Indeed Ads: How Much Should Home Care Businesses Be Spending? With Special Guest Rachel Gartner

Using Indeed to get caregivers?

Most agencies are and it is one of the top sources, but it can get costly. On today's episode, we welcome caregiver recruiting expert and owner of Carework Rachel Gartner.

Let’s talk about Indeed.

As we’ve discussed in our previous posts, Indeed is such an amazing resource to use to get applicants for your business.

However, you may be asking how much money you should be spending to get your desired results.

In this post, Rachel Gartner, a caregiver recruiting expert from Carework will give us her insights to answer that.

So, let's dive in.

How Much Should Home Care Business Owners Be Spending on Indeed when Attracting Caregivers?

If you spend $600 a month, you're going to meet your hiring goals or whatever it is if you spend this amount per month.

You might be surprised, but there is not an answer that will work for everybody.

Keep in mind that  everybody's markets are different, as well as their appeal to applicants. In addition, the amount of applicants they need is different.

So this can really be broken down to a math problem, but it's most simple.

That is, how many applicants do you need to meet your hiring goals multiplied by your cost per applicant?

So, if you sit down and look at your numbers, you should know how many caregivers you want to hire.

How many applicants does it take you to get those number of hires? And what's your current cost per applicant?

Now, the problem for a lot of people is, when they do that it can be very startling and overwhelming of how much they would need to spend.

So then the long term strategies come into play, right?

That's the quick answer.

The long term strategy is you have to increase the amount of applicants you convert to hires and decrease your cost per applicant.

If you are working on those two areas of strategy, and if you know the numbers, then you can forecast a budget that is custom to your current hiring results to meet your hiring goals.

1. How many applicants do I need?
2. How much does each applicant cost me?

If you're working on those long-term strategies, you're spending the right amount to meet your hiring goals. This will help you keep your agency healthy while you work on decreasing the cost over time.

Hopefully for most people, they're going to want to decrease it.

Now, a couple of things can make this number really high, in certain markets.

We see this actually a lot in California.

We see this in states that have very high certification requirements, such as New Jersey.

The number is going to be higher than what they have to spend on Indeed.

But what will even it out for them is if they get really good at converting those applicants to hires.

So just remember, these two things go hand in hand:

• How many applicants does it take me to get a hire?
• What's my cost per applicant?

If you have one of those that's throwing your number off, focus on that.

And win where you can.

If you have a low cost per applicant, you can afford to be a little bit worse at converting applicants to hire.

If you live in a state where your cost per applicant is going to be really high, you have to be particularly good at getting those applicants hired in order to keep your budget.

It is crucial to remember that with Indeed, getting those applicants is only part of the story.

If we don't have this other aspect of converting them, then we're missing out on a huge part of that.

Tips on How to Get More Applicants with Indeed Ads

There's a lot of Indeed strategies when it comes to getting more applicants. And that process can get really complex.

But here are the basics that you should keep in mind:

• Run a combination of paid and free ads.

• Don't rely on one or the other.
• Refresh your ads once every 30 days per ad.

So, one of the things we like to suggest is to have a multitude of ads running and every week, refresh one or two of those ads that have hit 30 days.

Because particularly with free ads, you're going to get the best results right after you post it.

Then every week, just take one of your ads that's hit 30 days and repost it.

Finally, call an Indeed rep.

A lot of people don't know that you can call your assigned Indeed representative and ask them very specific questions.

They can help you find out what titles are performing best in the area, or what keywords are getting results.

They can sit down and look at some of the data you don't have access to and go through that with you.

At Carework, they do that strategy for their clients. Rachel stated:

“It's not uncommon for my recruiters to spend an hour or 2 hours on the phone with Indeed really digging into that data to turn around and craft custom strategies for a market.”

So, if you're not sure why your Indeed ads aren't performing, contact their representatives.

Just before you do, make sure you know how much money you're prepared to spend.

If you're converting those applicants to hires because you cannot out spend a broken recruiting pipeline, make sure you're getting a good amount of hires for the applicants.

Call Indeed and figure out how to really pump up the numbers to get more applicants in your pipeline.

At Carework, we can do all of these hard things for you. 

We can do 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 careworkus.com. We'd love to help you.