Competition for talent in the senior living world is as vast as the full marketplace, where job seekers are asking themselves, “what can I gain by working here?” It’s this question that holds the key to a Life Plan Community’s recruitment success. You will never be able to outspend your recruitment competitors, but you can outposition them.
Other businesses have large recruitment budgets; senior living communities have their own advantages—purposeful work with residents, career growth opportunities and, as corny as it sounds, a daily opportunity to use one’s gifts and skills to make people’s lives better.
C-Suite Proof Points:
- Strong employer brands reduce cost-per-hire by up to ~50% and lower turnover by ~28%.
- U.S. employee engagement has fallen in recent years, underscoring the need to re-engage teams with a compelling EVP.
- Roughly half of candidates won’t consider employers with a poor reputation, even with higher pay.
- A bad hire can cost ~30% of first-year salary.
- Faster fills and lower cost: more organic applicants and referral flow.
This kind of positioning can compete against big recruitment budgets … but only if you are crystal clear with yourself and with the job market about what a recruit will gain by joining your team.
Strategy Outperforms Chance in Recruitment
I’m talking about a proven concept that helps successful organizations focus energy and investment on talent recruitment and retention: the employee value proposition (EVP). Developing a clearly defined EVP helps you identify and commit to the benefits and values your senior living community provides to its employees in exchange for their skills, knowledge and time.
When done thoughtfully, an EVP attracts, retains and engages employees in all departments. With an EVP, you are proactively aligning your recruitment and retention strategy with your long-term vision for your organization. Without an EVP, you are leaving those strategies to chance.
Do You Really Need an EVP?
Does every senior living provider need an EVP?
- If you’re comfortable with high healthcare agency costs, longer vacancies and inconsistent culture, then you can skip an EVP.
- If not, consider this: Strong employer brands cut cost-per-hire by up to 50% and time-to-fill by 1–2x, while lowering turnover by ~28%.
So, the EVP is for you if you want to attract the brightest minds and hardest workers. The EVP is designed to attract candidates looking for the type of meaningful career that Life Plan Communities offer in spades.
The need for a forward-looking EVP becomes even more critical for organizations in growth mode. If you hope to expand, you need to seed your workforce with people who can grow into future leadership roles and embrace any changes that technology may bring to the workplace.
Illustrate, Don’t Tell, to Attract Culture Matches
Like the best consumer brand platforms, the EVP conveys an emotional feel by illustrating your employer culture for candidates, which helps those who “fit” your culture to self-select your community as a desirable landing place.
For example, a single site community may highlight how it inherently offers exceptional ability for employees to quickly pivot to affect change in planning and policies. Having no offsite “corporate headquarters” to dictate policies might be a powerful signal to that type of candidate.
Equally valid is the multi-site organization that has a clearly defined, time-tested “best practices” culture that can attract a different type of candidate. Neither is right or better; the fit is all.
All senior living providers can highlight the rewarding experiences working with the senior population; how you do so can be a differentiator from your direct competitors, but there is a real sense in which our entire field can benefit from mutually different aging services from other parts of the larger employment field.
Where to Begin When Developing an EVP
Is it possible that you already have an EVP and just don’t know it?
No. If you can’t point to it on your desk or computer desktop (real or digital), then you are missing out on one of the most powerful tools in recruitment. Fortunately, the process itself of developing the EVP is priceless in how it engages and unites an organization, front line to board room.
Anatomy of the EVP
Though not impossible to develop an EVP with internal resources, most organizations recognize significant advantages to hire an outside partner to conduct these steps—impartiality, capacity and experience being the three biggest advantages. For example, Love & Company has a methodology tailored to senior living organizations that ensures involvement and inclusiveness from all key stakeholders throughout discovery. We believe you must ensure that this process is done “with” and not “to” your team members.
With your discovery complete and conclusions drawn, you are ready to bring strategic intentionality to an internal statement that will anchor all ensuing recruitment efforts: the EVP itself.
Your EVP should accurately illustrate:
- Your organization and its values
- Your employee culture (it’s ok to be slightly aspirational to attract the right candidates to enhance culture as well)
- Expectations about how employer and employee alike inform/represent your brand
- Purpose and connection. Why the work matters every shift.
- Growth pathways and education benefits
- Belonging and inclusion, plus realistic expectations about the work
In a nutshell, specifically answer:
What can be gained by working here?
An Achievable 90-Day Process
With the right planning and committed resources (which is why inviting a partner like Love & Company to help is so valuable), the process can take 90 days. Consider how this typical 90-day launch process touches each part of your organization and allows the flexibility to fine tune the EVP in its development stage.
- Weeks 1-2:
- Take stock of your current branding and communication materials—including all recruitment, onboarding, retention and referral information and assets.
- Review (or begin conducting) onboarding and exit interviews to gather employee feedback.
- Conduct group interviews with leadership and team members at all levels.
- Analyze competitor positioning of your primary employment competitors, both inside and outside of senior living.
- Weeks 3-5:
- Draft EVP; test with frontline staff (dining, hospitality, nursing, etc.)
- Incorporate into job descriptions to test.
- Weeks 6-8:
- Note any shifts in candidate response, rewrite job posts based on data, add day-in-the-life reels/videos and career growth details.
- Weeks 9-12:
- Measure ongoing candidate response and quality, as well as retention and attrition rates for potential EVP enhancements.
Measurement
Measure what matters in 90 days and beyond
To truly understand how your candidate volume and quality improve, as well as the EVPs’ impact on employee retention and attrition, it is important to measure progress. Some opportunities to measure success accurately are as follows:
- Candidate Net Promoter Score (NPS): send a 1-question survey after the process; invite promoters to refer.
- Time-to-fill: target 30–40% faster for evergreen roles within 6–9 months.
- Cost-per-hire: benchmark today; target ~25–50% reduction.
- Quality-of-hire: 90-day performance + manager satisfaction + early attrition (within 6 months of hire).
- Offer-acceptance rate: track monthly and document declines by role.
- Turnover: aim for a reduction year-over-year in priority roles.
How to Get Started
In summary: A better brand = lower spend, faster fills, stronger teams. If you don’t have an EVP as well as a way to measure success, you’re hiring by chance. Start the 90-day launch process this week and start measuring your success.
If you don’t have the internal capacity to start this process, Love & Company can help. We’re known for creating great senior living brands and building full residential occupancy, but we also create great employee brands and build workforces full of great culture fits in senior living. Contact Dana Pyles or Wayne Langley to talk about your situation.
