Heather Brazik Smith, Chief Human Resources Officer at BrightStar Care

Show Notes

Care for Caregivers: Bright Star Care’s CXO on Community, Consistency, and AI in Hiring

Summary

How do you build connection and consistency for a largely solo, non-desk workforce?

Heather Bresick-Smith, Chief Experience Officer at Bright Star Care (formerly CHRO), shares how the home healthcare franchisor is reshaping employee experience across 13–14k caregivers through community, clear lanes of ownership, and smart tech.

Heather breaks down the shift from HR to Experience—employee, client, and soon owner experience—plus formal change management to drive franchisee adoption. She reveals Bright Star’s new employer brand pillars—connection at our core, flexibility that fits your life, and care that starts within—and why the first 90 days are the retention tipping point.

Heather details a network-wide LMS for consistent onboarding and career paths, an employee mobile app that becomes the “virtual office” for distributed caregivers, and where AI fits: sourcing, screening, scheduling, and predictive signals that prioritize highly motivated candidates with a clean human handoff.

She closes with how franchisee roundtables turn local wins in recruiting and retention into system-wide standards.

Timestamps

[00:45] – From CHRO to CXO: experience “lanes,” client/employee/owner experience, and change management

[03:17] – Splitting people ops vs. franchisee-facing support to scale impact

[04:06] – The caregiver challenge: isolation, recruiting vs. retention, and the 90-day stickiness milestone

[06:39] – Employer brand pillars: connection, flexibility, and “care that starts within”

[09:03] – The employee mobile app as the virtual office: messaging, recognition, and education on-the-go

[12:24] – Standardizing learning: network-wide LMS, robust 90-day onboarding, CE, and career paths

[15:10] – Practical AI in hiring: sourcing/screening/scheduling and predictive signals for candidate prioritization

[17:30] – The “people leader co-pilot” vision: just-in-time guidance for interviews, feedback, and HR risk

[19:48] – Stronger together: franchisee collaboration and turning best practices into system norms

Takeaways

- Define clear experience lanes (employee, client, owner) and formalize change management to boost adoption across franchises.

- Design for early retention: build programs that carry caregivers past the 90-day threshold and target candidates who mirror your best performers.

- Lead with “care that starts within”: make caregiver well-being a visible pillar of your employer brand and day-to-day operations.

- Create community for distributed workers: use a mobile app for real-time messaging, recognition, and learning—treat it like the office.

- Standardize a network-wide LMS to deliver consistent onboarding, CE, and career pathways that reduce burnout and turnover.

- Use AI judiciously: automate sourcing/screening/scheduling, leverage predictive motivation signals, and ensure a warm, timely human handoff.

Sponsor

AllVoices brings all your employee relations work together in one place. No more jumping between spreadsheets, emails, and legacy systems just one place to document and manage reports, cases, investigations, and performance conversations. It helps you run a more consistent process, takes busywork off your plate with AI, and makes it easier to spot trends early, so you can work proactively, not just put out fires.

See a demo at ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.allvoices.co/

What is HR Voices?

HR Voices is a scenario-based podcast for People Leaders who’ve actually had to make the call.

Each episode brings experienced HR and People leaders into realistic, anonymized workplace scenarios—the kind you recognize immediately. Performance issues. Messy conflicts. Investigations that don’t fit neatly into a policy box. Instead of talking about their own companies, guests react to outside cases and walk through how they’d think it through in real time.

There are no right answers here. What you’ll hear is judgment: how seasoned leaders balance risk, fairness, legal reality, and humanity when the stakes are high and the path isn’t obvious.

HR Voices is for HR, People Ops, legal, and leaders who want to hear how other smart humans actually handle employee relations—without confidentiality breaches, hypotheticals that feel fake, or a lecture on “best practices.”

Rebecca Taylor (00:17)
Hello and welcome to HR Voices. I'm Rebecca Taylor and I'm here with Heather Bresick-Smith. She's the Chief Experience Officer at Bright Star Care. Heather, welcome. Thank you so much for being here.

Heather Smith (00:28)
Thank you for having me, Rebecca. I'm excited to talk.

