Care staffing since 2025
Someone is always waiting up.
Porchlight places caregivers with the agencies, programs and families who need them. Home care and personal care, clinical and licensed roles, early childhood, disability support, and the coordinators who hold the whole schedule together.
We place Home health aides CNAs Early childhood staff Direct support professionals Med techs Schedulers
Why we exist
The work is the relationship.
Care work is one of the few jobs where the whole product is a particular person arriving at a particular door on a Tuesday and already knowing which cupboard the cups are in. Everything else — the care plan, the visit notes, the billing units — exists to support that.
The staffing industry mostly ignores this. A slot opens, a body is sent, a different body is sent the following week, and when the client stops opening the door it gets written up as a labor shortage. There's a shortage. That's half of it.
A client who has had eleven aides in a year doesn't have a staffing problem. They have eleven broken introductions.
So Porchlight is built around protecting the match rather than filling the slot. We ask about the client's morning routine before we ask about anyone's availability. We don't put a worker on a route they can't realistically get to, because a forty-minute unpaid drive is how a good match quietly ends in month three. We pay for orientation, because asking someone to learn a household on their own time is asking them to work for free.
When we can't cover a shift without breaking a match somewhere else, we say so. Agencies find that irritating for about a month and then stop calling anyone else.
Where our people work
Six settings, one standard of introduction.
Every title below is a role we fill. Some need a license, some need a car, all of them need somebody who will still be there in March.
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Home care & personal care
The largest part of what we do. Bathing, transfers, meals, medication reminders, companionship, and the hundred small things that keep somebody in their own house. We check the aide's own state training certificate. The federal 75-hour floor only applies at Medicare-certified agencies — most home care isn't Medicaid or Medicare at all, and several states require far more. Where the work is Medicaid-funded we make sure electronic visit verification is set up before a first shift instead of after a rejected claim.
- Home Health Aide
- Personal Care Aide
- Caregiver
- Live-in
- Overnight
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Clinical & licensed
Roles where the credential is the job. Certification is verified against the state nurse aide registry or the licensing board, and we read the registry entry for findings as well as for a name.
- CNA
- LPN / LVN
- RN
- Medication Technician
- Restorative Aide
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Early childhood & school age
Centers, home-based programs and after-school. Staff-to-child ratios are set by the license, so we ask what the room is licensed for and what its ratio is before we ask what it needs. A CDA needs 480 hours with one age group, so we won't send somebody working toward theirs to a job that floats them between rooms.
- Lead Teacher
- Assistant Teacher
- Infant & Toddler
- After-school
- Floater
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Disability & independent living
Direct support professionals, job coaches and respite staff, working to a person-centered plan written by and with the person it's about. We hire for people who can tell the difference between helping and taking over. Crisis training is checked by name and expiry — CPI, Mandt, Safety-Care, whichever the program runs — along with the state abuse registry and medication administration certification where the role needs it.
- Direct Support Professional
- Job Coach
- Respite
- Community Habilitation
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Adult day & community programs
Activity staff, program aides, transport drivers and kitchen support. Quieter work than home care and just as easy to get wrong — a program runs on whether the same faces are in the room on Thursday.
- Activity Assistant
- Program Aide
- Transport Driver
- Dietary Aide
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Coordination & scheduling
The office side, which decides whether any of the above works. Schedulers, care coordinators, intake, authorizations and billing. We screen for the systems you already run and for whether somebody can hold twenty moving pieces at four o'clock on a Friday.
- Scheduler
- Care Coordinator
- Intake Specialist
- Authorizations
- Billing
If you do the work
You'll know the hours, the client and the drive before you say yes.
Nobody should accept a placement and find out afterwards that it's two buses away, or that the eight hours on the offer are really five plus a gap in the middle. Every role we send you comes with all of it written down.
- You never pay us. Not a fee, not a deposit, not for training
- Pay rate, weekly hours, the actual address and the travel time, up front
- Orientation is paid. Learning a household is work
- Mileage between clients goes on the invoice, not on you
- We tell you what the client is like before the first visit, and we introduce you
- Interview accommodations arranged on request, with no documentation needed
- Intake in English or Spanish — atendemos en español
If you run the schedule
We're the call you make on a Sunday night.
Agencies, home care franchises, adult day programs, centers and private families. Whether it's one aide for one household or six people for a new authorization, the intake is the same conversation and the standard doesn't move.
- Qualified shortlist within 48 hours of an agreed intake
- Credentials verified with the registry or board that issued them
- Every placement screened against the OIG exclusion list, because billing for an excluded individual lands on you
- Background screening and TB status confirmed before a first shift, and CPR where the role or the state requires it
- Temp and temp-to-hire staff sit on our W-2 — payroll, taxes, workers' comp
- We check in at day seven and day thirty, with the worker and with you, separately
- 90-day replacement on direct hires, in writing
How a match happens
How a match gets made.
