Levo
Levo is redefining the healthcare recruiting process for home care agencies and caregivers.
Solving a Need in the Healthcare Recruiting Process
Each year, over 2 million healthcare professionals provide in-home care for aging seniors. Over 60% of these caregivers do not finish the year with the same home care agency they started with. This attrition presents a challenge for both employers and employees alike. For the former, home care agencies incur an average cost per hire of over $550, which amounts to ~$2.4B in annual recruiting spend on caregivers. In fact, over the course of a year, the typical home care agency can expect to spend over $150k on replacing churned caregivers. For caregivers, in addition to suffering from recruiting burnout, they often find themselves with employers that don’t reflect their personalities, preferences and experiences. These challenges are largely preventable and can be solved with improved communication, intentional recognition and enhanced compensation and benefits for caregivers. While traditional job boards are good for blasting out job descriptions, they aren’t great at actually shepherding the job application process that follows the initial intake form.
This is where Levo steps in, offering a human-first, lightning-fast job application process that lowers the barriers for caregivers to find and retain meaningful work. Within its easy-to-use web platform, caregivers answer basic questions via a chatbot and then select times when they are available for a screening with Levo. During this conversation, Levo deeply connects with each caregiver to understand what motivates them, where prior staffings fell short of expectations and how future opportunities could increase satisfaction.
These initial conversations, coupled with the team’s experience analyzing HR and scheduling data from industry partners, have allowed Levo to develop a preliminary model identifying ~10 factors associated with caregiver churn. The end result is a highly-tailored list of interview questions that result in better outcomes for both home care agencies and caregivers.
Initial results from Levo have seen home care customers/agencies receive ~50% more candidates per week, reduce their interview “no show” rates by ~40%, and increase overall hiring rates by +20%.
Example Levo caregiver profile that is shared with employers.
The Founders
Jason Yu is a second-year MBA student at The Wharton School and is well positioned to lead Levo. Prior to business school, Jason served as an Interim Area Director for Arosa (backed by Bain Capital), one of the nation’s leading providers in integrated care management and caregiving services. It was in this role that he experienced firsthand just how difficult it was to retain caregivers under the existing system and what aspects of the job process needed to be improved. Before Arosa, Jason worked at Boston Consulting Group where he helped healthcare and field service companies on a variety of business needs.
Daniel Tian is a third-year undergraduate in The Jerome Fisher Program in Management & Technology, a dual degree program between Penn Engineering and The Wharton School. He previously led and scaled engineering / product teams as one of the first 50 engineers at Ramp (Founders Fund backed), a contract tech lead at Cider (a16z backed), and Product Manager at TikTok Ads.
Looking Ahead
After raising a pre-seed round in 2021, the company has experienced rapid growth and has retained 6 home care agencies across 3 geographies. While Levo is currently focused on onboarding more customers and building out its engineering and operations teams, it is also beginning to explore additional ways to engage with caregivers beyond the job identification process. Levo hopes to become the de facto solution for caregivers in the home care space so these individuals can simply focus on providing the best care for seniors. This is the concept of “caring for the caregivers,” which is often talked about but rarely executed.
The company is also tapping into the Wharton entrepreneurship ecosystem. After participating in VIP-X, a 3-month accelerator program offered by the school’s Venture Lab, Levo went on to retain non-dilutive funding from a number of sources. It is the recipient of multiple awards from the Penn Wharton Innovation Fund and has also received support from Penn’s Weiss Tech House and The National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps (I-Corps). Levo is a semi-finalist for Penn’s Startup Challenge, a pitch competition where student-founded ventures compete for $150k in funding.
Levo is actively looking to expand its team and is hiring across multiple functions. If you’re interested in helping Levo create better jobs for caregivers, reach out to Jason at jason@hellolevo.com.