Interim HealthCare Leverages Tech, Communication Tactics to Boost Hiring, Retention
The Florida-based company is a home-based care franchise that provides home health care, hospice care, palliative care, pediatric care and personal care to about 200,000 patients annually from more than 330 U.S. locations in 42 states. The company employs 43,000 professionals who provide 25 million hours of care annually.
Its parent company, Caring Brands International, also operates Bluebird Care in the United Kingdom and the Australian provider Just Better Care.
Hospice News sat down with Scott Williams, vice president of talent with Interim HealthCare to talk about the best practices the company employs to execute its recruitment and retention strategies.
What are the leading trends that are influencing the hospice workforce right now?
There’s a lot of factors that are pulling on us at this point. There’s always a battle for talent, if you will. That’s something that hasn’t been new, and it’s not specific just to hospice.
In my space, that’s where all my time is concentrated. So that’s really what I’m laser focused on is how do we win that battle for talent each and every day.
Have you seen any changes in that labor market? Has anything improved?
First and foremost, our franchise partners have achieved remarkable success in the last six months, leading to significant growth in both applicant volume and number of hires. I wouldn’t say things are getting easier, I think the success is really a direct result of their just relentless efforts in attracting and retaining top talent.
Let’s get into some of the ways they’re doing that. Can you talk about some of the strategies that Interim is using to attract staff?
We are fortunate to have almost 60 years in the industry as a whole, so we’ve got a wealth of experience within our network to draw from. Obviously, we’re using traditional channels, such as job boards, social media outlets and referral programs to reward our staff for promoting Interim HealthCare.
Our franchise partners are also partnering with universities and trade schools locally to help develop the emerging workforce. We were just ranked No. 13 among America’s health care and social service companies in Forbes America’s Best Employers for New Graduates list in 2024.
We’ve doubled down on training and development, so investing in people, developing systems and processes to improve efficiency and effectiveness.
We are optimizing job ads to maximize performance. So how do we interact on those job boards to make sure that we’re getting in front of that target audience? We’re utilizing AI and automation for programmatic job distribution, applicant screening and communication.
The primary objective really is to utilize the technology to free up our recruiters and to allow them to have more meaningful conversations to be successful. We have to engage the candidates to really understand their needs and then try to demonstrate how Interim HealthCare meets those needs.
How do you ascertain those needs? How do you gain that understanding of what those employees or prospective employees really value?
Meaningful conversations — I think some people approach an interview as one-sided, but it’s really two-sided. So there’s really two parts to the interview process. Number one, determining whether they meet our minimum requirements for hire, those who feel like they have good values, that would be a benefit to Interim HealthCare and the clients and patients we serve.
But then we also lean in and ask questions about what drives them. What are their motivators? Once we identify those, we have to then sell to them and show them how Interim meets those needs while we’re on that initial call. Turning the interview into a two-sided process is really important.
Switching gears to the retention aspect, what is Interim doing there?
Once they’re employed, and we’ve identified these needs, we show them how we’re going to meet them. We have to walk that talk. We have to express our commitment to them each and every day.
It’s never been more important to show the professionals how valued they are to us. I would say we have a number of employee recognition programs that honor nurses, CNAs, aides, physical therapists, social workers, health care, staffing employees, home care and hospice employees and veterans.
Then there are localized programs by our franchise partners to recognize the work that their employees are putting in, day in and day out.
Obviously, benefits are really important, and benefit plans vary by location. But I would say all employees enjoy flexible scheduling, competitive pay, online training, courses, tuition, discounts, growth opportunities and a positive culture where they’re valued.
How centralized are these strategies? Is Interim corporate developing some of these ideas and scaling them across the franchisees? Or are these, coming from the franchisees and moving up the chain?
It’s both. We have to provide good systems, tools and training processes, but the franchise partners run their organizations locally. They have to develop programs that are geared towards their unique population, because every population has a unique dynamic.