Unlocking Growth: Scaleable Recruiting & Retention Pt. 2

In this episode of the Hire to Thrive podcast, Rachel Gartner discusses the importance of having a scalable recruiting and retention process for home care agencies. She emphasizes the need to understand the financial value of each caregiver hire and set agency growth goals based on average hours worked per hire. Rachel also highlights the importance of using metrics as levers to track progress and make data-driven decisions. She provides insights on how to scale retention by implementing effective communication strategies, meeting caregivers' needs, and building future leaders within the agency. Rachel concludes by discussing the downward spiral that many home care agencies face and how investing in the recruiting pipeline can switch the trajectory to an upward spiral.

Key Takeaways:

1. Understand the financial value of each caregiver hire by knowing average retention, hours worked, and profit margins per hour.
2. Set agency growth goals based on current growth objectives and average hours worked per hire.
3. Use metrics as levers to track progress and make data-driven decisions for scalable growth.
4. Implement effective communication strategies to improve retention, such as regular check-ins and addressing caregivers' needs.
5. Build future leaders within the agency by providing career paths, training, and support.
6. Invest time, effort, and money into the recruiting pipeline to switch from a downward spiral to an upward spiral.

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Transcript

[TRANSCRIPT]

0:00:00 - (A): You.

0:00:02 - (Rachel Gartner): Welcome to the Hire to Thrive podcast, where home care hiring is reimagined. I'm your host, Rachel Gartner, founder and CEO of Carework. We're on a mission to help you hire and retain more high-quality caregivers so that you can serve your community better. Since 2018, we've helped our partner agencies hire thousands of caregivers. If your agency needs more hires to thrive, you're in the right place.

0:00:36 - (A): You. Let's talk about cost-effective, scalable, growth, and retention. So three main concepts here for having a scalable recruiting and retention process. You need to understand your caregiver's value. Now, in this instance, I'm not talking about the emotional value, because obviously, they are very valuable as people no matter how much they work or what your margins are. But I am talking about on a financial level, the value of each hire that you make.

0:01:04 - (A): So to know this, you need to know your average retention. You need to know on average, how many hours your hires work and what your margins per hour are. This gives you a great way to improve that over time. So, you know, if we could get everybody to work a little bit more and stick around a little bit longer, we're going to start really getting ahead financially versus the constant turnover or underutilizing the roster that you currently have.

0:01:31 - (A): The next one is to set your agency growth goals. So how many caregivers do you need to hire based on your current growth goals, and your average hours worked for hire? So you cannot effectively grow your agency if you don't know at a basic level how many caregivers you need to hire. And a pitfall I see a lot is people will say, like, I'll hire as many caregivers as I can. That is wonderful. I love that energy.

0:01:56 - (A): But you can't do that if you're not building in the structure for it. And it's much easier to build this structure if you set regular goals that increase over time versus just saying, we want as many as we can get. Because if you do that, it's not a real goal. It's just like a dream. It's like, it'd be great. We'll hire as many caregivers as we can. The growth market is unlimited. That's probably true. Your growth. If you can hire caregivers, the need is there, right?

0:02:24 - (A): But if you're not setting specific goals based on how much you want to grow your agency, how many hours you want to be working, and then how many caregivers you need to hire to work those hours based on your average hours worked per hire and accounting for turnover. You're not giving your team anything you can really hold them accountable for. Because everybody wants to hire a ton of caregivers. But you want to have a specific goal to say. Remember, to meet our growth goals, we need to hire eleven caregivers per month.

0:02:52 - (A): Right now, we're halfway through the month. We've only hired four. We're not on track how are we going to scale that up in the next two weeks? That's the power of database goals. And then you want to use your metrics as levers. So if you know you have a good cost per applicant and you have a good conversion to hire, so your funnel is working, then increase your ad budget. And then you can say, we want eleven hires per month and we know it's costing us this amount.

0:03:17 - (A): Here we go. But you have to keep an eye on your metrics to make sure that they stay steady, otherwise, it will not be scalable. So remember I said sometimes people go spend a ton more on their online job ads, but they don't have the foundational structure and systems in place to be scalable. So you might have a step in the process, or a hire or a staff person in your agency. That is the bottleneck of making that growth scalable.

0:03:43 - (A): This means even if you go spend $5,000 on your job ads, you're not going to get the hires you're looking for. Because now you have a human being who can't call everybody fast enough. So now instead of calling everybody the first day, they're calling them, and within a few days they might be falling behind. So you're not going to get as good a conversion, and now you're spending more, but you're not getting the proportional results.

