Is your organization or health center currently looking to hire a Community Health Worker (CHW)? The profession is booming, with an expected 11% growth in jobs throughout the next decade. The reason? It’s simple – CHW initiatives have a profound impact within the communities they operate within and are well-suited to address a variety of healthcare issues. Our Community Health Workers have been helping communities thrive for over thirty-five years. Although a lot has changed since we were a small camp-aide project helping migrant communities in the midwest, one thing has stayed consistent through the decades:

Hiring Community Health Workers is tough.

For instance, CHWs must come from the community and population from which they serve. Often, regional community health centers may start new outreach programs trying to serve a local population – but don’t have a representative member of that population interview candidates during the hiring process. It’s an easy mistake to make, but has dire implicates for the success of your hiring efforts in trying to find a qualified candidate. And an initiative that doesn’t have qualified Community Health Workers is bound to fail.

In order to help organizations make sure they have the right process developed for hiring CHWs, we’ve created five free resources. These resources will walk you through the entire process of starting a CHW Program all the way through beginning to hire your first CHWs. These resources have been developed from our internal processes and are designed to help your organization avoid the common pitfalls that may occur while trying to start a CHW program with qualified candidates.

1) Should we start a Community Health Worker Program? A Guide to Organizational Conceptual Fitness – this guide will help your organization think about what organizational elements are needed (and which still need to be developed) to start a Community Health Worker program.

2) CHW Program Readiness Checklist – It’s critical to ensure that before a program launch, your organization has all of the components in place. This simple checklist can help ensure that no key areas are overlooked.

3) A Guide to Hiring Qualified Supervisors for CHW Programs – Are you ready to begin hiring supervisors for your CHW programs? Great! This guide will walk your organization by creating a specialized hiring process to attract top-tier candidates.

4) Finding Qualified Candidates: How to Hire Community Health Workers – our comprehensive manual that walks the reader through the entire hiring process used by MHP Salud.

5) The Community Health Worker Pre-Hiring Checklist – You are finally ready to begin hiring CHWs! This checklist helps organizations ready themselves to begin the hiring process for a Community Health Worker position.

The work CHWs can do at your health care organization can improve the way your team works together and ensure that your organization is serving the population as effectively as possible. Further, CHWs programs are flexible by design and can be implemented to address a variety of health issues for different populations. Over the years MHP Salud has developed and successfully implemented CHWs programs to address a variety of health topics. We’ve used this experience and information to develop training and consulting to help organizations start or maintain Community Health Worker Programs. To learn more about our products and support please visit CHW Training and Consulting.

1. >Community Health Worker Core Consensus Project (2016). Understanding scope and competencies: A contemporary look at the United States community health worker field. Available at http://files.ctctcdn.com/a907c850501/1c1289f0-88cc-49c3-a238-66def942c147.pdf 3 Institute for Clinical and Economic Review. Community Health Workers: A Review of Program Evolution, Evidence of Effectiveness and Value, and Status of Workforce Development in New England. The New England Comparative Effectiveness Advisory Council. Boston, Massachusetts: July, 2013
2. https://www.mass.gov/doc/achieving-the-triple-aim-success-with-community-health-workers-0/download