Senior living operators have long struggled to hire for certain positions, including nurses and other specialized roles. In response to those challenges, some operators have adjusted recruiting strategies with these workers in mind.
Among the hardest roles to recruit for are on the care side of the industry, particularly with registered nurses (RNs) and licensed practical nurses (LPNs). Bayli Panzi, director of community talent and human resources with LCS, said she is encouraging communities to consider workers with nontraditional skill sets for these roles in a hope to bring in outside talent that could lead to the next generation of senior housing leadership getting trained now.
As such, LCS has started recruiting for people with sales and marketing backgrounds, especially those with relationship-based positions.
“It’s imperative to our business to think outside of senior living what type of skill set could benefit this operation,” Panzi told Senior Housing News. “Anything that’s really going to be relationship based should be considered.”
Nonprofit Ascension Senior Living is also setting its sights on filling a combination of RN, LPN and clinical and dining positions. The organization is the senior housing and care arm of St. Louis-based health system Ascension, and thus it already has a presence in healthcare. That gives recruiters more access to hospitals, post-acute locations and physician practices for potential new hires in specialized roles, according to CEO Erin Shadbolt.
Alongside recruiting, Shadbolt noted the organization is building up its current existing workforce with clear paths of job advancement moving forward.
“An entry-level patient care tech can start out bedside at the hospital, have an opportunity to receive additional training in senior living as a certified nursing assistant (CNA) by completing a CNA Trainee program and obtaining a certification while doing clinical rotations alongside our staff in one of our senior living communities,” Shadbolt said. “Once established as a CNA, there is opportunity to train and obtain a certification as a Med Aide to assist with passing medications.”
Focusing on the benefits of senior living
It’s a common refrain in senior living that communities can offer better work-life balance and a sense of doing good in the world. Recruiters are highlighting those and other differences as they seek out new workers in other industries.
In an effort to bring over healthcare workers to fill vacant RN and LPN positions, Shadbolt said Ascension has highlighted the slower pace of senior housing compared to working in another healthcare setting. The company also talks about the passion and sense of good one feels working with residents, most of which is pulled from her previous experience working within the industry.
Additionally, Ascension uses referrals and succession planning through training for new hires to fill vacant spots.
“Senior living provides a level of connection that is rare in the acute care or clinical setting,” she said. “It is easier to make a difference in senior living than many of the other settings that seem more attractive in healthcare, and it is our job to make sure healthcare leaders and clinicians know the opportunities for caring, honoring, and loving our residents, as well as the career growth options that exist in senior living.”
At LCS, the average length it takes to fill a RN or LPN position is around 42 days. Panzi said from her experience, the stat is below the healthcare industry average of around 59 days.
The operator has a “decentralized” recruiting process, meaning communities are largely responsible for their own recruitment. Recruitment budgets vary from location to location.
As recently as five years ago, the Des Moines, Iowa-based senior living company’s main competitors “were really other providers, or healthcare in general.” But now, Panzi said the company’s potential workers as “anyone and everyone,” including current staff at local restaurants, retail stores and hotels.
The company attracts those workers by taking a more active and engaging approach through a combination of brand guidance, such as job fairs to drive interest in the company even if it doesn’t result in new applicants, or by “passively sourcing” for possible recruits.
“It really takes all cylinders to move a community, especially a large community like the ones LCS manages, and operate in a positive direction,” Panzi said.
Over the past year, Houston, Texas-based Belmont Village built up its own recruiting department to fill its openings, the hardest of which involve healthcare, with nurses in particular requiring the most time and effort to get on board. According to President Mercedes Kerr, the operator has a “high bar” for staff and often competes with healthcare companies for new workers.
“We just need to be very smart about how we go about making sure that we’re finding and sourcing the right candidates,” Kerr told Senior Housing News.
Measuring the ROI of recruiting
As these companies look to recruit new and hard-to-hire workers, they are also measuring their returns on investment to budget for the future and determine their most effective methods for hiring.
LCS tracks its spending on advertising openings on websites like LinkedIn or Indeed, two platforms that help the company quantify and qualify applicants, according to Panzi.
LCS has also implemented a new recruiting system through Oracle that tracks organizational metrics.
The time it takes to hire for any given position, the cost of hiring for a role and retention stats are all key metrics the company tracks in determining the ROI of its recruiting efforts.
“Some markets, truthfully, could survive off of minimal advertising budgets,” she said. “We have some communities where their traffic is just insane. And then based on location, we have some communities that their budget is triple because their population is just significantly lower.”
The budget for Belmont Village’s recruiting department comes from each community, according to Kerr. Recruiting is a high priority that “pays for itself” in the end, compared to the cost of using staffing agencies or overtime.
Ascension’s recruitment team is “robust,” according to Shadbolt, and while it is expensive to maintain, it’s worth the cost.
“This team has a variety of resources and tools that are used daily to assist in their efforts,” she said. “We know that recruiting is costly but having dedicated staff to care for our residents is our number one ROI and we will do whatever it takes.”
