When is it time to hire a recruiter for my home care agency?
The most basic answer: when you're not getting caregivers hired quickly enough.
If you can't give every caregiver a call the same day as they apply, you need to hire a recruiter. If you as an agency owner are spending hours every day on Indeed or other platforms every day, a bottleneck in recruiting will become the bottleneck for your entire agency's growth.
Caregiver recruitment is a funnel; applicants drop off at every stage, from not responding to a phone call to not showing up to an interview. While recruiting is extremely important, your time as the owner is better spent with the caregivers who do show up and do get hired. Similarly, other staff members like care coordinator or schedulers are better off to spend their time with the caregivers who show up as well.
The cutoff point that my company, Carework, uses to recommend a dedicated recruiter or recruiting service is hiring (or trying to hire) 5 caregivers per month. This takes a significant amount of time. If your agency is in a stage of growth where you only need to hire 1-2 caregivers per month (and you're satisfied with that level of growth), you may be fine to handle recruiting yourself—otherwise you need to look at bringing someone on to help.
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