How to Hire the Right Caregivers 

Effective caregiver recruitment comes down to determining your home care agency needs, attracting the right candidates, and successfully identifying which of them you should hire.

We’ve published a comprehensive guide to caregiver recruitment that will walk you through this process. It breaks down how to advertise caregiver roles, evaluate candidates, and ensure a smooth onboarding. Plus, our checklist on how to quickly hire better caregivers will help you identify common recruitment errors you might be making.

But today, we’re going to take a deeper dive into one crucial area: caregiver interview questions.

What Interview Questions Should You Ask Caregivers?

We’re sharing 32 interview questions for caregivers, each one of which will help you discover critical information about candidates’ experiences, skills, working styles, and needs.

Before you begin interviewing candidates, carefully select questions from this list. Pick the questions that best align with your hiring priorities so you can get all the information you need while avoiding interviewer fatigue.

Creating a recruitment rubric (PDF) will also enable you to hire caregivers with the right skills and abilities. This means creating a scorecard for each candidate. Rubrics can help you make more objective decisions, plus they allow you to efficiently compare applicants. 

General Caregiver Interview Questions to Reveal Character and Compatibility

1. What attracts you to caregiving?

2. What are your biggest strengths?

3. What is your biggest weakness and how are you working on overcoming it?

4. What caregiving achievement are you most proud of, and why?

5. What do you think are the most important attributes of a caregiver?

6. How would previous patients and/or coworkers describe you?

Questions About Past Experience to Determine Starting Point

1. What types of patients have you previously worked with?

2. What types of care have you previously provided?

3. Have you ever worked with [type of patient] or provided [type of care]?

4. What types of care and/or patients do you feel most comfortable providing?

5. How much supervision did you receive in past jobs?

Skill-Based Questions to Assess Caregiver Role Competency

1. How do you demonstrate [specific soft skill] in your work?

2. Tell me about a time you needed to use [skill] at work.

3. Talk me through how you would [complete an important task]. 

4. What skills are you currently working on developing?

5. Have you been trained on [skill]?

6. Which skills do you think you would benefit from additional training on?

   

Hypothetical Scenarios to Test Thought Process

1. What would you do if you felt that a patient’s care plan and other documentation didn’t match their current needs?

2. Let’s say you had a particularly complex case for your first appointment of the day, which means that you’re now running late. What would you do? 

3. How would you build a relationship with a new patient who is resistant to receiving care services?

4. If your patient is lonely and tries to find ways to extend the appointment, either by engaging you in conversation or pretending to have additional needs. What do you do?

5. Let’s say that you have a patient with dementia who tells you that their relatives are abusing them. How would you handle this situation?

6. What would you do if a patient or family member refused to let you enter their home?

Questions to Help You Understand a Candidate’s Needs as an Employee 

1. What motivates you at work?

2. How do you prefer to receive feedback?

3. Describe your ideal relationship with your manager.

4. What are your long-term caregiving goals? How can this job help you achieve those?

5. Do you have any scheduling requirements or preferences?

6. What’s your ideal number of hours per week?

7. What three things do you value most at work?

8. Tell us about a time when a job wasn’t a good fit for you. Why didn’t it work out, and what did you need instead?

9. Do you have any questions for us? 

Simplifying the Process From Job Offer to First Shift 

Your home care agency relies on caregivers to deliver high-quality services, ensure compliance with state and federal laws, and grow your business. But asking the right caregiver interview questions is only the first step in adding talented new caregivers to your team.

ShiftCare’s home care software allows you to onboard new caregivers and schedule their first shift in as little as 10 minutes. Automated compliance reports will help you confirm that every home care aide has submitted all their documentation, while the caregiver app will make checking staff availability and sharing schedules easy.

Discover how much time you can save on caregiver management. Try ShiftCare for free.