Business Description
ReciproCare is building a marketplace that meets both home care worker and home care agency needs. We will use technology to increase work opportunities for the low-income women who largely populate the home care workforce, leading to an expansion of the industry’s total capacity to deliver home care to seniors and disabled persons.
There is a big disconnect between the home care workers who want to work and the home care agency employers who struggle to find enough qualified candidates in this high-turnover industry. Some of my loved ones are home care workers struggling to find full-time work. ReciproCare is tackling the inefficiencies that make it hard for them to find the right jobs to earn enough money to survive.
Agencies will pay a monthly subscription fee for access to our prequalified caregiver marketplace, They will also pay an additional fee when a worker is successfully hired through the platform. Our biggest challenge will be user (home care worker) acquisition and user engagement through the prequalification process. Our goals: 1. Increase the number of hours of home care available 2. Reduce involuntary underemployment 3. Increase income for home care workers and agencies.
In sum, ReciproCare is building a technology-enabled business to address home care labor market inefficiencies with a one-stop shop for home care workers, making it easier to exercise their agency to find the work with the conditions that they want and for as many hours as they want.
What is the purpose of this loan?
We will use the financial support to pay for recruitment and prequalification of a subset of home care workers (certified nursing assistants, home health aides, and personal care aides) in Maryland, including criminal background check, employment verification, reference check, licensure validation, education verification and health screenings.
We will also use the financial support to grow our engineering and product team (currently a single software engineer) for the duration of the pilot, so that we may integrate lessons learned during the pilot Into our product development and design efforts.