Meeting Your Immediate Staffing Needs

• Post your community’s jobs for free on the LeadingAge national career center with code STANDTOGETHER
• Reach non-traditional populations using these tools:
  • Displaced workers
  • Immigrants and Refugees
  • Men
  • Older Adults
  • People Looking for Second Career
  • Veterans
• Learn from your colleagues: try these practical, promising recruitment practices on recruiting refugees, internship programs, flexible scheduling, partnering with voc-rehab programs in your state, providing housing, starting new staff at an entry-level “concierge” position, providing a living wage, etc.
• Use this jobs list to promote careers in aging services
• Take these materials to a job fair
• Learn what the living wage is in your area with this calculator
• Try these simple techniques your colleagues have used to support staff during COVID
• Search recruitment, hiring, staff in the Buyer’s Guide to find companies that specialize in recruitment
• Reach out to high schools and help students fulfill community service obligations – find your state here and reach out to your local school system and offer students a chance to volunteer

Planning Ahead – Including Recruitment in Your Strategic Planning

• Learn about the 2021 Summer Enrichment program that focuses on diversity and get ready to apply for 2022.
• Gain new ideas for reaching different populations in Better Jobs Better Care: New Research on the Long-Term are Workforce on pp. 10-11.
• Learn 6 strategies for professionalizing the direct care workforce in “Feeling valued because they are valued:”, a LeadingAge vision for professionalizing the caregiving workforce in the field of long-term services and supports. This paper proposes 6 strategies for professionalizing the direct care workforce.
• Understand how a livable wage might work and read Making care work pay: How paying at least a living wage to direct care workers could benefit care recipients, care workers, and communities: This report offers a glimpse into a different world—one in which direct care workers become more valued for their work.
• Read this blog on how everyone wins when direct care workers earn a living wage.
• Create a living wage for your staff –try this community’s approach to provide a living wage one over a few years.
• Read Hiring and integrating foreign-born nurses and personal care assistants in long-term services and supports: This research snapshot looks at the foreign-born nurse and personal care workforce, including benefits, challenges, and promising strategies for recruiting and retaining them and integrating them into the organization.
• Read the LeadingAge Policy Vision: An Aging Services System for the 21st Century that is Bold, Equitable, Sustainable, and Transformative. The paper includes 6 interdependent elements to meet the needs of the aging population with steps that Congress, the Executive Branch, or the private sector could take.
• Read this 2021 Ziegler paper outlines strategies to address recruitment and retention, demographic changes, and the consequences of labor challenges.

Ongoing Work in this Area from LeadingAge

Policy/Advocacy:

• Better Care Better Jobs Act (S. 2210, H.R. 4131)
• Elder Justice Act (EJA) Reauthorization and Modernization Act (S. 2674, H.R. 4969).
• Nursing Home Workforce Support and Expansion Act of 2021: (H.R. 5094)
• Supporting Our Direct Care Workforce and Family Caregivers Act (S. 2344) and the Direct Creation, Advancement and Retention of Employment (CARE) Opportunity Act (H.R. 2999)
• Immigration: LeadingAge continues to share the International Migration of Aging and Geriatric Workers in Response to the Needs of Elders, IMAGINE Initiative. The proposal recommends the creation of several new visa classifications to address the care needs of aging services providers, which includes the following policy recommendations.
  • Enacting an “H2Age” temporary guest worker program for CNAs and home health care aides.
  • Enact “Carer Pairer,” a new authority under the J1 visa program, to include aging services workers in addition to childcare workers.
  • Expanding the EB3 visa program, designed for professional workers, to allow more direct care workers to enter the U.S. through the “other” slots, that could be used for CNAs.
  • Modify the EB3 program visas to address LTSS needs, and designate slots to LTSS nurses, and streamline the process.
  • Modify the R-1 visa program to provide religious visas to temporary workers in faith-based organizations.
• Citizenship for Essential Workers Act (S. 747, H.R. 1909)
• Workforce for an Expanding Economy Act (H.R. 4288)

Research on the Immigrant Workforce:

• With Help from Afar: The Role of Immigrant Home Health Aides in Meeting the Growing Demand for Long-Term Services and Supports: This brief describes characteristics of immigrant home health aides who are employed by Medicare- and Medicaid-certified or state-licensed home health and hospice agencies, the potential role that immigrant direct care workers could play in filling vacancies, how current and proposed U.S. immigration policy affects immigrant workers and American families, and the policy and practice implications of an expanded immigrant direct care workforce.
• A Picture Foreign-Born Workers in Long-Term Services and Supports: This research snapshot provides an overview of study findings of the prevalence, characteristics, countries of origin, and migration routes of foreign-born nurses and personal care assistants, and governmental policies that affect the ability of migrants/immigrants to work in host countries.