By Thomas A. Parmalee
In home care, virtual staffing conversations have traditionally centered on cost, availability and speed.
However, as agencies continue to navigate persistent workforce shortages and rising operational demands, a quieter but increasingly important factor is coming into focus: alignment — not just in skills, but in time zones, communication style and culture.
That distinction is at the center of how Contemporary Recruiting is positioning its virtual assistant model for home care agencies. In a recent interview, Andres Cuellar, a partner with Contemporary Recruiting, emphasized that while many competitors rely on offshore staffing models in regions such as the Philippines or India, those arrangements often introduce structural friction that can impact day-to-day performance.
According to Cuellar, the issue is not only geographic distance, but operational timing. Many overseas teams are working when U.S. agencies are closed, effectively reversing the natural rhythm of care coordination and administrative workflows. That misalignment, he noted, can introduce fatigue-related performance risks and communication delays at moments when responsiveness is critical.
Equally important, Cuellar pointed to cultural alignment as a defining differentiator. Because Contemporary Recruiting’s virtual assistants are based in Colombia and operate within the Central Time Zone, they function on a schedule that mirrors U.S. agency operations. Many have also lived, studied, or spent time in the United States, which helps bridge communication norms and workplace expectations.
This proximity is not incidental — it is foundational to the model. Home care, he explained, is fundamentally a relationship-driven industry, where success depends on empathy, responsiveness, and trust between caregivers, clients, and agency staff.
Home Care Post recently caught up with Cuellar to learn how Contemporary Recruiting’s approach is designed to embed a homecare company’s DNA into its remote team members, ensuring they operate not as detached support staff, but as integrated extensions of the agencies they serve.
What problem in the home care industry led Contemporary Recruiting to launch this virtual assistant service?
Our company initially started operating as a headhunter agency for U.S. based, in-office roles within home care, home health and hospice. We helped agencies find and place candidates for all types of roles, including marketers, recruiters, schedulers, intake specialists, care coordinators and office managers.
Around 2020-2022 (during the COVID-19 pandemic) the U.S. labor market went through an extremely challenging period for employers, in particular for small companies such as homecare agencies, as they were experiencing high turnover from their staff roles due to increasing wages that were many times hard or impossible to compete with.
We delivered a solution to our agency owners by providing employees who worked remotely from Colombia – South America “virtual assistants” – who could perform most of the operational tasks required in homecare.
This solution was a lot more cost effective than hiring a U.S. based employee, the turnover rate was significantly less than before, and with our rigorous homecare training and KPI analysis, each of our virtual assistants was providing an exceptional service to our clients.
How does your business model work and how is the billing handled for the services performed?
We provide homecare trained and experienced professionals (also known as virtual assistants), who work remotely from Colombia in South America, and can perform a variety of home care, home health or hospice tasks. Our company assumes the employer liability (payment, payroll taxes, benefits, etc.) yet the virtual assistant works directly and solely for each client and is also managed (for the most part) by them. Hence, we bill our clients through our Texas based LLC, and our clients pay us as 1099 contractors.
Also, our contracts are month to month and can be cancelled at any time with a 30-day notice.
Do artificial intelligence tools for homecare replace the need for a virtual assistant?
There are excellent AI tools in the market that both enhance the client care experience as well as help with operational tasks such as recruiting, onboarding, scheduling, and billing.
However, home care is a “people business” and while these tools do help with efficiency, human interactions, empathetic conversations, and building strong relationships with caregivers and clients is still a key part of the industry, which will be hard to replace with technology.
We are, however, advocates for AI, and have training in place with several of the major applications available for home care, so our virtual assistants can help manage and utilize them if they are made available by their assigned client.
Why did Contemporary Recruiting choose Colombia as the source of these virtual assistants? Are you working with staff in other countries as well?
The work ethic in Colombia is exceptional: Employees truly value their jobs. With Colombia being the northern-most country in South America, it is heavily influenced by the U.S., which is important as our virtual assistants need to provide a strong cultural fit. Furthermore, besides speaking perfect English, our virtual assistants also speak native Spanish, which has proved beneficial in various U.S. markets to communicate with Spanish-speaking caregivers and clients. We are in the process of also opening virtual assistant operations in Argentina and Mexico.
Is the virtual assistant assigned to one client, or shared among multiple companies?
To deliver the best service experience as well as to provide accountability, each virtual assistant is only assigned to one client. They work the same business hours as your office staff and can be reached at any time via phone call or video meetings. Virtual assistants are just like having another staff employee who simply works remotely.
What kinds of educational or professional backgrounds do your virtual assistants typically have?
Our virtual assistants come from two types of backgrounds:
- They have 1-3+ years of prior homecare/home health experience and have worked in administrative roles for another U.S. based agency. We then recruit them and place them with our clients.
- Professionals with prior experience in scheduling, recruiting, sales, intakes, customer service from non-homecare backgrounds, yet they demonstrate high levels of empathy and multitasking abilities. These professionals then undergo our homecare training process and HIPAA certification prior to being matched with a client.
Can your virtual assistants work inside common homecare software platforms, such as Homecare Homebase, WellSky, AxisCare, AlayaCare, or CareSmartz?
Yes, our virtual assistants either have prior experience working with these homecare software programs, or we provide training in several of these platforms prior to them starting with a new client.