Rebecca Taylor (00:31)
I'm very excited too because

I wanna go right into the very beginning of this, which is where we actually just stopped before we started recording and I was like, I should probably start recording. So you're a chief experience officer and previously at Bright Star, you were the CHRO. Before we dive into anything else, can you talk a little bit about that transition, that role, what you do now that's different and how does that sort of impact the work that you do?

Heather Smith (00:58)
Yeah, absolutely. So I have heard from some colleagues that they're jealous of the title. I wish that was my title, right? It's a, it feels fresh, right? And different and a little more modern. Bright Star Care, as you may or may not know, is a home healthcare franchisor. And we have about 13 to 14,000 employees throughout the country. Of course, they are independently owned and operated. So it's not necessarily our employees, but we still feel very

Rebecca Taylor (01:05)
Yeah.

Heather Smith (01:27)
responsible for their experience. And so part of what we've been looking at over the last year is how do we create lanes for the different stakeholders that we're responsible for, that we're supporting within our franchise support center. And part of that was saying, hey, we have a people team for our internal support center staff, but we need an employee experience team for all of our direct care staff, our owners, our

office staff. We're very involved with supporting them through a coaching model, through an education model. And so we have employee experience, we have people in comms for kind of our internal team. We also have client experience, and we are soon to be bringing on owner experience. And within that we have ⁓ learning and development, which we're trying to rebrand to learning experience, of course, we feel like that makes a lot of sense. We also have organizational change management, and that is

for us to make that more formal really helps us with the adoption process with our owners as we roll out new programs, new technology, anything that we would like to introduce that we feel might help make their jobs and their businesses more effective, more efficient. ⁓ And so we're working on a playbook there where we can drive greater adoption.

Rebecca Taylor (02:51)
Okay, thank you for that, because I think that is so interesting and I probably have a thousand other questions around just that we could talk about in this topic. But I think the thing that I think is really standing out to me in your explanation is that a lot of the work that you're doing is still feels very HRE, right? In the sense that you're building resources for people, you're making sure that people have a unified experience at the organization, no matter where they might be located.

And so is there still a CHRO at Bright Star 2, or is it more of just a transformation of the title, but still essentially kind of owning similar things?

Heather Smith (03:28)
So we still have an HR leader. have a senior vice president of people and communications. And technically everyone would tell you she is the new head of HR. I would say that she's graciously taken a lot of the people operations role from me so that I can focus on being more franchisee facing and offer more support out into our network. And that's been amazing.

Rebecca Taylor (03:33)
Mm.

I think that's really cool. And so you have franchisees in so many different locations. I think you said 14,000 sort of employees across everywhere. So when you're looking at a workforce that large, that spread out, what are some of the challenges of creating a unifying culture or even just curating the experience that you want them to have?

Heather Smith (04:15)
Right.

Excellent question. There are a lot of challenges. I would say the one that we're really focused on for 2026 is connection and community. Because if you think about what does the role of a caregiver look like, they're very rarely in an office environment. They are almost always alone, one-on-one. there's a couple of family members that might come in and out of like a private pay, private care experience.

Rebecca Taylor (04:18)
Hahaha.

Yeah.

Heather Smith (04:46)
but they're traveling back and forth to that that client's home. That's where they have the relationship. And so when we do a great job of matching between client and caregiver, it's like magic, but that doesn't always happen. And so as you've probably heard the industry overall shortage of caregivers, shortage of nurses, I would say shortage of qualified, like high quality candidates.

And our challenge is not only recruiting and hopefully at some point maintaining a bench where we can continue to take on new work each week and we have the staff in order to fill those shifts, but it's also retention. And that's the shift we're trying to make this year is let's get out of the recruiting revolving door and let's look at our very best caregivers. How did we find them and let's target the right candidates? And then how do we

them beyond that critical first 90 days. Once we keep them for over 90 days, they tend to stay and they'll stay for a great length of time.