0:04:04 - (A): That is a not scalable process. We want to help you build a process that is scalable, that you understand what it takes to meet your goals and you know how to hold your team accountable, and you're giving them the tools that they need to do that. This is really important for us. I mean, like I said, we've handled hundreds of thousands of applicants. So for me, managing a team of 40 recruiters, I have to know how our applicant volume is trending how much time it should take my team, whether they're performing efficiently, and whether they're getting results. I mean, I track this all the time, so I know you can do it. I know you can do it, and I would love to help you.

0:04:40 - (A): Quick overview of retention metrics. These are basic, but what percentage of your caregivers are still working at 90 days, at six months, in a year? So kind of like we did with recruiting, these are your entry-level metrics. Now, to succeed at these metrics, you can break them down for 90-day retention. Who worked the first shift? Who was still working for 30 days? 45, 60 days? If they were still working, how many hours per week are they working? If they're not working, when did they stop and were they not getting enough hours?

0:05:12 - (A): There's a lot of data to break down in each step, but this gives you a basic way to measure this. All right? Scalable retention. So now that we have a scalable hiring funnel and we know how many we need to hire based on retention. How do we scale retention? The mistake a lot of agencies make is they don't think of retention as a scalable system and process. They are leaving it up to people just being good about communicating, being good about doing it.

0:05:41 - (A): It won't work. So how do you scale retention? You have to communicate often when it comes to shifts, to growth career paths. You have to communicate this to your new hires. And this is where a system comes into place. Like on week one we check in with them and we go through this list. In week three, we asked them these questions. At week six we check in to see if they're meeting their hours. On week eight we check in to see if their pay is working for them or if they need to increase or decrease.

0:06:11 - (A): This is a system that makes it scalable. The next way is to continue to put caregivers first find out what your new hires needs and meet their needs. And then to make myself laugh, I put in parentheses and communicate. That just said communication. But something really powerful that I got from Jensen Jones and Stephen Tweed at Home Care CEO forum is to just straight up ask your new hires what take home pay they need.

0:06:39 - (A): And then you do the math to know. On average, this is how much is going to be taken out for taxes in our area. And so to account for that, you're going to need to work X amount of hours. And here's a shift where I can get you that amount of hours and you can meet your take home pay needs that is so powerful to the firm. Day one, we understand your needs and we're going to meet them for you. That is caregiver first, right?

0:07:02 - (A): Another way is to meet their needs when there are unexpected issues. So their child is homesick from school even. Just asking is there anything you need? Are you guys okay? So many people look at agencies calling out or caregivers calling out as just a problem. And I get it, it is a problem. I'm not saying it's not. But when you put the human element back in and you treat every caregiver like they are the best caregiver that's ever worked for you and you assume the best and you put yourself out there and you make yourself vulnerable to connect with them and to offer them support it is so powerful for attention when they are not just numbers.

0:07:41 - (A): Now do we need to know the numbers? Yes, but they should not feel like a number. And those are different things on that same track. Build future Leaders this is another issue with my slides and I'm so sorry the updated paragraph is missing there. But the point here is that building leaders within a home care agency is the same as building leaders in any other industry, in any other role. It is to give them a path forward, to show them the vision that you have for them to achieve and how you're going to help them achieve it. And then empower them to do that. Give them the training that they need. Give them the support that they need.

0:08:19 - (A): I talked with one agency owner who takes every single hire out to lunch when they hit 45 days to see what they need and how they're growing. Other agencies have done this with lead caregivers who go to the first shift with them and then check in with them again all throughout their first week. These are systems that you build a culture of leadership and you empower them. So that lead caregiver role is a great one to say we have lead caregivers, they make more money and this is how you become a lead caregiver. And if that is your goal, we're going to help you achieve that so that you can increase your earning potential.

0:08:53 - (A): I've seen other agencies that give a dollar an hour raise to caregivers once they have referred a certain number of new hires. So not only are you going to get a referral bonus when they're hired, but you're going to long term earn more money because you are helping build our agency and you're going to become a leader within this agency. Those are all things that help retention. And then people get scared about the cost. And I get it.

