Over the last year, Belmont Village Senior Living has built out a recruiting department that is already paying dividends.
The Houston, Texas-based operator initially started the department years ago with only one vice president of recruitment. Now, it has seven dedicated recruiters, all to maintain the stream of new workers to keep up with projected demand ahead, according to Mercedes Kerr, president of Belmont Village.
“This has been a task force that has really left no corner unchecked to make sure that we were doing things in the very best way possible,” Kerr told Senior Housing News.
Like many other operators, Belmont Village is doing all this to get ahead in staffing, which is among the most critical areas of senior living operations. The senior living industry faces a swell of demand ahead, but taking care of residents and growing for the future will require many more staffers than the industry currently has.
The new department is a pivot from a model of communities handling their own recruiting, to one that is based on a centralized methodology, according to Kerr. By doing so, the company said it has reduced turnover and boosted retention. The new practice also has given communities more time to focus on the employees they currently have.
“We frankly revamped absolutely every single aspect of recruiting during that period of time, and in some cases, we reverted back to templates that we had used in the past,” Kerr said.
Building the team
Some senior living operators have taken gradual approaches to change and evolution in the years since the Covid-19 pandemic. Kerr said the new Belmont Village recruiting team was built “in one fell swoop,” largely over the course of the last year.
Initially, the company’s recruiting team included only Tara Arancibia, vice president of recruitment. The operator quickly expanded on the team by bringing on seven additional recruiters over the span of around a year.
Belmont Village’s corporate recruiting team is meant to take some of the work off the plate of community staff. Instead of seeking out candidates, communities now have more time to train and interview new workers.
Like in sales, Belmont Village’s recruiting team takes the stance that new leads are precious opportunities that must be taken quickly. As such, the company stresses speed-to-lead in all new recruiting interactions. Along with adjusting the speed of when interviews were taking place – sometimes within 24 hours of an initial call – recruiters have also changed their screening process in order to sooner complete the hiring process.
The goal is to avoid having open positions for long, as that could impact scheduling and staffing, Kerr said. Managers coordinate with the recruiters to help fill vacancies.
“If you have a great candidate that is in front of you, and you are not connecting with that individual quickly, it’s very likely that they’re going to take that next phone call, that other meeting, that interview and find a job somewhere else before you even get yourself organized,” Kerr said.
Belmont Village is not the only senior living operator taking this approach. Commonwealth Senior Living’s recruiters have a target time of four hours to contact applicants once they have applied for a position, and Atria Senior Living looks to close on candidates within 10 days.
Each recruiter is also constantly seeking out applicants, and averages between 50 and 60 contacts daily. Alongside the initial recruitment messaging and interest, the team of recruiters also handle the initial phone interview to determine who will be moving forward in the interviewing process.
“They are the primary contact and their goal is to be able to put the right people in front of the managers that need to have those interviews,” Kerr said.
Belmont Village gears the positions toward hiring for specific roles, such as management needs, both at the community and regional level. That is driven by a need to recruit for a wide variety of roles, including caregivers, frontline staff and corporate roles.
Belmont Village budgets for its recruiting by allocating a set amount of revenue from each community for the process. Because recruiters are often covering multiple communities, Kerr said having the team is still a good deal compared to bringing on third-party recruiters.
“Just about everything in what we do in recruiting has evolved, and it is a reflection of the times,” Kerr said. “Not just in terms of how challenged the market has been … but also just in terms of how the profile of our teams has also evolved.”
As Kerr alluded, Belmont Village has also shifted back to older staffing practices by consolidating its recruiting efforts to its corporate office. In addition to the physical recruiters, an AI-enabled tool is being used to walk applicants through their first steps and schedule an interview around the clock.
‘Efforts paid off’
Since the beginning of the year, the Belmont Village recruitment team has scheduled over 5,300 interviews. The company also uses a chatbot that has helped schedule an additional 2,700 interviews as of early August.
Belmont Village has adjusted its strategy based on the respective markets where its communities are located. In some markets including Austin, Texas and Chicago the operator has to offer more part-time and flexible positions. The team has also had to adapt its strategy in Los Angeles to coordinate scheduling among clusters of communities.
Now, with the recruiting team in place, the percentage of open positions at Belmont Village has been reduced to “manageable and reasonable” levels that fit with natural turnover, Kerr said.
“Their efforts paid off very quickly, and we were very pleased with the change,” she added.
Belmont Village’s recruiting methods have helped reduce the number of agency and contract staffers by filling more open positions. That, along with a reduction of overtime, has helped keep the operator’s staffing budgets manageable.
“It has paid for itself in terms of our ability to be efficient with what is essentially our most important asset, which is our human capital,” Kerr said. “And it’s what keeps everything moving in the way that it should.”
Kerr said that the operator is taking a wait-and-see approach to building out the team further, including expanding it. The company has two new construction projects underway, and Kerr expects that as new communities come online, that will increase the need for recruiters.
“As we have more properties under our belt, maybe we’ll ultimately tip the scales and decide that we need to add one or two more people,” Kerr said. “But right now, I think that the team is very efficient and works very, very well.”
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