An agency turns down three packages in a week because it has nobody to send. On the same website, the careers page is a line at the bottom of the footer saying to email a general inbox with a CV.
The business is constrained by carers and the website is built entirely for clients.
Step 1: give recruitment its own visible route
A careers section in the main navigation, not a link in the footer. People looking for work will not hunt for it, and the ones who do are already applying elsewhere.
Step 2: publish the hourly rate
Care applicants compare on rate, and an advert without one is skipped. Publishing it, including weekend and bank holiday rates, gets applications from people who would otherwise not bother.
Step 3: answer the travel question honestly
Whether travel time is paid, what mileage is paid and how tightly rounds are geographically grouped. This is the biggest complaint in domiciliary care and the most powerful thing to be honest about.
Step 4: be clear about hours
Guaranteed hours, zero hours, minimum commitment, whether shifts are split and how much notice a rota gives. Applicants have childcare and other work, and vagueness here loses them.
Step 5: say whether experience is needed
Many good carers come from retail, hospitality or family caring. Saying explicitly that experience is not required, and describing the training given, widens the field enormously.
Step 6: explain the checks plainly
Background checks, references, right to work and what the process involves. Applicants worry about old matters on a record, and explaining how these are considered keeps honest people in the process.
Step 7: publish the timeline to starting
How long from application to first shift, including training and checks. Applicants need to work soon and an open-ended process loses them to an agency that gives dates.
Step 8: reply within hours, not days
Care applicants apply to several agencies in one sitting. Capturing the application at any hour and responding first is the single biggest recruitment advantage available.
Step 9: capture what actually matters
Name, contact, where they live, whether they drive, availability by day and time, any experience and whether they have worked in care before. That is enough to know whether to call.
Step 10: describe the work honestly
Personal care, the emotional side and the reality of the round. Applicants who arrive with accurate expectations stay, and the ones who leave in week two cost more than the vacancy did.
Step 10b: publish progression honestly
Care work is often taken as a stopgap and becomes a career when someone can see where it leads. Setting out the qualifications the agency funds, the senior and coordinator roles people move into and roughly how long that takes gives an applicant a reason to choose you over an agency paying twenty pence more an hour.
Step 10c: make applying take two minutes
A long form with a CV upload loses applicants who are filling this in on a phone between shifts. Asking for a name, a number, an area and availability is enough to make a call, and the rest can be gathered by the person who rings back the same day.
Step 11: keep client enquiries separate
A family enquiring about care and a person looking for work need entirely different routes, and the family side is covered in dementia care enquiries from families and live-in care enquiries and the details agencies need.
Step 12: stop losing applications in a general inbox
The problem is described in job applications and supplier pitches clogging your inbox, and recruitment handling generally in an AI receptionist for recruitment agencies.
Getting started
Publish rates, travel terms, hours, training and the timeline, then capture applications at any hour and route them away from client enquiries. SpideyChat for care providers answers from your published pages. Try SpideyChat on your own site, or read about capture on the features page.