How are you handling caregiver no-shows in week-of scheduling? My fill rate dropped 12% in Q1 and I can't pinpoint why
Curious how other agency owners and schedulers are handling this. Running a non-medical home care agency (around 60 active caregivers, 110 clients) and our same-week shift fill rate has been sliding since January. Was sitting comfortably at 94%, now we're hovering at 82%.
I've ruled out the obvious stuff — pay rates haven't changed, we haven't lost a major referral source, client volume is steady. What I'm seeing is more last-minute call-offs (under 4 hours notice) and fewer caregivers picking up open shifts when we broadcast them.
Things I've tried so far:
- Switched from group SMS broadcasts to a tiered system (top performers get first crack at shifts)
- Added a small bonus for picking up shifts with under 24 hours notice
- Cleaned up our caregiver availability data — turns out about 15% of stated availability was stale by 3+ months
The bonus helped slightly but it's eating into margin. The tiered broadcast actually made things worse because B-tier caregivers felt deprioritized and started disengaging.
A few things I'm wondering:
- Is anyone tracking a "shift acceptance rate" by caregiver as a leading indicator? Mine is sitting at 31% and I have nothing to benchmark against.
- For agencies using GPS clock-in, are you seeing patterns in late punches that predict no-shows? Feels like there's signal there but I'm not sure how to extract it.
- Has anyone tried a "shift trade marketplace" model where caregivers swap among themselves? Worried about compliance but interested in lowering coordinator workload.
What's working for you? Specifically interested in agencies in the 50-150 caregiver range — feels like we're past the spreadsheet stage but not quite at the enterprise-platform stage.