What do a fast food restaurant manager and a factory machinist have in common? Both traded their jobs to work for a Right at Home franchise in Gainesville, GA.
Although franchise owner Pete Morrissey is somewhat of a novice in the home care industry — purchasing his franchise only two years ago — he has developed a successful formula for identifying, recruiting and retaining talent.
“I am more interested in the requisite skill set that that person brings to the opportunity and not necessarily having already done that role or a similar role,” Morrissey explained to McKnight’s Home Care Daily Pulse.
Morrissey, a West Point graduate whose own resume includes stints as a military helicopter pilot and executive positions at IBM and Pfizer, bought the Right at Home franchise 40 miles from Atlanta just two months before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. He called turnover at the 10-year-old agency “about average” when he took over the business. He quickly set out to improve it. Over the past two years, the agency has reduced turnover by 30%. This year, it will grow revenues 70%.
Focus on skill sets
Although Morrissey likes to recruit candidates with experience in nursing homes and hospitals, he also considers applicants from nontraditional industries who have transferable skill sets. For instance, a fast food manager he hired had abilities that were compatible with a scheduling position.
“As I was reading her resume, it struck me that she worked with a lot of hourly employees,” Morissey said. “It’s a fast-paced environment and, when we were talking about the role, she said she also had experience in a hospital setting, which was fantastic.”
Morrissey also hired the machinist as a caregiver because she demonstrated she was reliable and also had competencies that could easily transfer to home care.
“She had been getting up at 4:30 every day for five years. She worked the day shift and it was a lot of manual labor …. She didn’t come with the classic background of home care experience, but she had all of the attributes that we were looking for.”
Education strategy
The shortage of direct workers has reached crisis levels in the home care industry and it is poised to get worse. Elder policy nonprofit PHI National estimates the direct care workforce will need to add 7.4 million jobs in the U.S. by the end of the decade. But in a recent study, PHI researchers couldn’t identify any of the 13.7 workers who lost entry-level jobs during the pandemic taking jobs later in direct care.
Educational opportunities and advancement have been identified as barriers to recruitment and retention in the home care industry. Morrissey said accessible training is a crucial component of his recruitment and retention strategy, regardless of a worker’s experience level. He partnered with online educational platform CareAcademy for employee training, which lets all workers access Georgia-mandated training sessions through an app on their smartphones.
“Some don’t have internet or WiFi access at home, but everyone has a smartphone. So, if we can enable that training on a device that everyone carries, it would be a big win for us,” Morrissey explained.
CareAcademy Founder and CEO Helen Adeosun told McKnight’s Home Care Daily Pulse in an email that educational opportunities can be valuable weapons in the battle to recruit and retain workers. In a new CareAcademy poll, 94% of 1,500 caregivers surveyed said education was an important consideration when accepting a job offer and 85% said they would be more likely to stay with their current employer if they were able to improve their skills.
“Home care agencies must take these trends into consideration as they seek to attract new talent,” Adeosun said.
