What comes first

Eggs and chickens’ order of existence often come up during start-up when discussing timings of recruiting care professionals and advertising for clients.

It’s an impossible circle, no? Well, no. Here’s two things we’ve learned over the years:

• It takes much longer to recruit and onboard the right care professionals than onboarding a client, from initial contact to starting work.
• It takes much longer for marketing activity to have an effect in generating leads compared to recruitment activity.

This means you need to make sure you’re doing two things:

• Start recruiting before leads start coming in – if you wait, it’ll be too late. The worst case scenario is spending time and money to get leads in to tell them ‘no’.
• Do both in parallel. Marketing activity is a slower burn and less predictable in outcome, but when enquiries do come in, they generally want to move quickly.

Important note: Care Professionals are not a homogenous group – there are subgroups in there that will be less sensitive to not having lots and lots of hours from day one. They are the ones you need to target in the early days.

More on that in future posts I’m sure.

Best wishes, Ben.