What training do assistants receive before interacting with patients, families, caregivers, or referral sources?
Our virtual assistants first undergo extensive homecare training which covers items like: types of patient conditions (Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, cardiovascular diseases), types of care providers (medical versus nonmedical), home care aides and tools and types of payment (private pay versus government programs).
Then, depending on the task(s) that they will be assigned to perform, we have them complete role specific training, including scheduling (Wellsky, HHAeXchange, AxisCare, etc), care coordinating, recruiting, quality assurance and sales and intakes.
Each virtual assistant also completes a HIPAA certification course.
What types of tasks are covered by virtual assistants?
We cover tasks including care coordinating, scheduling, recruiting and onboarding (caregivers, RNs, therapists, etc.), after hours and on-call duty, sales tasks, calling on leads to book in-home assessments, opening new referral partner networks by emailing and cold calling, performing intakes, quality assurance, insurance verification, bookkeeping, billing and other administrative tasks.
What are the benefits to having a virtual assistant in comparison to a U.S. based employee?
The obvious benefit is of course costs savings, as a virtual assistant can be 1/2 to 1/3 of the cost of the same U.S. based employee.
Other benefits include reduced employee turnover, the ability to scale operations and free up owners or staff members from administrative tasks to focus on strategy and growth and access to homecare experienced and trained talent.
How quickly can an agency usually get started after signing on?
After signing, we typically deliver three candidate profiles, so our clients can then conduct video interviews and select the best fit for them. Once a virtual assistant is selected, we perform background checks, trainings (if not completed before) as well as HIPAA certifications. The time from contract signature to first day of work varies between 2-3 weeks.
What oversight and accountability systems are in place?
To start, we have a dedicated customer success team that holds each virtual assistant accountable to KPIs, analyzes their performance as well as their soft skills and has check-ins on a weekly basis with them. They also hold regular meetings with our agency client managers to discuss KPI results and to address any issues.
Besides this, we have screen monitoring software on our company-provided computers that track the websites visited by our virtual assistant and deliver productivity reports, to ensure optimal time utilization.
What systems are needed from agencies to bring on a virtual assistant?
We recommend providing access to a shared email account, which can also be used for the credentials for the software/CRM tool utilized by the agency.
Adding another phone line with your current provider or a VoIP is also ideal to help make calls and send messages to clients and caregivers as well as connect with other agency staff members.
Our technology and implementation team will help new clients with the setup of these systems if needed.
Beyond virtual assistants, what other services does Contemporary Recruiting provide to the home care industry that operators may not know about?
We recently implemented a sales and intake service where our in-house professionals call, text and email leads and book assessments for our clients.
Our team noticed that a lot of agencies were investing in paid leads (A Place for Mom, Google, etc.) or had organic leads and calls that came in, but they did not always have the time or consistency to follow up on them. Agency owners (who many times are the ones performing these sales functions) are often putting out fires and marketers are ideally in the field building connections with referral partners or performing client visits. Agencies rarely have dedicated staff members who call on a lead as soon it is received and may also lack the time or resources to have consistency for follow-ups.
There is also a general conception that the only way to “win” a lead is to be the first one to call them. While this may be true in many cases, a lot of prospects are still in the discovery and agency comparison phase after a month from initial inquiry, or they may have tried a competitor agency but are having second thoughts about the service and professionalism delivered. Hence, consistent calls, texts and follow ups throughout the first or second month may be the key to win over a lead.
Our homecare sales professionals take immediate action on a lead but also perform more than 25 touches on every prospect throughout the first three months. They act as an extension to the agency’s team, build rapport with prospective clients to understand their needs and book assessments, so that the local team can then visit and close the lead in-person.
What are some success stories that you can share?
We are big on making sure that our virtual assistants share the same “company DNA” as our client agencies. This includes keeping in mind client preferences when scheduling caregivers, ensuring our virtual assistants who are focused on recruiting promote the agency’s value to attract new talent, and having our sales and intake virtual assistants create rapport with prospective clients via compassionate conversations. All this is to say that an effective virtual assistant must showcase empathy, commitment and build relationships with clients, caregivers and other agency staff members.
We often receive feedback that demonstrates this, such as the following feedback:
- “Latasha, one of our caregivers called in this week and mentioned that she was not going to be able to make it to work (one hour before the start of the shift) because she was not feeling well. Knowing that it would be almost impossible to fill the shift with another caregiver, Maria our virtual assistant used her “convincing powers” and was able to persuade Latasha to make the shift. Our caregivers love Maria and many have built professional friendships with her.”
- “Jose our recruiter has done an amazing job and is an integral part of our team. He is part of our work family. In fact, we are making arrangements to fly him out in a few months for our end-of-year company party and look forward to spending time with him in person.”
- “Mrs. Dees, (one of our clients) calls our office every Monday to make a few minor adjustments to the care schedule for her husband. She always asks for Carolina, our virtual assistant, and spends about 15 minutes on the phone with her. The schedule changes take only about two minutes, and the rest of the time on the phone is spent chatting with Carolina about her grandkids and the highlights of her weekend. They have developed such a great friendship to the point that Mrs. Dees insisted on stopping by the office to let Carolina try her famous casserole, not ever realizing that our virtual assistant works remotely from Colombia.”
Learn more about Contemporary Recruiting.
