How Many Caregiver Applicants Do You Need To Be Successful? With Special Guest Rachel Gartner

Want to get more applicants? But how many applicants do you actually need in order to help your business grow and flourish? On today's episode, we welcome Rachel Gartner from Carework to help you determine what it looks like to be successful.

How Many Caregiver Applicants Do You Need?

When it comes to running Indeed ads or any type of ads for recruiting applicants or caregivers, it is important to know how many applicants you need to be successful.

So this number, like every data point in recruiting, varies based on the agency in the market.

One of the first things people will realize is:

“I need more applicants if I'm a larger agency and I want to hire more.”

“I need fewer applicants if I'm a smaller agency and I'm not hiring as much.”

But what they don't think about is the number of applicants it takes you to get a hire is completely different.

There are some agencies where it takes them a lot of applicants to get a single hire. They need more applicants obviously. 

Smaller agencies or agencies and really friendly recruiting markets, they can get by with fewer applicants. 

What happened over the last couple of years? The entire market has gotten more competitive. A lot of agencies were caught off guard because they are used to getting enough applicants and calling them when they can. They need a job and they come in.

However, now it all has to be done so carefully and takes a lot of time and effort.

So when you're looking at how many applicants you need, there is a number that you can figure out. 

And all you need to do is every week write down how many applicants you got and how many hires you got to figure out that percentage.

And then take that, do the math with your hiring goals, and you get the exact number of applicants that you need.

For instance, nationwide right now, the average is about 9% of applicants are completing the hiring process for the agencies that Carework is currently recruiting for.

That number might catch some of our listers off guard. You can get people pretty frequently that are like.

You may got 100 applicants last month, but only got eight or nine hires.

That number is good. You're right on average, that's pretty normal.

We get people that are getting maybe six or seven hires out of 100 applicants.

That's still within the realm of normal. 

Rachel also shared:

“I will say in August of 2021, we hit the lowest point where only 5% of applicants were getting hired.”

So if you are following the national trends in your agency, you should be seeing improvement this year versus last year.

But you won't know if you're not tracking the data. So start tracking the data, see how many applicants it takes you to get a hire.

And then it's just easy math. And it is so essential.

Make sure to understand how important it is that we are tracking these numbers when it comes to recruiting.

It's crucial that the majority of what we do at Carework, we're doing all of the day to day legwork of recruiting.

But the value is we track all these numbers, we put them in a national context, and we tell people what to do with them.

So for agencies out there that aren't sure how they're performing, start an Excel spreadsheet and track these numbers every week.

Because then any recruiting strategies you try, you have a measurable outcome.

There are a thousand different strategies you could try right now, new software, new companies and all these things.

You need to know what data point you're trying to address.

Start tracking how many applicants book interviews, how many interviews show up, how many show up to complete the hiring process, how many of those completed the first shift.

It's a pretty basic funnel, and that will tell you just how many applicants you need, but it will also tell you exactly where in the process you could improve versus the national trends.

So, from a very biased perspective, knowing these recruiting KPIs is a crucial aspect of running a home care agency.

At Carework, we can do all of these hard things for you. We can do your day-to-day of all of your recruiting legwork, manage your job ads, and track all of your data for you.

So if you're looking for an outsourced recruiting solution, we are ready for you! It's like hiring a new recruiter, but way cheaper.

You can go to www.careworkus.com, click the button that says book a call with a hiring expert. We'd love to help you.