Rebecca Taylor (05:57)
That's great that it's sort of that 90 days is that first sort of benchmark and milestone. It's like there's viability to their employment, right? If they kind of stay past that. I think that's really interesting. you know, I have some experience kind of chatting with folks in similar industries. You know, my friend is actually a, she's an in-home PT. She's part of a large system. So not caregiver, but similar kind of structure of being more in the field with patients and less interacting with, you know,

colleagues and teammates sort of on a day-to-day basis. So when you're sort of thinking about the experience that you want them to have, when you want them to commit after 90 days, what's the, I guess, the feeling that you want them to have or what are the things that you want them to focus on that will keep them engaged and retained?

Heather Smith (06:44)
So it's interesting that you asked that question because we're just starting to infuse all of our external sites with some new employer brand pillars. And those three are ⁓ connection at our core, flexibility that fits your life, and care that starts within. And I think that third piece is the piece that we haven't really focused on. We ask you to give exceptional care to all of our clients, but how are we caring for you?

Rebecca Taylor (07:12)
Mmm.

Heather Smith (07:12)
And

that is a completely new idea, organically brought forward through some focus groups that we conducted last year. And so these are things that are real. They're happening out in the field. But we're not focusing on that story when we're looking to attract and recruit new caregivers. And I think that everyone wants to feel that, right? We've been in this interesting little race where we're looking to recruit as fast as we can.

Rebecca Taylor (07:15)
Yeah.

Heather Smith (07:41)
to get them to first shift, first paycheck as fast as we can, but we're not thinking about what makes us different, what creates that stickiness, and how do we go about accomplishing it.

Rebecca Taylor (07:48)
Yeah.

Yeah, I think that that's really cool. Just kind of the differentiation in offering care for caregivers could probably be its own hour long episode on its own. caregivers are famous for kind of not experiencing that same level of attention within organizations, within systems that they work in. And it's why nurses are leaving the profession in droves. There is sort of this larger

Heather Smith (08:06)
Yes.

Rebecca Taylor (08:25)
crisis in that kind of sense. And so to hear that an organization as large as Bright Star that can be as influential as Bright Star is kind of stepping up to sort of say, hey, this is something that we know is important. And I think it's, I mean, I would think that any competition would have to be able to compete with that by also kind of thinking about care in a similar way. So it's cool to be able to kind of set that standard. You talked about focus groups and so, you know, having feedback from employees. So

Heather Smith (08:49)
Yeah.

Rebecca Taylor (08:52)
What are some other ways that you get feedback from a workforce that is so distributed? Like, are you using tools? How often are you interfacing with people? I know you mentioned you were just traveling. So how does the feedback process normally look?

Heather Smith (09:05)
Well, we're actually working on piloting an employee mobile app, which is not.

It's not really like, you know, rocket science, right? Everybody's been on employee apps for a very long time. But we struggle with consistency throughout the network. And I respect this. Our owners are very entrepreneurial, right? And they start with our model and then they realize that when you've seen one agency, you've seen one agency because we can't be like a copy paste McDonald's model. There are different state regulations or different licenses.

Rebecca Taylor (09:17)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Heather Smith (09:40)
requirements, different markets bring, you know, different opportunities. And so, you know, a new owner goes out, you know, into their market and all of sudden they realize, ⁓ you know, I need to make some adjustments. And ideally our franchise support center coaches are helping them with those adjustments, but the ability and the interest to be innovative as an owner is right there. And so ⁓ there are oftentimes where we'll make a recommendation.

Rebecca Taylor (10:04)
Right.

Heather Smith (10:09)
as a franchisor and we'll get a decent group that says, yeah, we'll come on board with you. But we won't holistically have the majority of our locations doing all the same things beyond what's really just required. So us having ⁓ last quarter an employee app out in the field that allows us to ⁓ owners and their teams, they can text, they can send direct messages, they can send out recognition and rewards.

Rebecca Taylor (10:20)
Mmm.

Heather Smith (10:39)
It creates more engagement. Like I said, it feels lonely when you're just one-on-one. So having that good connection back to your office team over to other caregivers that you may be able to connect with makes a lot of sense. Pushing out not just what you need to know, but what you want to know and offering potentially in the future maybe education opportunities, you know, kind of in the palm of your hand is what we hope will create ⁓

Rebecca Taylor (10:43)
Yeah.

Heather Smith (11:08)
more consistency throughout and give us that, I just moved, but I still really want to work for Bright Star Care. It feels the same. Might be a different group of people, might be a different client, but it feels the same when I walk in that door.

