by Raymond Beavers, NAHCA Contributor

There are several ways for you to recruit and retain quality CNAs for NAHCA, one of the biggest ways to recruit new CNAs to join NAHCA is social media. I believe that a great CNA that shares posts, creates new posts and shares away can have a big impact on new CNAs joining NAHCA. If you really care about what you’re doing, your online presence is going to show it. Sure, there are going to negative Nancy’s, but you must figure for each one of them, there are probably 10 great quality CNAs that we can recruit. If we go in with a great positive attitude on groups, then look at the example we are setting. I would say making sure that CNAs know that they can get their CEUs directly from NAHCAs VCC is a huge plus.

Personally, if it was not for my administrator taking us to our first NAHCA conference in 2014, I would not have known NAHCA for fallen in love with the great association that Lori & Lisa worked so hard on. I believe that this is something that we can focus on as well. If we reach out to facilities and talk to the administration and let them know all the great benefits that NAHCA offers, they would be willing to sponsor their star quality CNAs. I believe having facilities recognize and sponsor certain CNAs would make the CNA feel like they are already a part of something bigger.

Retaining quality CNAs is a bit harder, but I believe that we can do it. Some sort of system for CNAs to reach out and check on each other would be great. I believe if we had a system in place that each NAHCA CNA got contact information with the five (5) closest CNAs to them, so they could meet up and find out if there is anything, they can help them with would be great. This was a huge plug for me, getting to know some of the NAHCA CNAs on a more personal level to turn to during tough situation.

In all, I think we have our work cut out with trying to retain and recruit more quality CNAs, but we’ve got this!