Up to now, this guide has kept caregiver applicants out: out of the conversion count, out of the keyword lists, out of Performance Max and away from Demand Gen videos. That's because they were in the wrong campaign. In their own campaign, they're the most important people an agency can reach.
A home care agency sells hours of care. Without caregivers to fill those hours, a family's call turns into a waiting list, and a waiting list turns into a family who calls the next agency. This chapter builds the recruiting campaign that keeps the schedule full: cheaper clicks, stricter targeting rules, its own goal and budget, and ads that lead with the one thing applicants care about most.
Three in Four Caregivers Leave Within a Year, So Recruiting Never Stops
Most businesses hire when someone leaves. Home care agencies hire all the time, because people leave all the time. An industry study of home care agencies put caregiver churn at 75.5% in 2025: for every four caregivers on the payroll at the start of the year, three were gone by the end.
The same study split churn by pay, and the gap is wide. Among caregivers paid $15 to $17.99 an hour, 84.4% left within the year. Among those paid $18 to $19.99, 53.0% did. A couple of dollars an hour separated an agency that replaces most of its staff every year from one that keeps half of them.
Demand isn't slowing either. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects about 760,500 openings a year for home health and personal care aides through 2035, with a median wage of $35,800 a year in May 2025. Every agency in your market is fishing in the same pond, all year.
That's the case for treating recruiting as a standing campaign rather than an emergency. An agency that only advertises jobs when the schedule is already short is always hiring late.
A Job Seeker's Click Costs a Fraction of a Family's in Our Example Market
The good news is price. In our example market, Chicago, Keyword Planner puts the top-of-page cost of a click on "caregiver jobs near me" at $0.60 to $2.99. "Home health aide jobs" runs $0.76 to $3.28. "Cna jobs near me," with 6,600 searches a month in the metro area, runs $0.44 to $4.23. A family's click on "in home care" runs $4.20 to $16.20.
Agencies have noticed. Of the 508 ad creatives we pulled from Google's Ads Transparency Center for home care and home health advertisers, 67 were hiring ads, from national chains like Bayada and Enhabit to single-office agencies. Where those ads send people matters as much as what they say: a job ad that lands on a page built for families is how applications end up in the client pipeline Chapter 1 worked so hard to keep clean.
Cheap clicks can still add up to an expensive hire, though. An applicant who never finishes the form, fails the background check or quits in the second week costs the click and the onboarding. That's why this campaign needs its own goal, covered below, and a way to count hires rather than clicks.
Google Bans Age, Gender and ZIP Targeting on Job Ads in the US
Job ads come with rules client ads don't have. Google's policy on employment in personalized advertising applies in the United States and Canada, and for ads offering jobs it bars targeting by:
- gender
- age
- parental status
- marital status
- ZIP code
What's allowed is simpler: Google's predefined audiences without those demographics, and locations by city, country or a radius of at least 1 kilometer, a little over half a mile, around a point.
This matters for how the account is built. Chapter 9 drew the client service area from the counties and ZIP codes you staff. That ZIP list can't be reused for recruiting. Draw a radius instead, around each office or around the neighborhoods where your current caregivers live, and size it by how far someone will realistically drive or ride a bus for a four-hour shift.
The rule is also a reason the recruiting campaign has to be separate. A client campaign with ZIP targeting that starts running job ads is breaking the policy, and the fix is the same structure this guide has used all along: one campaign per job.
Give Recruiting Its Own Campaign, Budget and Conversion Goal
Chapter 1 set up the job application as a conversion the client campaigns don't count. The recruiting campaign flips that. Google's campaign-specific conversion goals let one campaign optimize toward a different action than the rest of the account, so the recruiting campaign can count completed applications while every client campaign keeps counting care requests.
Build it like this:
- Its own campaign and budget, so a busy hiring month never takes money from families searching for care, and the reverse.
- Its own conversion goal: a completed application, not a click on the careers page. If your applicant system can report hires back, import them too and let the campaign learn from those.
- Its own keywords: the job searches Chapter 5 pulled out of the client campaigns, such as "caregiver jobs near me," "home health aide jobs," "companion caregiver jobs" and "cna jobs near me."
