Healthcare recruiting: how to hire RNs, CNAs and caregivers without relying on job boards
Healthcare recruiting works best where caregivers and clinical staff actually spend their time — social media, not job boards. Paid job ads on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok reach people who aren't actively searching, then qualify them on license, certification, shift availability and travel radius before they reach your recruiter.
Across our 2025–2026 campaigns, that runs $4 to $16 per applicant depending on the role.
Based on Boostpoint-managed healthcare campaigns · 2026
Cost per applicant by credential
The narrower the credential, the smaller the qualified population — and the more you pay to find one.
Blended across all roles: $11.54 · Median campaign: $8.73
Your problem is the first 100 days
Every article about healthcare staffing opens with the shortage. Home health and personal care aides are now the largest single occupation in the United States at roughly 4.3 million workers, and the full direct care workforce reaches about 5.4 million.
Demand keeps outrunning supply — 59% of home care agencies report running with insufficient staffing, and roughly one in four clients who need home care are turned away.
But look at where the losses actually happen.
Median caregiver turnover was about 75% in 2024 — an improvement from a recent peak near 79%, and still brutal. In skilled nursing, CNA turnover ran 42.3% in the most recent AHCA report, the highest of any position they track, while nursing staff turnover across facilities has been measured above 50%.
Nearly four out of five caregivers who leave do so within their first 100 days.
That pattern tells you something specific. This is not purely a supply problem. Agencies and facilities are hiring people — they're losing them almost immediately, and every departure costs an estimated $2,600 to $5,000 in recruitment and training.
Which reframes what recruiting has to do:
Enough flow to outpace churn
Backfilling continuous turnover without a permanent vacancy takes steady volume, not a burst.
Matched to shift and radius
Mismatched hires are the ones who leave in week three. Screen for the schedule before the interview.
Speed at first contact
A caregiver applying today takes the first agency that calls back. Not the best one — the first one.
All three are reach-and-qualification problems. That's what this page is about.
Why job boards underperform for healthcare hiring
Job boards run on search intent. Someone decides they want a new job, opens Indeed, types "caregiver" or "CNA," and scrolls. Your posting competes with every other agency and facility hiring the same role in the same radius.
The searching pool is small and heavily contested
In any given week, the number of CNAs actively searching in your service area is a fixed, small number — and every competitor is bidding on them.
When you need to hire faster, your cost per applicant rises with the auction rather than your reach expanding.
Most qualified caregivers aren't searching
A CNA working days at a facility twenty minutes away isn't refreshing a careers page. She might move for a better shift, a shorter drive, or a dollar more an hour — but she'll never see your posting, because she isn't looking for it.
In a workforce where 36% of direct care workers live in or near poverty, small improvements in pay and schedule move people. They just have to hear about it.
The people you want are reachable. They just aren't reachable through a search box.
Applicants arrive unscreened on the things that matter
You learn someone applied. You don't learn whether they hold an active CNA certificate, whether they can work overnights or weekends, whether they drive, or how far they'll travel.
Your scheduler finds that out on a phone call — and shift mismatch is one of the biggest drivers of early attrition.
What healthcare recruiting actually costs, by role
Almost nobody in this industry publishes advertising cost by role, so here is ours.
Across 478 Boostpoint-managed healthcare campaigns run between January 2025 and mid-2026:
| Role | Cost per applicant |
|---|---|
| Caregiver / Home Health Aide | $3.47 |
| CNA / Nurse Aide | $6.82 |
| LPN / LVN | $12.14 |
| RN / Nurse | $15.93 |
| Therapy (PT / OT / SLP) | $53.18 |
Cost scales with the credential. A caregiver costs roughly one-fifth what an RN costs to reach, and therapy roles run more than fifteen times a caregiver. That isn't a platform quirk — it reflects how many people in a given radius hold each credential. The smaller the qualified population, the more you pay to find one.
Two caveats. The CNA and therapy figures rest on smaller samples than the others, so treat them as directional. And these are advertising costs only — they don't include recruiter time, screening, credential verification, or onboarding.
Overall distribution
| Metric | All healthcare campaigns |
|---|---|
| Blended cost per applicant | $11.54 |
| Median campaign | $8.73 |
| Typical range (25th–75th percentile) | $4–$14 |
| Click-through rate | 1.27% |
| Cost per click | $1.21 |
| Click-to-application rate | 10.5% |
Put that next to what turnover costs you
This is the comparison worth sitting with.
Industry estimates put the cost of losing a single caregiver at $2,600 to $5,000 in recruitment and training. Our blended cost to generate a caregiver applicant is $3.47.
Even at a conservative applicant-to-hire ratio, the advertising cost of replacing a caregiver is a rounding error against the cost of the departure itself.
