We hear it everyday. There are not enough Caregivers. I need more CNAs. I'm struggling with hiring Caregivers. What do I do? One of the first steps in our conversation is to stop and take a hard look at your requirements alongside market trends.
Every local market is unique extending unique challenges to business owners, recruiters, and executives. You could be in a rural market with low population, an urban setting with thousands of places to work, or a suburb that just opened an Amazon warehouse. Regardless of where you sit, we recommend assessing three core areas:
- How big is your current market? This represents people in your community today that are already working in the field (likely people applying to your jobs today). Sometimes, you may have a lot of people to reach in your community, but perhaps your recruitment strategies are not attracting enough volume. In some communities, there simply isn’t enough available talent that already identifies as wanting to work as a Caregiver.
- Do you have new grads you can tap into? Too many companies have a hard requirement of 1-5 years of experience in a market without enough Caregivers. This means you could be ignoring an opportunity to train a large workforce of Caregivers that are just graduating and hunting for work. Can you train Caregivers? If so, you’re likely to open your talent pool by quite a bit. (PS: CNAs can also find free CNA CEUs on myCNAjobs)
- Can you open your market to everyone else? This may seem extreme, but the best Caregivers are people with big hearts that love to care for seniors. Many people are unaware of job opportunities in home care or senior living. Do you have new mom groups, retiree groups, local churches, or a strategy to tap into teachers during the summer? So often, community education can create Caregivers in your local market. And at the end of the day, this is what we all must do to overcome the market shortage.
- Is a requirement a nice-to-have or a need-to-have?
- Can you grow your business and meet staffing demands by keeping current requirements place?
- Can you better train people in your community?
This is a big focus for us at myCNAjobs – drawing people into the profession. We invite you to join us on this journey to attract more talent into the field. And as always, good Caregiver recruitment equals using multiple recruitment strategies to recruit on a daily basis. If you haven’t yet checked out our suite of tools, we welcome you to learn more about recruiting with us.
