Kindly Care, a San Francisco, CA-based marketplace for senior care is announcing today the launch of Care Exchange, enabling home care agencies to collaborate with each other when recruiting, vetting, and training caregivers.
Historically, home care agencies competed with each other for their caregivers, but the ever increasing shortage in caregivers is necessitating a more collaborative approach. With Care Exchange, agencies are able to refer caregivers into a shared pool database for all participants to recruit. For every qualified caregiver that gets accepted into the Care Exchange, the referring agency can recruit another caregiver for free.
Over the last couple of years, there have been increasing signs of a caregiver shortage. According to AARP, there are currently seven people aged 45-64 to care for each person who is 80 or older; by 2030 there will be only four and by 2050 there will be fewer than three.
The current nature of employment in home care causes a fluctuation in work hours from week to week, with many caregivers working for more than one agency at any given time. This means that the process of recruiting, vetting, and training caregivers is repeated for the same candidates, which inflates the recruiting cost and lengthens the amount of time it takes to onboard a new employee.
Care Exchange addresses this caregiver shortage by streamlining the process of identifying potential candidates and reducing the cost of onboarding them. Since all referred caregivers are current or former employees of agencies, they already meet the licensing requirements that exist in certain states. Further, agencies are recruiting from a very distilled pool of qualified caregivers, so all candidates are reliable and experienced home care professionals.
“Kindly Care’s business is very symbiotic with agencies. Our self-serve clients often need additional help that is outside of our scope of services, and we’ve made many referrals to agencies we know and respect. Over time, it became obvious that referring caregivers to each other is the next logical step” said CEO and co-founder of Kindly Care, Igor Lebovic.
Care Exchange is currently available in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the coverage will soon expand to all cities where Kindly Care operates.
