Is your job posting for a home health nurse attracting a lot of clicks, but applicants are quickly leaving the page? Turn those opens into candidates. In this article, we will go over best practices, and how to keep nurses flowing into your patient’s houses.

What’s in it for you?

 Creating quality job postings can affect several parts of your business, including:

• Staffing
• Patient satisfaction
• Employee satisfaction and retention
• Overtime management

In the next section, we will go over effective, best practices to make sure that your job postings are seen.

Crafting the perfect job posting for nurses

 Nurses are a necessary part of the healthcare workforce, and after enduring COVID-19, they are known as and should be forever known as healthcare heroes. Bearing that in mind, it is important to know who you are targeting for jobs, to use that as a template for your job postings.

Create a target nurse applicant template that reflects nurses that you are looking to hire.

This means asking questions like:

• What are the problems that nurses have?
• Why are they leaving their jobs?
• What are they looking for in their next position?
• Who are they – demographically?
• Where do they live?

Then you can start building the structure of your posting. Here are some pieces of information to guide you in the right direction to build a solid job posting:

• On average, according to LinkedIn, applicants will spend 14 seconds looking at a job posting before deciding that it isn’t for them
• Make sure that the posting can be skimmed quickly and easily, short concise headings help applicants navigate through critical information
• This is your elevator pitch’s elevator pitch. Treat your job posting as an advertisement for your agency, and an opportunity to sell your company to a prospective employee.

How do you take this information and put it into practice?

Know what nurses want and put that into your job posting. 2020 was the year of the nurse, what are you going to do in 2021 to get stellar nurses? Here are some critical points to touch on:

• Working as a team – A collaborative environment is helpful
• A consistent, healthy schedule – Your nurses need to know that they will be scheduled according to their availability and skillset
• What is the tone of your business? Make it professional and put together, if you are in need of an urgent hire, don’t let that bleed into your post

The anatomy of a caregiver job posting

 Now that you have figured out what your candidates want and need, put it in a job posting format that will reel the candidates to you. The parts of a job posting include:

• Job title
• Headline
• What you are looking for
• A brief description of your company
• Responsibilities
• SALARY/PAY

Job Title: This is an opportunity for you to be creative while remaining professional.

“Home Health Registered Nurse” or “Home Health RN” rank highly in Google and other popular search engines, and are very succinct, to the point.

Headline: This is your opportunity to be creative and innovative.

“Are you ready for an opportunity to work with patients in their own homes? This is your chance to sharpen and grow your skills while getting to know our patients, who appreciate the knowledge and skills that you bring to the table.”

You could also explain the benefits of working in patient’s homes, as opposed to larger group settings like hospitals and long-term care communities. Sell them on your agency!

What you are looking for: This is an opportunity to summarize the candidate that you are looking for, and listing traits that would be good for your patients. Maybe you could keep some patients in need of a new nurse in mind while thinking of adjectives:

• Does X patient need a nurse that is… familiar with Hoyer lift transfers or dementia care?
• Does Patient Y need a nurse that can… be talkative or goes about their tasks?

This is the chance for you to customize the bullet points to your current staffing needs and challenges. This will help to attract nurses to add to your team, where your current roster is unable.

A brief description of your company: This is your chance to highlight what your home health agency does well, and perhaps, where this new nurse could make an impact.

“At John Doe Home Health, we have attained X and Y awards for 2020, and for 2021, we are looking to expand our offerings in pain management which will fill a needed gap in care for our patients…”

This will help guide your nurses in the right direction and see that they would make a direct impact – not only on the lives of their patients but in the agency as a whole.

Responsibilities: This is your opportunity to be transparent and honest about what the nurse’s role will look like. An important element is a parallelism, between what the nurse’s job description looks like from the job posting, and what it looks like on paper when they are signing an offer letter. These need to match. If they are going to be doing a wide range of things, outline those.

Salary/Pay: Please be sure to add a salary or pay range. It is important when applicants are looking for jobs, that their next opportunity fits in their budget, and advances with their career. Nurses have only gained experience over time and need to make sure that your agency offers them all that they need, in terms of a position and finances.

What not to do & what to say instead…

 Now that we have covered the anatomy of a job posting for a home health nurse, and how to craft the post, here are some things that you should avoid:

• High sign-on bonuses – There is a nursing shortage, however, these more often than not, scare of applicants because of the longevity of payout, other unknowns, and it is indicative of staffing difficulties.
• Small business is a turn-off word in a job search – If your business is smaller, say something more along the lines of “a growing company anxious to help more patients with your expertise” and craft the messaging around your prospective applicants. Reassuring your applicants that they will always have work for themis a helpful aspect of the job posting.
• Rushing the hiring process – Encourage candidates to give a 2-week notice to their current employers, and make time for proper onboarding, hiring, and training sessions. Take the time to call references and properly vet applicants. Letting the process take a normal pace will help to not overwhelm applicants, potentially making them feel rushed and pressured.

Perks You should mention

• Opportunities for growth – Do you have a path for nurses that start with your company?
• What makes your agency different? List your differentiators that are more specific to nurses, but if there is a special program that you offer patients, or notable awards, etc… capitalize on those!
• Benefits – Make sure that your nurses feel that they will be supported in other aspects of their life
• Culture – If your place is a great place to work, don’t just say that, show them why. Did you put a nurse through nursing school? Do you have a heartwarming nurse and patient story? Share your culture and let nurses figure out how they fit into your culture. This is an important part of any company, and yours could be the reason that a nurse leaves their current position and comes to work with your home health agency.

Putting it all together

Did you learn something new from this article? We went over best practices and effective ways to draw nurses into your home health agency, including creating a persona, making sure that you are using the right structure for a job posting, and some things to avoid. Are there other strategies that have worked for you? Let us know.

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