For most agencies the binding constraint isn't ad budget. It's whether enough qualified people ever see the role, and how fast someone follows up when they do.
Advertising cost per hire, by role
Pick the role you're filling and set your own applicant-to-hire rate. The presets use our real cost per applicant for each credential.
Our observed role costs ran $3.47 to $53.18. Blended average across all roles: $11.54.
Use your own number. This varies more between agencies than anything else on this page.
Advertising cost per hire
$35
$3.47 per applicant ÷ 10% applicant-to-hire rate
Estimate only, for illustrating the relationship between the three inputs. It covers advertising — not recruiter time, screening, credential verification, or onboarding. The turnover comparison uses $3,800, the midpoint of commonly cited $2,600–$5,000 estimates for the cost of losing one caregiver.
Want these numbers for your own roles?We'll pull comparable cost per applicant for the roles, shifts and service areas you're hiring for — before you commit to anything.
Book a 20-minute callWho actually applies to healthcare job ads on social media
A common objection is that social advertising reaches teenagers rather than experienced clinical staff. Our data says otherwise.
Just over half of applicants were aged 45 to 64 — the core of the experienced direct care workforce — and they were the least expensive applicants we acquired.
Applicants vs. impressions by age band
The multiplier is the conversion index — share of applicants divided by share of impressions. Above 1.0× means that age band produced more applicants than its exposure would predict.
Applicants aged 18 to 24 made up 3.3% of applications, at a higher cost than any group except 25–34. The 45–54 and 55–64 bands both converted well above their share of impressions, and cost the least.
Two things make this worth noting.
We didn't select for it
Employment ads in the United States run under Meta's Special Ad Category, which removes age targeting entirely. Nobody can target by age. This is organic response — who chose to engage, not who we selected.
It mirrors the workforce
Direct care skews toward mid-career and older workers, and the applicant pool reflects that rather than skewing away from it.
79.8% of applicants were women, and they cost less per applicant than men — $11.15 versus $13.03. That also tracks the actual composition of the direct care workforce.
How social healthcare recruiting works
The role becomes an ad, not a listing
A job posting is a document. An ad is creative built to stop a scroll. For direct care roles it leads with the three things applicants screen on first: pay, shift, and travel distance. Certifications and duties come after.
Creative also has to be refreshed before it fatigues. One ad running unchanged for months is the most common reason self-managed campaigns look promising for three weeks and then flatten.
Geography down to the service area
Campaigns can run tight around a single facility or branch, across a multi-county service area, or statewide for travel and per-diem roles. Reach doesn't depend on how many people happen to be searching in that geography, so expanding or contracting the footprint is a setting change rather than a supply problem.
Qualification happens at the application, not the audience
This is where most people misread how these campaigns work.
Special Ad Category removes detailed audience targeting for employment ads to prevent discrimination in hiring. Every advertiser operates under the same rules. You cannot build an audience of "CNAs with two years of experience who can work nights."
What you can do is qualify at the point of application. Someone who taps the ad answers a short set of knockout questions in under a minute:
Knockout questions, answered before a scheduler is involved
- Certification or license held, and whether it's active
- Shift availability — days, evenings, overnights, weekends
- Reliable transportation and how far they'll travel
- Years of experience in the setting
- Any state-specific requirements
Applicants who don't meet your minimums screen themselves out before reaching a scheduler. Across our campaigns, 10.5% of people who clicked went on to complete an application — a rate that only holds when the form is short enough to finish on a phone.
Follow-up in minutes, not days
Caregivers apply to several agencies in one sitting. The agency that responds in five minutes beats the one that calls back in two days, almost regardless of the offer. Automated SMS goes out the moment an application lands.
In a workforce where four in five departures happen inside 100 days, speed at the front of the process matters as much as anything after it.
Who does what
Worth being explicit, because this is the question agencies ask us first.
Boostpoint runs
- Ad creative built for direct care roles, including short-form video
- Campaign setup, budget pacing and service-area geography
- The knockout questions on your application
- Creative refresh before performance fatigues
- Automated SMS the moment an application lands
- Delivery of applicants into your ATS
Your team runs
- The offer — pay rate, shift, benefits
- Your screening minimums and what disqualifies someone
- Calling applicants, fast
- Credential verification and background checks
- Interviews, orientation and onboarding
We don't place caregivers and we don't charge per hire. This is a media cost with campaign management on top of it.
Where this works best
Three situations where the gap between social advertising and job boards is widest.
High-volume, continuous hiring
If caregiver turnover means you're backfilling every month, you need steady flow rather than a posting that produces a burst and goes quiet. Campaign spend scales with the requisition load.
