Her Story
About Samantha
I've been in healthcare for about 10 years, with 2 years in my current role as a recruiting manager for Bayada Home Health, a nonprofit organization. I recruit home health aides across 14 counties in Pennsylvania, doing full cycle recruiting that includes everything from setting up interviews and checking references to creating employee files, hiring employees in our internal systems, and leading weekly orientation sessions. What I take the most pride in is bringing on family caregivers - people who have been taking care of their mother or father for years without getting paid for it. Our program allows them to be paid for that work and have a source of income while they're doing that, instead of struggling to try to make the time to take care of their mom and pay their bills. I really take a big sense of pride in that we get to keep people in their homes, they don't have to go to a nursing facility or be sent away from their family - they can be kept close and where they're comfortable. My career path started in retail, then I worked front desk at a dry cleaners while going to school, moved to an office assistant position at Susquehanna Health (now UPMC), then to an urgent care setting, and even worked as a program manager for aerospace and defense manufacturing before getting back into home health. I'm still relatively new to recruiting management, and I want to continue learning full recruitment, maybe eventually climbing the ladder to talent acquisition and working on a larger scale, possibly moving up to director status within my organization.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Samantha
01What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
If I can do it, anybody can do it. When I started college, I was a non-traditional student - I was almost 30, and I had just given birth to my third kiddo. He was born in July, I started my very first semester in August. I was able to maintain my high GPA all throughout college, worked part-time, went to school full-time, and raised the kids as a single mother. I think my advice is, even when everything externally feels stacked against you, where there's a will, there's a way. If you want to make it happen for yourself, you can. Now, having a good support system in place is really crucial for that. You can only take on so much by yourself, so just make sure that you're leaning on the people that you can, where you need the most support. My mom definitely helped - there was a portion in the middle of my college career where she actually quit her job to watch my kids because I could no longer afford the daycare services for two kiddos at one time on a single income. If she wouldn't have been able to do that for me, I probably wouldn't have made it through school financially, but she was able to, for a couple years, help me out, and that's how I made it.
02What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
This particular program is state funded, so they determine the reimbursement rates for what we are allowed to pay the employees. It's a low wage, and I have to not only find a quality candidate, but then I have to deal with the low wage on the other end. They kind of contrast each other most of the time - you know, experience level, they want to be paid for their experience level. So that's the most difficult hurdle that we face, is just the state funding and getting a quality candidate in to the home that is agreeable to that low wage. We do advocacy constantly with this, and with our representatives, we do meet with them. We do a lot of marketing, and I personally have sent letters to governors, explaining why home health in particular needs increased in reimbursement wages. So we do a lot - I do have a lot of advocacy effort for that, to get that wage increased for them.
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