Must-Know Recruiting Trends for 2022: 3 Ways for Your Home Care Agency to Gain a Recruiting Edge

How to compete—quickly—in a job market where candidates have their pick of the best jobs around.

When a proper strategy is implemented, recruiting for your home care agency can be successful.

With a record-breaking number of open jobs (nine million and counting) and a home care industry growing faster than any other field, competition for caregivers in 2022 will be tight.

The job market has made a 180-degree turn since the mid-2010s when employers had the upper hand. Now, the workforce is calling the shots, and caregiver agencies will have to adapt to the rapidly changing job market and make new appeals to both active and passive job seekers.

The most important strategies for home care agency recruiters to focus on in 2022 are actively recruiting, streamlining the hiring process, and demonstrating a healthy and forward-thinking company culture.

1. Move candidates through the process quickly and smoothly

Build a recruiting, interviewing, and hiring process that’s as smooth and fast as possible. Assume that whatever candidates you’re talking to, someone else—a recruiter, another agency—is courting them as well. And by the time you’re getting around to making an offer, the ink could be drying on their new contract with one of your competitors. Speed matters.

To ensure you can move more quickly and smoothly than the competition, streamline your internal and candidate-facing hiring processes.

Internal

Before you move candidates through your hiring pipeline, set clear internal standards for application review, screening, interviewing, job offers, communication with candidates and among hiring managers, time to hire, and onboarding. Document these standards and review them for leaders, recruiters, and hiring managers.

Candidate-facing

Polish your candidate-facing path too: Set clear expectations for job qualifications and core competencies, application requirements and interview expectations, steps in the hiring process, time to hire, job offers, and onboarding.

This path isn’t just for internal use. Show it to candidates too so they know what to expect from your recruiting process. Where possible, provide guidance on how they can prepare and succeed in an interview.

Recruiting tip

Tell candidates specifically what you want to see on applications and in job interviews. Want them to come prepared to answer behavioral interview questions? Will you quiz them on health and safety protocols? Will they field questions from a panel of interviewers? Let them know exactly what to expect.

Want to know what this looks like? Check out tech company Square’s careers page to see how they describe their interview process.

2. Build an active recruiting strategy

Speaking of time, home care agencies will jockey to be the first to recruit the best caregivers.

Passive recruiting on job boards will give you no edge in the job market this year. Post-and-pray is over. If you want to attract the best caregivers, you’ll have to get them. This might mean advertising open positions on social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok, contacting ideal candidates on LinkedIn, actively participating in community job fairs, or contacting previous job candidates to loop them back into your pipeline.

Even if your prospects don’t bite right away, just by reaching out and putting your company's best foot forward, you’ve added future candidates to your talent pool. These are caregivers you can contact again in the future—or they may be the ones who come back to you, actively looking to make a change.

3. Commit to improving your company culture and showing candidates your work

One of the most important things on job seekers’ minds this year is company culture. Workers are tired of being overwhelmed, tired of inflexible schedules, workplace discrimination, low pay, lack of benefits, and weak leadership.

In 2022, recruiters should be prepared to demonstrate (in other words, show, don’t tell) a healthy and inclusive company culture. This should include:

  • Employer branding materials that feature the voices of current employees talking frankly about their experience with your agency
  • Reports about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) work that include: goals for your programs and the strategy for achieving them, metrics you’re gathering to measure your progress, updates on progress, and the voices of people in your organization who belong to marginalized groups
  • Detailed information about pay (yep, right there in the job description), benefits, schedules, and other employee perks
  • Core values and concrete plans for living up to these values

Does your home care agency need help with recruiting?

Staying on top of recruiting and recruiting trends can be a challenge. The experts at Home Care Marketing Pros can lend a hand! We use a variety of methods to boost your agency's online visibility and reach more potential caregivers. Contact us today to get started!

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