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First call
We start with the person
What does a good morning look like. Who else is in the house. What went wrong with the last placement and what nobody wants to say out loud about it. Twenty minutes here saves a month later, and it's the part most agencies skip because it doesn't fit a form.
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Before we send anyone
Credentials, screening, and the drive
Registry and licensing checks, the OIG exclusion list, background screening and TB status. Background checks are consumer reports, so the candidate gets the disclosure and gives written permission first. Then we look at the route on a map at the hour the shift starts, because a commute that works at two in the afternoon may not exist at six.
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The introduction
Nobody arrives cold
A first visit is introduced, with somebody from Porchlight there or on the phone. The worker knows the routine, the client knows who is coming, and the family isn't meeting a stranger on a bad day.
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After the first week
We call both sides, separately
At day seven and again at day thirty. Separately, because the honest version of how it is going is rarely the version people give in front of each other.
What we hold to
The parts we refuse to make flexible.
If we fall short of one of these, write to melo@porchlighthiringgroup.com and it reaches the person who can fix it.
Nothing unnamed
The rate, the weekly hours, the address and the travel time are on the offer before you're asked to accept it.
Continuity before coverage
We would rather tell you we can't fill Tuesday than pull somebody out of a match that's working.
No cold first visits
Somebody from Porchlight is present or on the phone for an introduction. A first shift isn't a drop-off.
Honest about the bars that exist
Some findings and convictions are a statutory disqualification in long-term care, and pretending otherwise wastes a person's time. We say which, early, and we don't treat a record that isn't disqualifying as one that is.
Two languages, all the way through
Intake, onboarding paperwork and safety briefing in English or Spanish. Documentación y capacitación disponibles en español.
In their words
From the other side of the door.
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They drove the route with me before I accepted. No agency had ever done that. It turned out the bus I was counting on doesn't run at five in the morning, and we found that out in advance instead of on day one.
Home Health Aide Placed 2025 -
We had burned through four aides on one household in eight months. Porchlight asked us questions about the client that we had never been asked. The fifth one is still there.
Scheduling Manager Home care agency -
I said at intake that I needed the interview questions in advance. Nobody asked me why, and nobody made it a thing. That was the first time that has happened to me.
Direct Support Professional Placed 2025
Questions
Asked before people call.
Do I have to pay anything?
No. Not at any stage, for any reason. Employers pay our fees. If somebody claiming to represent Porchlight asks you for money — for training, for a background check, for a uniform — it isn't us. Email melo@porchlighthiringgroup.com and we'll deal with it.
I don't have a certification yet. Is that a problem?
Not for every role. Personal care and companion work, adult day programs and some school-age settings don't require one to start. Home health aide work at a Medicare-certified agency does, and clinical roles always do. Tell us where you are and we'll tell you straight what is open now and what opens after the course.
What does it cost an agency?
Direct hire is a percentage of first-year pay, agreed in writing before we source anybody and payable only when somebody starts. Temp and temp-to-hire are billed at an hourly rate that already contains payroll taxes, workers' compensation and our margin. One number.
Can you cover a call-out tomorrow morning?
Sometimes, and we'll tell you straight away if not. What we won't do is pull somebody out of an established match to patch a gap, because that turns one problem into two. If we can't cover it without doing that, we say so and help you think about the week instead.
A record came up on my background check. Am I out?
Not automatically. Long-term care has real statutory bars — certain findings on an abuse registry and certain convictions do disqualify somebody by law, and we won't pretend otherwise or waste your time. Outside those, a record is weighed against what the role requires, in line with EEOC guidance and applicable state fair-chance law. We tell you where you stand early.
Do you place people into private households directly?
Yes, and it works differently from an agency placement. A private family becomes a household employer, which brings real obligations around payroll, withholding and workers' compensation.
The part that catches families out isn't the tax, it's the hours. Since the home care rule took effect in 2015 a home care worker employed directly by a family is owed minimum wage and, if they live out, overtime past forty hours. Live-in arrangements and sleep time are treated differently again and are where most disputes start. We walk families through all of it at intake, and we won't set up an arrangement that pays somebody off the books.
Whose payroll am I on?
On temp and temp-to-hire assignments, ours. You're our W-2 employee for as long as the assignment runs, which means we carry payroll, employment taxes, unemployment insurance and workers' compensation. On a direct hire you're the agency's employee from day one and we step out.
Start here
Tell us about the person, not the slot.
Whichever side of this you're on, a person reads it and answers within one business day.
¿Trabaja en el cuidado de personas? Escríbanos en español y le respondemos en español.
Prefer email melo@porchlighthiringgroup.com