Home Care Staffing: Overcoming Hiring & Retention in 2025

With the home care industry expected to grow even more competitive in 2025, agency owners and senior leaders are searching for ways to better scale their workforce, attract top talent, and grow their business without sacrificing their bottom line.

In this webinar we dive into the most common strategies we're hearing from home care agencies looking to accelerate their growth in 2025.

Transcript

Brian Cottone Jr.:

Good afternoon everyone. Welcome to today's webinar and thank you for joining. I will be talking today about the home care staffing crisis and how you can overcome hiring and retention headaches in the new year. My name is Brian Cottone Jr. I'm the Vice President of Sales at Vitable and I'll be guiding you through this session today. So as we all know, before we get into the agenda, the home care staffing crisis has created significant challenges for agencies across the country. From caregiver turnover to endless compliance mandates, staying competitive has never been more important and challenging. So our session today aims to tackle each of those topics and provide actionable insights to help you sustain and grow your agency with confidence.

So here's what we'll be covering today. First, attracting and retaining employees. Arguably the most important piece of your business is your people. Second, we'll be talking about navigating compliance during growth. We all know about growing pains and there's no gain without pain during growth. Third, we'll be talking about improving time to hire and onboard. Speed is the name of the game in the home care industry. And finally, we'll wrap up with a live Q & A session, time permitting. So be sure to stick around and have your questions ready to go. You can also add them into the chat throughout.

So if you haven't heard of us before, Vitable is an affordable ACA compliant health benefit program made specifically for home cares frustrated with expensive and complex insurance plans. Our founder and CEO, actually his family owned a home care company and he saw the struggle up close and personal, mainly around three things. Health insurance options for home cares are scarce, expensive and really hard to get set up. Two, many employees make too much to be eligible for Medicaid but not enough to afford traditional health insurance. And then three, the pre-employment testing during hiring hindered companies to a point, in the home care industry specifically, to a point where it affected the growth of the company. So that's how Vitable came to be. And if you're curious, Vitable is a play on the words vital and affordable.

So before we dive into this first topic of attracting and retaining top talent, we're going to do a poll. Okay, so the poll is "What is the biggest barrier to growing your agency?" Here are the choices. One, difficulty attracting and recruiting quality talent. Two, difficulty retaining quality employees. Three, slow new hire onboarding process and four, just can't afford benefits like health insurance. So we'll give about 20 to 30 seconds here to vote. I know it might be tempting to select most of these, but we're looking for one answer. Okay, so here are the poll results. Looks like the top choice was difficulty retaining quality employees. Next was can't afford benefits like health insurance - just too costly. Third was difficulty attracting and recruiting quality talent, and finally slow new hire onboarding process. So we'll touch on all of these today. Thanks to those who participated in the poll.

So let's dive into the first key topic here, attracting and retaining employees. So according to a benchmark report by Activated Insights, the average turnover rate is nearly 80% for caregivers, which is a silent but deadly hidden cost, often amounting to losses as high as $252,000 annually. That's really unattainable for a business that continues to grow. So to address this, agencies must prioritize not only offering better benefits but improved employee experience with those benefits. There's two other reports we wanted to reference here, one by OnPay and another by Paychex, an HR and payroll leader. Health insurance consistently ranks as the number one desired employee benefit, yet many agencies struggle to even find cost effective plans given how razor thin the margins are in the home care space. So quality benefits and affordability are number one and number two, in almost every case when I talk to home cares. Despite all of this supporting data, many agencies still don't offer benefits and I think we talked about some of the reasons why: hard to find, not cost effective. Less than 50% of agencies with less than 85 employees, as you see here under agency size and a major health insurance plan that's less than 50%, are offering any sort of health benefit. In comparison, other industries across the board, closer to 67% of companies in that size are offering health benefits to their hourly employees. We believe the main reason, aside from the obvious cost and fit for home care employees, is lack of innovation. And lack of innovation specifically in the home care space, which is why Vitable is here today.

So we got through attracting and retaining top talent, very, very important. Next we want to talk about navigating compliance as you continue to grow your business, this is arguably just as important as attracting and retaining top talent and you'll see why here. Poll number two: "What is your biggest challenge in offering affordable health benefits that employees actually value?" The first option would be the high cost of health benefit plans. Second would be limited options tailored to caregiver needs. Third, lack of employee interest in benefits. And finally, difficulty navigating the ACA compliance portion of offering health benefits while staying within budget. We'll give you about 15 to 20 seconds here.

Alright, let's see how we did. Looks like the high cost of health benefit plans. Number one, not a surprise. Cost is usually the biggest hindrance for companies in the home care space to get health benefit plans. Second, difficulty navigating ACA compliance while staying within budget. Third, limited options tailored to caregiver needs. And then finally, lack of employee interest and available benefits. This is what we see when we talk about what's important when it comes to offering benefits. We talk about cost, we talk about quality service and employee interest. And employee interest is always very important, but it's not the thing that's stopping home cares from offering. It's more so the cost and the fit of the benefit plan. So another reason to offer benefits as they are sought after by the job market.

Did you know compliance with ACA requirements is really critical. One in four home care agencies were audited for non-compliance with the ACA in 2023. These fines can reach up to $4,350 per employee for certain violations. Understanding how you fit into the ACA compliance is very important, such as calculating full-time equivalents, offering minimum essential coverage plans and essentially avoiding these penalties altogether should be a top priority. And we'll talk through some of these fines, how they work and the cost that potentially could fall on your shoulders. So home cares are most likely or more likely to be audited by the IRS due to a couple things. And why are home cares being singled out? Well here's why. One high count of hourly workers, two, there's high turnover rates which could affect the amount of full-time employees that a company has. It's fluctuating constantly. Third, low operating margins and four, data collection errors.

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