- Negatives that point the other way: the client campaigns block job searches (Chapter 5), and the recruiting campaign blocks client searches, such as "cost," "for my mom," "agency near me" and "hire a caregiver."
- Its own landing page: the careers page, never a client page. Chapter 10 kept Performance Max off the careers page; this campaign is the one that should send people there.
Set the budget from hires, not from a round number. Start with how many caregivers you need to add each month, then track how many applications it takes to get one hire. After a month or two, your own cost per application and hire rate tell you what a new caregiver costs to recruit through Google, and whether the budget matches the schedule.
Lead the Job Ad With Pay, Because Pay Decides Who Stays
Families read an ad for trust. Caregivers read it for pay. The churn numbers say they're right to: pay is the difference between keeping half your staff and keeping one in six.
The better recruiting ads we pulled lead with it. Custom Home Care's reads "We're Hiring Caregivers - Now Hiring in Chicago," then "Caregivers Receive a Living Wage, Paid Sick, & a No-Cost Financial Advisor." Home Care Powered by AUAF runs an image ad that says "Get Paid to be a Caregiver" with "$21/Hr" in large type. Help at Home's hiring ads in other states offer "Weekly, overtime-holiday pay" and a hiring bonus. Those ads answer the first question a caregiver has before they click.
State law may require the pay anyway. In Illinois, since January 1, 2025, employers with 15 or more employees must include the pay scale and benefits in any specific job posting for work in the state. The law doesn't say whether a search ad is itself a "posting," so our reading is cautious: the job page your ad links to must carry the pay scale and benefits, and the pay in the ad should match it. Other states have their own pay transparency laws, so check yours before you write the ad. (This isn't legal advice.)
Beyond pay, write for what makes caregivers stay: consistent hours, a regular client, paid training, a scheduler who answers the phone. Those are the recruiting version of the family-review headlines in Chapter 8.
Make the Application Short Enough to Finish on a Phone
Most caregivers search for jobs on a phone, often between shifts or on a break, and the click is only the first step. An application that asks for a full work history, three references and a resume upload before anyone has spoken to the applicant loses most of the people the ad paid to reach. Google counts the click either way; the agency only gets the applicant who finishes.
Keep the first step short: name, phone, the area they can work in, the shifts they want, and whether they have a certification such as CNA or home health aide. Call them back the same day. Collect the rest at the interview. If you need caregivers who speak a second language your families ask for, say so on the careers page and in the ad, because Chapter 9's point about languages cuts both ways: bilingual caregivers are some of the hardest people to find and the ones families ask for by name.
Then measure the step that matters. An application that turns into an interview is a better conversion to optimize toward than one that only fills in a form, and a hire is better still. Import whichever of those your applicant system can report.
Mark Up Every Job Page So Google Lists It for Free
Paid ads aren't the only way into Google's results for job seekers. Google runs a job search experience of its own, and job pages can appear in it at no cost if they carry JobPosting structured data, a small block of code that describes the opening in a format Google reads.
Google lists five required properties: the date posted, a description, the hiring organization, the job location and the title. It recommends several more, and for home care two matter most: the base salary, so the pay shows in Google's listing, and the employment type, so a caregiver looking for part-time work can find you. Ask your web developer or careers software provider whether your job pages already include it. Many applicant systems add it automatically, and many small agency sites that post jobs as plain pages don't.
Keep the three versions of the pay consistent: the job page, the structured data and the ad. A caregiver who clicks "$21/hr" and finds $19 on the page won't finish the application, and in Illinois the page is the version the law reads.
Next: Private Pay, Medicaid and Medicare Clients Search Differently. Give Each Its Own Campaign.
With recruiting in its own campaign, the client side of the account can do what the last chapter sets up: a separate campaign for each way families pay, each with its own keywords, pages and cost per lead. Chapter 15 puts private pay, Medicaid and Medicare home health side by side and brings the guide together.
If you're starting here, Chapter 1 keeps applications out of the client conversion count, Chapter 5 builds the job-search list, and Chapter 10 keeps Performance Max away from the careers page. The guide home lists all fifteen chapters.
Under our Google Ads management, a home care account runs recruiting in its own campaign from the first month, because the client campaigns only work if there's a caregiver to send.
