Caring Senior Service’s Ceo Is Tackling Caregiver Shortages, Scaling Growth With Ai

Caring Senior Service founder and CEO Jeff Salter is betting on a combination of grassroots referral-building, mindset shifts in hiring and AI-enabled operations to fuel growth in 2026.

Salter, who still operates multiple home care locations, said that hands-on experience is shaping a strategy focused on scaling more efficiently, improving caregiver workflows and ultimately capturing more clients in an increasingly competitive market.

San Antonio, Texas-based Caring Senior Service provides personal, respite and companion care, as well as specialty services lines including Alzheimer’s and stroke care. The founder-led organization operates over 50 locations across 21 states.

Salter sat down with HHCN to discuss his approach to capturing more clients, building referral pipelines, changing caregiver recruitment mindsets and the technology that will make these goals possible.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

HHCN: What are your top priorities for 2026?

Salter: I still own and operate five locations, so I’m a different franchisor than most other leaders in the franchising industry and home care space, in that I’m still heavily rooted in the actual day-to-day work that gets done and how we’re delivering services to people. So I lead the franchise system with that mindset. Which is not to say other CEOs don’t care about those things, but I just have a different perspective on it.

As a franchisor, one of our priorities next year is just really to help focus on capturing more clients, more growth. To do that, there are a couple of things that have to happen. First and foremost, we’ve got to be really involved in our communities and out, out and about working with referral partners. But it also means we’ve got to focus on caregivers and finding the caregivers.

Finding the best caregivers you can has always been a challenge. It’s never been easy, but admittedly, in the last five years, it’s been a heavier challenge for all of us. But I believe that technology is actually going to open up some things for us, because while workers might get displaced in some areas, I think that there’ll be an opportunity for us to capture some of those workers in doing meaningful work. Caregiving work is very meaningful. It’s not a menial job at all.

So [my priorities are] growth, caregiver acquisition, support and then overall implementation. We’re not trying to displace people with AI and technology, but we’re trying to make the job just better for everyone involved, our clients, our caregivers and then our staff members. So we’re going to be really focusing on AI projects or technology products.

What’s your strategy to build referral relationships?

We’ve got a similar strategy as a system. We’re all following a similar strategy to how we’re going to build those relationships, but really each location has to focus on how many strong partners they have.

We measure success based on repeat referrals, the number of times a home health company might call me with a challenging situation and need me to help out with a patient of theirs.

We just recently launched some additional software tools that are going to help our sales force be more active. Sales team members are out there in the field talking to these referral sources and partners. They’re challenged [by the fact] that there’s so much going on. How do they keep up with it all? So this is a great area where technology can step in and help. We’re focused on some tools that are going to improve their ability to manage that large swath of referral partners.

One of your priorities is caregiver acquisition – what does the hiring landscape look like right now from your perspective?

I think that the problem is the methods that companies are using; they’re trying to attract the wrong type of caregivers, and they’re speaking in the wrong way to the workforce that exists today. If you change that attitude, you find that it loosens things up quite a bit. You get more candidates, you speak to more candidates, and you actually hire more candidates if you’re offering work that fits what their expectations are.

It’s easier said than done, but we’ve been really focused on that work, and we don’t see a problem with the number of applicants that we’re getting. We don’t see a problem with the number of qualified candidates that we’re getting.

We’re focusing a lot on doing training internally, on helping our team understand that, ‘Hey, don’t keep looking for what you think is the perfect caregiver, because they’re probably right in front of you.’ You’ve got to switch your mindset to speak to them about meeting them where they’re at. It’s a common term, and that’s what we’ve got to really focus on.

The last time that HHCN chatted with Caring Senior Service, we discussed your home-made technology stack and implementation. What’s the status of that implementation, and what are your goals for your technology for the next year?

We’ve rolled out our second generation of the software that helps us manage all of our clients, our caregivers, all of the scheduling – that’s the most important. That’s where we spend the most time, logistics matching with the client and ensuring that they’re there on time and they’re completing the expected work that the client has.

So we’ve now rolled out all of our locations on the new software, and now we get to move from a transition phase to the new software migration and now, really leveraging that software in some ways that are going to get some advances.

We’re focused a lot on staff efficiencies. Used to, we had to put an ad in the newspaper, and people had to write their names on 25 pieces of paper to get things done. And surprisingly, in our industry, that still exists more than it doesn’t. Ten years ago, we changed that with our first version of our software, so that our goal was that a caregiver enters her name one time into the application, and she never has to type her name again.

We’re integrating with voice technology, so people can actually have voice agents to speak back and forth to complete something like a progress note. We’re moving to technology where the caregiver is able to respond to a voice agent and say, ‘I’m finished with my work with Mrs. Jones today, and I completed all of the tasks that were required.’ And then that form almost gets filled out, and it asks some smart questions to clarify a few things when it’s unsure. It makes it even easier for the caregiver to focus on what matters, which is care with the client, spending time with the client, and not having to comply with the agency’s laborious processes. Because that’s what frustrates caregivers.

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