Rebecca Taylor (11:16)
Yeah.

Yeah, that's cool. It's almost like the app almost sort of becomes, I don't want to put words in your mouth, so this is just kind of how I'm thinking about it. The app almost becomes the office space in a way. If it's the place that it's like, that's where everybody is gathered, that's where everybody is, we can recognize each other, celebrate each other and create that, like you mentioned, that sense of community so that there's less loneliness. You know, someone's out in the field, they feel supported, they feel like they're part of something, not that they're just

Heather Smith (11:34)
Yes.

Right.

Yeah.

Rebecca Taylor (11:51)
out in the wild, you know, helping with patients. Yeah. I think that's cool.

Heather Smith (11:53)
Right? Right.

Yeah, absolutely. I

think the other thing that we're we're we've just embarked upon and we're hoping this is a differentiator for us too. And again, a lot of people might listen to this and say, ⁓ we've had a learning management system for how many years? This is not like that that crazy new. But for us to have an L a standard LMS across the entire network with learner seats for every single one of those employees is a brand new concept. And so we can take that now and build from that caregivers get a really

Rebecca Taylor (12:22)
Yeah.

Heather Smith (12:26)
strong and ⁓ robust 90-day onboarding experience where it could vary from location to location right now. We can see that they're getting exactly what they need. We can help our office teams retain their key office roles. Our director of nursing position tends to roll over. Like you said, it's high burnout. We ask a lot of our people. so giving them that ability to keep up on their certification

Rebecca Taylor (12:36)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Heather Smith (12:56)
to do any of their continuing education, to also feel like maybe there's a path for me from caregiver into another role, into something that might be management. We haven't really had the ability to make those kinds of recommendations out in the network. And so we're pretty excited about being able to do that this year.

Rebecca Taylor (13:17)
Yeah, that's so cool. Cause that also probably helps your franchisors or franchisees. I always confuse which one is which. Franchisees, thank you. You're the franchisor. So it has to help them too, because like you mentioned, they're relatively entrepreneurial minded. so consistency can sometimes sort of be a struggle with some founders, right? They're kind of just like looking at what's right in front of them in certain ways, or they're so deep in other parts of the business that they forget.

Heather Smith (13:23)
Franchisees, yes. Yes. Yeah, right.

Rebecca Taylor (13:45)
the onboarding side or the people management side, not by intention, just by, you know, it's just sort of the way that it works. So creating, you know, an onboarding experience that's consistent has to also take some weight off of them, because they're not trying to mentally figure out what to do and then execute it. It's kind of just like, here's what's good, roll with it. Yeah, that's cool. So.

Heather Smith (14:04)
Right, yep. Yeah, and they can put a

little bit of their own flair and their own stamp on it as they're doing it, but just allows us to feel like we've really provided something that's very high quality out in the field if we have that full kind of global vision in just a simple little dashboard on the LMS.

Rebecca Taylor (14:18)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. And so here's a question. Are you using AI in any of these two? Because I've been talking to, I've done a lot of these chats lately, and the theme that's kind of been coming up has been about using AI to hyper-personalize someone's employee experience. So you can really sort of get insights on how someone's motivated, what they need, how they're performing, and then use tools to sort of give them recommendations for how they can improve performance or

curate benefits systems that might give more people what they need. Are you thinking about AI in this tech stack too, or are you already using it?

Heather Smith (15:04)
So we're thinking about it and talking about it a lot and we're already using it maybe just a tiny bit so far. I am always really careful. We're a human centered business, right? So we have to keep the human there and we want to figure out how to use AI to make things more efficient, more streamlined, know, get them to the point of care. And so we are piloting some AI tools for sourcing.

Rebecca Taylor (15:18)
yeah.

Heather Smith (15:33)
screening and scheduling with candidates. We also have a little bit of predictive analytics pilots going where we can take a look 90 days back and say like, well, where's our benchmark for our most successful candidates, especially at caregiver? And then how do we key in on those and make sure they get prioritized into the interview queue faster than maybe some of the outliers do? And so that's been really interesting to see how that data comes through.

for things like how long did it take that individual to complete the application, how quickly did they return a call, know, not just their qualifications, but it's really motivation. There's a little bit of intrinsic motivation there that you're seeing in terms of how engaged and how motivated are they to get to this role. We have some franchisees that have been using AI agents to do a lot of that scheduling, maybe to even ask some initial, know, pre-qualifying questions.