Hard shifts
Overnights, weekends and split shifts are the roles job boards struggle with most, because the small pool of active searchers self-selects toward convenient schedules. Reaching people who weren't looking widens the pool for exactly the shifts that stay open longest.
Thin or spread-out service areas
Where a job board has few active searchers, media is cheap and you can reach nearly the whole eligible population repeatedly. Cost per applicant runs higher, but a more expensive applicant who exists beats no applicant at all.
When this isn't the right approach
It doesn't work everywhere, and it's cheaper for both of us to say so up front.
Highly specialized clinical roles
Nurse practitioners, specialized therapists and senior clinical leadership are better served by search firms and referral networks. The qualified population is too small for a broad-reach channel — our therapy campaigns show what happens as the credential narrows.
A single opening
The economics work best at volume. For one role, your referral program and a job board posting are usually enough.
When pay is the actual problem
If your rate is meaningfully below market for the role and region, advertising surfaces that faster and more expensively. Fix the offer first.
If you can't respond same-day
Social produces applicants in volume and they go cold fast. Without a scheduler working them quickly, you'll pay for candidates you never reach.
Before you spend a dollar
Whoever runs your campaigns, these five things determine whether the money works. Get them settled first.
- Your rate is competitive for the role and region Advertising surfaces a weak offer faster, not slower. Check yours against what agencies in your service area are posting before you spend.
- A scheduler can call applicants the same day Ideally within minutes. Name the person before launch, not after the first batch arrives.
- You know your actual knockout criteria Certification, shift availability, transportation, travel radius, state requirements. Write down what disqualifies someone — that list becomes the application.
- Applicants have somewhere to land An ATS, or at minimum a list one person owns. Candidates that arrive nowhere get worked by nobody.
- You can leave it running three weeks The first two are a learning period while the platform calibrates. Judging on ten days of data leads to the wrong call.
What to measure
If you run this — with us or anyone else — track these four and ignore everything else at first.
-
Cost per qualified applicant, by role
A caregiver and an RN are different economics — a blended number hides both.
-
Applicant-to-hire rate
This tells you whether your screening questions are set correctly.
-
Time to first contact
Measured in minutes. Usually the single biggest lever available.
-
90-day retention by source
The number almost nobody tracks, and the one that reveals whether you're hiring people who actually fit the shift.
Frequently asked questions
How much does it cost to recruit a caregiver?
Across our 2025–2026 campaigns, caregiver and home health aide applicants cost $3.47 each on average. CNAs ran $6.82, LPNs $12.14, and RNs $15.93. Cost scales with the credential because the qualified population in any radius gets smaller as requirements rise.
How much does it cost to recruit an RN?
RN applicants averaged $15.93 across our campaigns — roughly four to five times a caregiver applicant. Nurse practitioners and specialized clinical roles cost considerably more and are usually better served by search firms than by broad-reach advertising.
Does Facebook actually work for hiring CNAs and caregivers?
Yes, for a specific reason: direct care workers use social media, and they don't use job boards unless they've already decided to look. Social advertising reaches people who aren't actively searching, which is most of the qualified population at any given moment.
Doesn't social media only reach young applicants?
No. In our data, just over half of applicants were aged 45 to 64, and they cost less per applicant than any younger group. Applicants 18 to 24 made up just 3.3% of applications. Employment ads can't target by age, so this is organic response that mirrors the actual direct care workforce.
How do you screen for certification and shift availability in a social media ad?
Screening happens in the application, not the ad targeting. Applicants answer knockout questions on certification, shift availability, transportation and travel radius before submitting. Employment ads can't use detailed audience targeting under Meta's Special Ad Category rules, so qualification is built into the form.
Will this help with our turnover problem?
Indirectly, and more than you'd expect. Nearly four in five caregivers who leave do so within the first 100 days, and shift or travel mismatch is a major driver. Screening for shift availability and travel radius up front means the people you hire are ones the schedule actually fits.
Does this replace job boards?
Usually not. Most agencies run both — job boards capture active searchers, social reaches the larger population that isn't looking. Where social tends to replace spend is agency and temp staffing fees, which cost far more per hire.
How long before we see applicants?
Campaigns typically produce applicants within days of launch, though the first two weeks are a learning period while the platform calibrates. Judging performance on fewer than three weeks of data usually leads to the wrong conclusion.
See what this looks like for your roles
Book a 20-minute call and we'll walk through cost per applicant for the roles, shifts and service areas you're hiring for.
Book a free demoMethodology. Cost figures on this page come from 478 Boostpoint-managed healthcare campaigns, January 2025 through mid-2026. Figures are what advertisers paid, inclusive of campaign management, and cover advertising only. Role-level figures are drawn from campaigns where the role was identifiable. This is a sample of Boostpoint campaigns, not an industry-wide study.