Do You Have Your Caregiver Skills Listed in Your LinkedIn Profile?
Many people consider caring for a loved one a personal responsibility. However, it is more than that. We could say it’s a masterclass in crisis management, performance efficiency, leadership, empathy, and a host of other valuable skills. Indeed, the success of a family caregiver often requires the ability to recognize and respond to a health crisis on a moment’s notice. To organize and manage a variety of healthcare components, including medications, dietary requirements, and activities of daily life. To interface with physicians and medical support staff, ensuring that the patient’s health condition is consistently monitored, and issues are promptly addressed. Some of the same skills that caregivers must use at home to care for their loved ones, help them perform their job duties at work.
Unfortunately, many employers are missing out on this valuable talent due to their failure to recognize and appreciate the strong attributes that family caregivers bring to the table. A Harvard Business School article states: “Employers do not consider caregivers a talent pool for addressing their persistent talent gaps.” In discussing this overlooked talent pool, the article goes on to caution: “By continuing to ignore the large pool of caregivers, employers raise their own costs and constrain the talent available to them.” (Harvard Business School Managing the Future of Work Project)
If you are a hiring manager, talent recruiter, or employer, what are your views regarding the transferability of caregiver skill sets into the corporate environment? Let’s consider the following scenario:
Z Company is a Fortune 500 organization with operations in over 50 countries, delivering innovative solutions in the healthcare and financial sectors. Z Company is seeking to fill a Project Manager position in its New York headquarters. Some of the requirements contained in the job description are below.
Leadership: Lead and manage complex projects and teams in an unpredictable, fast-paced environment.
Risk Management: Proactively identify project issues and risks; create and implement mitigation and contingency plans.
Communication and Reporting: Consistently provide clear, concise, and timely updates to all stakeholders to ensure successful project coordination. Comfortable working across teams, external partners, and executive leadership to secure alignment on goals, timelines, and deliverables.
Agility: Able to shift between tasks; anticipate and manage downstream consequences.
Currently, there are two candidates for the position:
Candidate 1
Jean meets the educational qualifications for the role. (Bachelor’s degree in business). She has extensive project management experience working for large, global organizations, including managing multi-level project teams. For the last two years, Jean has worked as a project manager for one of Z Company’s competitors. A large portion of Jean’s work involves managing resource allocation, budgets, timelines, and project documentation.
Candidate 2
Grace, who also holds a bachelor’s degree in business, meets the educational qualifications for the job as well. Grace has a variety of global project management experiences in her background; however, she spent the last two years caring for her terminally ill grandmother until her grandmother passed away three weeks ago. Grace’s care duties involved coordinating her grandmother’s home care services and managing her home care staff. Advocating and negotiating for her grandmother’s medical care across her care team (including attending physicians, home services staff, etc.) Responding to crises resulting from her grandmother’s frequent seizures, organizing and administering her multiple, daily medications, and helping to develop effective care plans as needed.
Based on this scenario, which candidate do you think Z Company should hire? Perhaps the better question is, if you were the hiring manager at Z Company, which candidate would you hire and why? The “why” portion of this question is the most important part because it forces you to come face-to-face with any underlying biases that you may not even be aware you have. If Grace is not your candidate of choice, are you jaded by the fact that her role for the last few years was not that of a traditional project manager? Are you overlooking the skills her caregiving experience helped her develop and strengthen, such as resilience, adaptability, and her ability to make critical decisions with limited time and information? All skills that your Project Manager role requires. Perhaps your decision is clouded by the fact that Grace showcased these skills on her resume in the context of her caregiving experience.
Whatever the reasons, unfortunately, you are not alone. Many employers continue to miss out on the unique talent offered by employees who at some point in their careers stepped away to become family caregivers. Those time periods of caregiving are often viewed as gaps in employment, as opposed to incubation periods for cultivating and strengthening viable business skills.
Conclusion
As caregiver advocates, our goals include raising awareness about these missed opportunities. After all, what people don’t know, they can’t change. If we can get hiring decision-makers to consider present and former family caregivers as viable talent, rather than sending all resumes containing caregiver experience directly to their “special file” receptacle, then we will be helping to clear a needed pathway for change. Ignoring this valuable talent pool is overlooking a competitive advantage that will become more significant as the care crisis continues to put its stronghold on the workplace. Meanwhile, the more that caregiving experiences are highlighted on resumes and in LinkedIn profiles, the greater the awareness and the more difficult it will be for hiring decision-makers to ignore this unique pool of talent.
Until the next blog!
Thank you for being here, for reading and for caring!
Reference
Fuller, J., Raman, M., Hintermann, F., et. al (October 2024). Hidden Workers: The Case For Caregivers. Published by Harvard Business School’s Project on Managing the Future of Work.