aspects of recruitment from job ad headlines, to copy, call to action, or school recruitment.
Jason recommends having a hypothesis for everything you test. For example, you may want to test the hypothesis that mentioning pay in the job ad will lead to a higher click-through rate. Let the tests run for 4 to 6 weeks and compare your click-through rate to another ad where pay wasn’t mentioned.
- Track Everything in Caregiver Recruitment
In order to find out if your tests are working, you need to track everything. You need to keep track of every caregiver applicant. You need to know how they found out about your company, what motivated them to contact you. It’s only when you track everything that you will know when a particular headline, a paragraph in the job ad, or a call to action is working. It’s only when you track every incoming application that you know which recruiting websites or which employee referral campaign is working.
“The discipline that comes with tracking is beneficial to other parts of your business,” adds Jason. “It allows you to make more informed investment decisions. Properly tracking recruitment sources helps direct funds to the vendors that truly help your caregiver recruitment and retention efforts.”
- When Recruiting Caregivers, Document Your Winning Formula
As you develop the steps in your system, write everything down. I know this is boring and takes time but it’s worth it! That way no matter who in your agency is working on caregiver recruiting, they can apply the caregiver recruitment recipe you have developed over time.
- Develop Disciplined Caregiver Recruitment
The key to successful recruitment is consistency. Once you have a system that works, use the same recipe every time until the data shows that it’s not working anymore. Require disciplined implementation and allow space for innovation and creativity.
This is achieved by the savvier recruiters. “With the right testing, tracking, and documentation, you can understand the baseline for your business and make changes whenever results are trending away from the baseline,” comments Jason.
Of course, we never know what the future holds. It has always been true but this truth came into stark reality for most of us since the start of the pandemic. Although we cannot control the world around us, we can decide how we act in the world. Bringing a disciplined approach to caregiver recruitment and implementation will position your agency on a positive vector in 2022.
This article was inspired by an article published by David Newman, Do It Marketing!