0:09:16 - (A): But if you are a private pay agency, you just have to learn to factor this in. To not build your pricing based off of just your average cost or the lower end of your cost, but to build in money for retention, for raises, for promotions, so that you can build a stronger agency and grow more in the long term, which then serves your community. Because are your prices higher? Yes, but they are getting better quality of care.

0:09:43 - (A): Totally worth it. That's another set box I could get on. But quickly we're going to talk about the downward spiral that many home care agencies are stuck in. Some of you may have seen me talk about this before if you've come to previous webinars. This is something I'm really, really passionate about explaining because I just work with so many agencies that were in this spiral and are not anymore and I want to help you get out of this spiral.

0:10:10 - (A): So here's what happens. You have an agency that's understaffed and then because they're understaffed, now they're turning away cases. Well, what happens if you turn away cases? You have lower revenue, lower profit. If you have lower revenue and lower profit, you can't invest as much in your ad budget and your recruiting pipeline and your recruiting staff. So then what happens is you don't have enough hires.

0:10:34 - (A): If you don't have enough hires, you get more understaffed and this downward spiral continues. This is a very frustrating place to be. And for leaders and owners of agencies this can feel incredibly overwhelming and it may even make you feel powerless or hopeless for the growth of your business. Because when you're early in the spiral, what it feels like is, well, we're understaffed, but everybody is understaffed.

0:11:01 - (A): It's just the nature of the industry. If you're later in the spiral, you might be saying things like, we're having to let go of some staff. It's getting harder. We need to lower our job budgets. It's really tight. We're really understaffed. We're turning away cases. And then I've heard people who have been in the spiral for a long time and they're saying things like, I've laid off everyone in the office. I can't afford to outsource recruiting because I just literally can't afford it.

0:11:30 - (A): I'm down over 50% from the same time last year. I had a great office manager that's been with me five years. I just had to let go. It is a horrible place to be. And I want you to know I'm not a home care agency owner, but I am a business owner. And I deeply understand the emotions of how this impacts you as a leader of a business. And I want you to know it does not have to be like this. So here is what we're seeing from other agencies, and I promise this is possible for you. So I want everything I'm about to describe, I don't want you to hear that from a place of good for them. I wish that was me. I want you to hear it from a place of this is possible for me.

0:12:13 - (A): There are agencies that are able to staff all of their cases. And because of that, now they're growing and they're able to take referrals. They're able to take all the cases they're offered and they're able to go out into the community and say, hey, I'm taking referrals. I can staff whatever you have. Right? So then what happens is they are now growing in revenue and growing in profit, which then means they're able to invest more in their ad budget and their recruiting pipeline and their referral incentives, retention bonuses, all of that, which means they get more consistent hires and they continue growing.

0:12:48 - (A): This is happening for agencies. I work with agencies that this is happening for. And here is the secret, and this says secret number five is do you switch into this upward spiral by investing time, effort and money into your recruiting pipeline? So I want you to pause right here because part of your brain just said, she's trying to sell me something. And of course I have things I can sell you to help with recruiting.

0:13:15 - (A): But I want to be really clear that it doesn't have to be care work. It doesn't have to be me. There are so many ways you can invest in this pipeline. So that might look like you start meeting with your team once a week to review your weekly KPIs. It might mean you sit down and define your recruiting process better, it might mean that you as an owner do recruiting yourself for a day to feel the process. I still do this sometimes. I'll jump in and do the recruiting job for a while, because sometimes there are inefficiencies or parts that are not great that you don't realize until you do it again yourself for a while.

0:13:50 - (A): It might mean the effort of having difficult conversations with your team to say, I don't think we're hiring with a caregiver first mindset, and we need to change that. Or I don't think the culture at our agency is caregiver first. I think we've gotten really down on caregivers and judgmental towards them. We need to change that. It might be money in job ads, it might be money and training for your team or in outsourcing.

0:14:12 - (A): But the point here is there are so many ways to do this, but they all come back to this point in this cycle that switches you from over here, where it's going down, to over here, where it's going up, and it is possible for your team. It is possible. I promise. It doesn't happen overnight, because just like that downward cycle happens over a long time, this one can take a long time too. But when you change the trajectory and you go from very slowly moving down or very fast moving down sometimes to now, we're slowly moving up, it builds momentum over time because you get bigger and you have more staff and you have more money and you have more time and you have more freedom and it snowballs up. And that's what we want to see.

0:14:59 - (A): Recruiting at the end of the day is a funnel. When you measure the conversion percentages at every step and make incremental improvements, you can completely change the outcome.