Rebecca Taylor (16:14)
Yeah.

Heather Smith (16:29)
That seems to be going really well. I just get concerned about that I want a nice clean handoff to the who am I going to be working for and working with and how do we get them there to that unique we're going to make a better connection. The thing that AI helps us do is be available 24-7 and on all the off hours when you might have a caregiver scrolling through Indeed or another job board and there's no one picking up the phone necessarily at the

Rebecca Taylor (16:36)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Heather Smith (16:59)
And so that's been huge for us to start to explore, you know, those types of tools. We're looking at infusing it in other ways. I think our big like pie in the sky idea that we need our tech team to get on board with at some point is like a people leader co-pilot. And so, you know, we use co-pilot, of course, you know, on the side in all of our work that we do. But what if you had a manager tool

Rebecca Taylor (17:19)
oooo

Heather Smith (17:29)
that all you had to tell it was not only I'm having an interview with this person today, but here's who it is. offer me some customized questions, help me get through giving feedback. Any of the things I think HR risks always comes to mind for us too. You don't know that if you know how to handle workers comp until you're in the middle of workers comp.

Rebecca Taylor (17:37)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Right.

Heather Smith (17:52)
And so

those would be amazing, you know, just at the point of need type of tools that could give, you know, the kind of guidance, you know, really at just a click away.

Rebecca Taylor (18:04)
Yeah, I think that's super smart. It's something that I've been really, really fascinated to see how All Voices has been doing it, to be honest, because I'm new to hosting the podcast. I come from HR myself, like I mentioned, and so I've really kind of been immersing myself and trying to understand just the HR tech landscape, but also the tool of the company that sponsors this podcast. And a lot of what has been really interesting is sort of how the team has looked at creating workflows and steps and guides so that

when you are going through an employee relations investigation, let's say, you have a checklist, you have a, here's the stuff that you have to get together. Here's all your documentation in one place. Because much to your point, like Workman's Comp, until you're doing an investigation, the first time you do an investigation can be absolutely terrifying. And so knowing that you have sort of tools that kind of help you to kind of say, these are sort of the steps that I should take, is really, really helpful. And to your point, it's about kind of giving

the manager or the HR person or whoever's gonna be doing the work, resources to help them do the work better, but not take on that work themselves, because that's still very human job. Yeah.

Heather Smith (19:10)
Yeah, you

nailed it, absolutely.

Rebecca Taylor (19:12)
Cool. Well, I know we're just at time. I'm like, I've been very excited hearing about some of the things that you're working on, especially care for caregivers. Yes, please. If there's anything I can do to support that other than just giving big thumbs up, like that, I love that. And do you have any closing thoughts for anybody listening?

Heather Smith (19:32)
I think from a closing perspective, we're just looking to continually re-imagine what's working and how do we just make it a little bit better. A lot of the information that we get that helps to...

helps us to figure out where our path is going in any given annual planning year comes from our franchisees. And we're always looking at who's the best at recruiting, who's the best at retention. What is it that they're doing differently than everybody else? How do we take that and then create a round table or create an event that happens fairly regularly so that the entire network can benefit from it? So I'm just excited with the collaboration.

that we're getting with our franchisees here over the last six months or so, they are really leaning in with us. There is much, less of ⁓ a feeling of compliance. Here's what you're not doing and what you need to doing, and a much, much more feeling of how do we collaborate together. And so I'm excited to see where that takes us this year.

Rebecca Taylor (20:36)
Yeah, that's awesome. Build together, right? Build together, learn together, grow together. Yup. Yeah, I'm so with you. Well, thank you, Heather, so much for being here. It's been so fun chatting with you, and thank you everybody for listening, and hope you have a great day. Bye.

Heather Smith (20:39)
Yes, stronger together, right? I like that too. Yeah.

Thanks, Rebecca.