Announcer: Hello and welcome to Eightfold Radio. Vanessa Valerio and Amrita Sanyal work with Care Indeed. For Care Indeed, promoting happiness amongst its caregivers and clients is critical. Let’s listen now as JoAnne McDougald discusses how these values of promoting career and life happiness are shared and promoted by Eightfold and its technology.

Eightfold: Welcome to Eightfold Radio. We’re here in beautiful Menlo Park, California. This is Jo McDougald, and I’m joined by Amrita Sanyal and Vanessa Valerio. They’re both from Care Indeed, and I’ll have you introduce yourselves, and tell me a little bit about what you do day-to-day.

Vanessa: Of course. So my name is Vanessa Valerio. I’m actually the vice president and chief operating officer of Care Indeed. I co-founded it with Dee Bustos in 2010 so it’s an eight year old company. So what we do is we are a non-medical home care provider. We provide caregivers to private homes, facility, retirement facilities, and my daily activities is just really making sure that my clients and caregivers are happy, really.

Eightfold: We love happiness.

Amrita: Yes, absolutely. Actually, thank you Vanessa. My name is Amrita, and I’m from Care Indeed. I work at the branch administrator off the Menlo Park office. My role also is to incorporate new clients into the system, and to make sure that they are happy. And our caregivers, and making sure that there is a lot of client retention as well as caregiver retention.

Eightfold: So both of you mentioned happiness, and I think that that is really one of the underlying commitments that Eightfold has made. Because what they do is they look at finding the person that’s got the right set of skills that would be right at that company. They know a lot about the company culture, and then they also know within that team. Isn’t that great to know that your personality would fit in in some way with not only the company, with your set of skills, but also down to the team level. That’s, to me, is super-compelling.

Vanessa: I think you’re absolutely correct, because for me it is finding that right match. For me not everyone is called to be a caregiver. So if Eightfold can help us provide those caregivers who might be able to provide the right support for our clients we’re all for that.

Eightfold: You’re all in. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Amrita: Yeah, because on a day-to-day basis we get about 10 applications, and out of that we will probably select one or two. So we really are looking for the best of the best so that we are dealing with a generation that is before us, way before us.

Eightfold: So, if you are in the job it’s not only do the right job that’s right for you. A lot of people might apply, and it’s really not the right career for them. They think, “Oh, I’ll get in, because I need a job. Being a caregiver I’ve been good to my dog or my grandmother. Maybe this is right for me.” But this helps weed that sort of thing out.

Vanessa: And we see that all the time. Their caregivers will come here or come to the office and just wait for their paycheck on a weekly basis, and that’s not what we’re looking for. Because, at the end of the day, this is a serious business. We’re dealing with our seniors, we’re dealing with the clients who are desperate for finding that right support. And if there is an organization who might be able to help us find the right people who has a heart, who has the compassion, and caring, please.

Amrita: Yeah. You just said what I was feeling.

Eightfold: So we’re here at this event. It’s beautiful, Menlo Park, and one of the things that I’m going to tell you a little bit about, what you’re going to hear about in just a minute. But they’re giving away tonight Da Vinci’s resume, Leonardo Da Vinci’s resume. I read Leonardo Da Vinci’s resume, and the first 16, 18 items are “I was great with war, and trebuchets, and building implements, and how to create a great moat, and by the way, I paint okay, and sometimes I sculpt.” And so the reason that he wrote this resume was because he was trying to get a job obviously with a king, a local person who would pay him. But his true talent and his true passions obviously lay in creating beautiful works of art.

And I think what this high-end technology can do is see through what we write on a piece of paper, this 500 year technology, of writing a resume is so outdated. We have to just look at what we’ve done. If someone has been a caregiver in their life, it might be the right job for them in the future rather than “I’ve never done that even remotely.” But this could identify those opportunities that they sought out where they could have been. Even helping your little sister with her ‘campfire girls’ thing, or anything could show that you had these tendencies. So what would be the ideal thing that you would find using this sort of technology, using this very leading edge technology to help with your organization?

Vanessa: To be honest with you, what we need at the moment, because there’s so much shortage in really amazing caregivers. What we are looking for is someone who can maybe identify what’s really the core values of each person.

Eightfold: Yeah.

Vanessa: By identifying whether this person really cares to serve humanity. I think we can really be able to find that connection.

Amrita: Yeah. Yeah. I think that what we look for is mainly the compassion, and also the compassion for their work, any kind of work.

Eightfold: Yeah.

Amrita: Not just caregiving. Even if you’re working as a companion person you need to have that passion in you, in any kind of work. Only then will you put in your 100 percent.

Vanessa: And I think one of the things that I recently read it’s the impact, really, that’s very, very important in finding a caregiver. Are they going to make an impact in the quality of life of our clients. And it’s definitely a very emotional place. It’s not about quantity. You’re not going to see numbers, or you’re not going to see tangible things.

Eightfold: Right.

Vanessa: And you’ll see it right away. We’ve seen our company grow. It’s an eight year old company, and we’re seeing just the involvement of caregivers, and I think one of the things that it’s important for Care Indeed at the moment is retention and making sure that we recognize who’s doing the hard work for us.

Eightfold: And Eightfold does find a way to help employers reach out at those critical stages and and say, “Oh, for this group of people they’re ready for either more training, or a mentorship program, or whatever else you might offer just to help them reach their career goals.” Because being a caregiver is one thing, but you probably have career goals too within your organization. And helping nurture all those sides of your employees and really help retain them.

Vanessa: Are we allowed to ask questions?

Eightfold: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Vanessa: So my question is from what time in the initial phase, and when do you guys set this goal? Is it a continuous effort of you’re going to hold our hand from the time of finding the right person, and up to when?

Eightfold: Oh, it’s throughout. So Eightfold has three big aspects to it. It’s first with the talent acquisition side. They help you there. They help you with talent management, which means they help you manage your employees throughout their life span from candidate to alumni. Until they leave it’s the entire lifecycle of the candidate, as well as this overarching push to getting diverse candidates.

We know that a diverse workforce is imperative to mirroring the population. It has to be that way. And so it eliminates unintended biases within the outreach by masking their names, masking gender, masking age so that you can make decisions fully based on the person that’s right for the company, the job, and the team. And so that’s what Eightfold does.

Vanessa: So we look forward to just meeting one of your team members and…

Eightfold: Learning more about it.

Vanessa: Possibilities.

Eightfold: Awesome. Thank you guys so much for joining us.

Amrita: Thank you so much.

Eightfold: Again, that’s Vanessa Valerio and Amrita Sanyal from Care Indeed. Thank you so much for joining us.

Respondent 1: Thank you.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to Eightfold Radio. To find out more about Eightfold, please visit us at eightfold2018.wpengine.com, and be sure to listen to our episodes chronicling the experiences of Eightfold’s clients and partners.