Your aged care agency spend is a recruitment process problem

Most aged care operators I speak with want to reduce their agency spend. Very few have a plan that works. The ones that do have discovered the same thing: this is not a supply problem. It is a recruitment process problem.

The agency has stopped being a contingency

Workforce agencies were designed for genuine gaps: unexpected absences, short-notice spikes, the occasional Saturday-morning coverage failure no roster could absorb. In many residential aged care and home care settings, that is not how they function anymore. The agency line in the budget has become load-bearing.

This did not happen because the labour market got harder, though it did. It happened because the gap between when a roster breaks and when a permanent hire can start is measured in months, not hours. The agency delivers a worker by the afternoon. The permanent process delivers someone six to ten weeks later, if the candidate has not withdrawn in the meantime.

When a site manager gets a call-out on Thursday morning, there is no real choice. The agency wins by default. Multiply that across every site and every week, and the agency bill stops being emergency spend and becomes structural spend.

Why the permanent recruitment process cannot compete on speed

The typical permanent hiring cycle in aged care runs like this: post the ad, screen applications, interview candidates, complete reference checks, initiate compliance documentation including police checks, Working with Children checks, and NDIS Worker Screening where applicable, make the offer, wait for acceptance, then begin onboarding. From ad live to first shift: six to twelve weeks when things go well, longer when a candidate withdraws or compliance processing runs slow.

Agencies have already done most of that work in advance. They maintain a pool of workers who are pre-screened, compliant, and available to deploy. The problem for aged care providers is not that agencies exist. It is that providers have never built equivalent infrastructure for their own permanent workforce.

When a vacancy appears, the first instinct is to post an ad. But posting an ad in response to a vacancy is already too late to close the roster gap that triggered it. By the time a permanent hire reaches their first shift, the agency has filled that gap dozens of times.

The structural fix is a pipeline, not a faster process

Compressing a ten-week process into two weeks does not solve the underlying problem. It trades quality for speed, which produces more early exits, more vacancies, more agency calls. The cycle continues.

The answer is a permanent pipeline that runs before vacancies exist. In practice, this means three things.

Evergreen job ads. Instead of posting when a role opens, home care and residential aged care providers run ads as a continuous intake. Applications come in, get screened, and sit in a live shortlist rather than being processed in a single batch. When a vacancy appears, the provider pulls from a maintained shortlist rather than starting from zero.

Regular screening runs. Monthly or fortnightly, even when the current roster is stable. Candidates are pre-screened, in some cases pre-interviewed, and compliance documentation is gathered early. The goal is a cohort of cleared candidates who can be offered a role within one to two weeks rather than twelve.

A maintained shortlist. Most providers rebuild their candidate list from scratch every time they hire. Providers with lower agency dependency keep a live shortlist: candidates who have been through an initial screen, have given permission to be recontacted, and are refreshed when roles come up. When the roster breaks, the response is to make offers, not to post ads.

The guide on how to hire aged care workers in Australia covers what a full pipeline process looks like, including the compliance steps that can be completed earlier in the process without cutting corners on quality.

What changes when the pipeline actually works

The agency relationship does not have to disappear entirely. There is a legitimate place for agencies in genuine contingency: a double absence on a public holiday, a sudden family emergency that takes two carers off the same shift. No permanent pipeline absorbs all of that.

What changes is the baseline. When the permanent roster is consistently staffed from a pre-built pool, the agency becomes an exception rather than a standing arrangement. The invoice does not go to zero. It contracts to what it was always supposed to be.

The providers I have seen make this shift share one characteristic: they decided to run recruitment as an ongoing operation rather than a response to vacancies. That requires either a coordinator keeping the intake moving between crises, or a screening tool that does the same at lower overhead. Most providers have neither. They are running recruitment as a crisis response, one vacancy at a time, and the agency fills the gap between each response.

The providers who have reduced agency spend did not do it by refusing to use agencies. They did it by building the permanent process to the point where the agency became unnecessary for routine gaps.

If you want to think through what building that kind of pipeline looks like for your roster size and site structure, book a call and we can work through what is realistic.

Ahmed Raza, co-founder, Ployo

Frequently asked questions

Why does the agency bill keep growing even when I hire more permanent staff?

Permanent hires reduce agency dependency only if the permanent roster holds. If early turnover is high, each departure reopens a gap the agency fills. The pipeline approach needs to be paired with sufficient screening quality so that permanent hires stay. High-volume hiring without that filter creates a revolving door through the same agency contacts.

Can aged care providers completely eliminate agency staffing?

A small agency arrangement for genuine contingency makes sense for most providers. The goal is to move from agency as operating model to agency as rare exception. The cost difference between routine agency use and emergency-only agency use is where the financial case for building the pipeline sits.

Which roles benefit most from a maintained permanent pipeline?

Personal care workers, aged care workers and home care support workers are the highest-volume roles where a pre-screened talent pool produces measurable reduction in agency dependency. These roles carry the highest turnover and the most frequent roster gaps, so they generate the most agency spend and have the most to gain.