What 110,000+ Caregiver Applicants are Telling Us (Jen Waldron)

From 110,713 caregiver applicants, 76% of those hired live less than 20 miles from the center of an agency’s service area. Location, hours, and pay are a few of the most important things applicants care about according to Jen Waldron, Co-Founder of Augusta. Every quarter, Augusta publishes the Recruitment Benchmark Report that details top recruitment channels, interview preferences, time-to-hire stats, previous caregiving experience, and top benefits applicants are looking for. Jen shares data and insights she’s gleaned having seen nearly 1 million caregiver applications over the years—the results are simple, yet staggering.

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min

Apr 14, 2026

What 110,000+ Caregiver Applicants are Telling Us (Jen Waldron)

Miriam Allred (00:11)
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Home Care Strategy Lab. I'm your host, Miriam Allred. It's great to be back with you. Today in the lab, I am joined by Jen Waldron, the co-founder of Augusta. Jen, welcome to the lab.

Jen Waldron (00:23)
Thanks so much for having me, Miriam.

Miriam Allred (00:25)
It's great to be here with you. We've been chatting over the last month or so. You guys have a lot going on and you are one of the recruiting experts in the space. And so I want to pick your brain on all things recruiting, some of the trends that you're seeing and also just some of your personal takes on what's going right and what's going wrong in recruiting. So before we jump in, why don't you introduce yourself, talk a little bit about your personal and professional background.

Jen Waldron (00:49)
Awesome. Well, first, like I said, thanks so much for having me. I'm super excited to share what we have been learning. my background is that I was a caregiver in 2009. I took the first job that I could during the great recession and it was working in a memory care community. And I did that for a couple of years and that's really kind of what made me passionate about the entire industry.

I personally pulled the double multiple times a week and saw how incredibly painful it is. Not only for me, ⁓ but the family, the older adult receiving care because the caregivers are tired and the business suffered as a result as well. So ⁓ that experience really made me passionate about this work.

and the industry because I did see frankly a lot of room for improvement in the jobs that caregivers were doing, the way the ecosystem functioned. And since then, I've basically only worked in senior care. So ⁓ from being a caregiver, I found a company that was doing online caregiver training. ⁓

and thought, wow, that would be awesome because I've just been a caregiver for the last couple of years. So I ended up kind of working my way up in that company. They ended up getting sold to Relias. And then I got a call from Helen at Care Academy and moved over there. alongside her and my now business partner, Yvan we helped grow Care Academy alongside Helen. And that was an amazing experience.

⁓ And I also got to meet Yvan. So Yvan Castilloux is my co-founder and our CEO. He was the chief technology officer at Care Academy. And he and I worked super well together and he started to branch out on his own and wanted to tackle one of the biggest issues that we saw going on in the industry, which was recruiting. People always say it's recruiting or retention. ⁓

And I think recruiting is really actually quite aligned, ⁓ directly related to retention. Yvan, I was basically an advisor to Augusta for a few months and then joined pretty quickly alongside our other co-founder, Sam Sanchez, who actually we met through a mutual customer and had his own business doing digital marketing for home care agencies to get caregiver leads. ⁓

So, and he's also still a family caregiver to his 100 year old great grandmother. ⁓ So for all of us, it's quite personal and yeah, it's all kind of come together at this point where we're now building a business, helping so far almost a million caregiver applicants apply to a job, hundreds of home care agencies hire the right caregivers. So.

It's been a journey so far.

Miriam Allred (03:56)
Yeah, great story. How often do you think about your caregiving days? Like how often do you literally replay moments, memories, challenges that you had as a caregiver?

Jen Waldron (04:06)
Yeah, there's a few experiences that I had that like, I think about them often that really shaped my interest in like staying in this industry and working at it even though it's not easy. And there's many, many challenges, but yeah, there's a couple things. Yeah. ⁓

Miriam Allred (04:25)
stick with you for better and for

worse, but it's like so memorable. Like the experiences that you had do stay with you and have shaped who you are and what you're doing and what motivates you to keep going. ⁓ One question about transitioning from like caregiver training to caregiver recruitment. Do you feel like there was a lot of parallels in those two verticals or is there a lot of overlap?

Jen Waldron (04:50)
that's a good question. There's...

They're not, there's not a ton of overlap. You would think that maybe there would be more. I mean, maybe you could say that from like a very practical perspective. Like once a caregiver is recruited, they need to be trained. Like it's a next step in the process, but I wouldn't say that like the way the businesses are structured are like really aligning recruiting and training,

Miriam Allred (05:20)
I'm just curious how much overlap you see. Like sometimes we bucket recruitment and retention together and I think training is a piece of retention primarily, but can be a part of recruitment. So I was just curious in your mind having been on both sides, like how that puzzle fits together and if it's all pretty closely aligned or you see them as different things.

Jen Waldron (05:32)
Bye.

Yeah, I mean it's all about getting the right people with the right clients or cases or roles on the team, I think. And when you do that, training hits really, really well. So I think it's almost like a precursor to getting the right training is making sure that you were kind of lined up with the right opportunity. And then the training is the support to really help you flourish in that.

Hopefully right roll.

Miriam Allred (06:05)
Yeah, good point. I want to ask a high level question before we get into like the nuances of recruiting. I want to hear your honest take on the biggest specific problem in recruiting today. Again, you have upwards of a million applications you've worked with thousands of agencies over the course of your career, like you've seen a lot and been through a lot. I'm curious if you had to kind of like

Put your finger on the biggest recruiting issue in this industry. what would you say that it boils down to?

Jen Waldron (06:35)
The biggest issue is that recruiting is treated basically as its own entity. It's siloed from the rest of the business. Literally recruiters are measured on hires or how many people to show up to orientation while a scheduler or a care coordinator is measured on how many open shifts there are. And that's where they're the

⁓ stresses on their role is to make sure that those open shifts are filled. The marketing and sales team are basically encouraged to get any referral that they can. And they're qualifying based on, acuity of care, but not the types of factors that are going to make a difference in terms of whether or not you can actually staff that shift. So it's basically the biggest problem is that the

organization isn't exactly aligned around hiring the right caregivers for the cases that are actually open right now and the clients that you'll have in the near term. It's like each part of the company has its own individual goal. In theory, they're all logical. It all makes sense, but it doesn't actually meet the end goal of getting the right people.

to staff the cases that you have now and will have in the near term.

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