The Rubik’s Cube of Hiring Home Care Aides
“Where should this agency hire more caregivers?”
The Rubik’s Cube of Hiring Home Care Aides
Written by Vesa Tormanen
Tackling the task of answering the question, ‘Where should this agency hire more caregivers?’ led me to dive into our database. On the surface, the solution seemed straightforward—identify the areas where demand is the most challenging to meet and hire more caregivers there—simple!
However, the reality is far more intricate. The geographic distributions of home care clients and home care aides are distinct. In this case, the areas with the highest concentration of clients and aides are not the bottlenecks.
Hiring Home Care Aides: Our Findings
I started peeling the onion and evaluating the working patterns of caregivers in these high-demand regions and their primary residence locations. My thought was that following the existing commuting patterns would outright tell me where these hires would need to be made.
The next discovery was that caregivers were not coming in from one locale or two but a scatterplot showing a visual representation of the distribution of starting points. To make matters more complex, the scatterplots were very different for each language.
Though I was ready to make my recommendation, I decided to see how much the rest of the caregiver population in these workforce source locations (where caregivers primarily reside and commute from) worked. While many caregivers worked full-time, a significant number desired more work but could not find shifts. If I recommended hiring more caregivers in those areas, these caregivers would have an even harder time finding and securing sufficient shifts.
Where to Hire vs. Whether to Hire
Maybe the better option was to motivate them to follow other caregivers to spots where shifts were available, increase their hours, and remain in their jobs longer. So now, employment decisions shifted for hiring home care aides, from ‘where to hire’ to ‘whether to hire’.
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