The nation’s staffing crisis is hitting senior care disproportionately hard, and what has kept our industry moving will not be enough to get us where we need to go. While recruitment, retention, and reputation have always been challenges in the senior care sector, current economic trends make it harder still to attract and keep team members who fit with your organization’s culture and care standards. 

Forum’s recent webinar, Rising Above the Rest: Using Your Brand to Impact Recruitment, Retention, Reputation, and Revenue discussed branding and how it attracts and keeps the right staff. Webinar panelists CC Andrews, Chief Strategist at Quantum Age Collaborative, and Lisa Thomson, Chief Operations Officer at Pathway Health, provided practical tips on owning your brand and using your core values to differentiate your organization from competitors. 

The United States has a rapidly growing population where the number of adults aged 65 and older will increase to 95 million by 2026. This growing population of seniors means that the aging services industry has an increasing need for qualified workers. To keep up with the aging population, the U.S. needs an additional 2.5 million workers by 2030. The unstable workforce leads to three main concerns for providers:

• Higher costs
• Access and quality of care 
• Poor working conditions 

The situation seems dire, and it is. Still, organizations can employ strategic plans and efforts to rise above the rest and continue providing excellent care with quality staff. 

What is Branding? 

The workforce is very diverse and multifaceted. Understanding the employees in your organization helps leaders identify the best ways to communicate, support, and educate staff members. Generational diversity is a significant consideration. Older workers will have different needs and expectations than younger workers, which impacts an organizational approach to messaging and branding. 

So, what is an employer brand? It’s the company’s ability to differentiate and promote what makes them unique—it’s everything that makes you stand out. An employer brand should tell a story about people and culture, not statistics and outcomes. Your business needs to create a vibrant and authentic vision of who you are as an employer and why employees want to work with you. 

You can begin the process of creating your unique employer brand in four simple steps: 

1. Audit and research: Interview your team and find out what makes your organization different. Record short interviews to promote your brand on social media. 
2. Identify your core strengths: Use your employee research and surveys to identify themes and core values in your organization. 
3. Craft your employer value proposition (EVP): Create a concise statement outlining why people should want to work for you. 
4. Share your message: Promote your branding and messaging anywhere and everywhere you have access, especially social media. This is a critical step to finding staffing that aligns with your core goals and values, which improves the recruitment and retention process. 

After this process, you can take internal research and messaging to learn what is broken and working well and then build a culture with intention. These four steps help retain the team you have and recruit the right people.  

Forum’s webinar dives deeper into honing organizational identity and articulating messaging to produce better clinical and operational outcomes. View the webinar, Rising Above the Rest: Using Your Brand to Impact Recruitment, Retention, Reputation, and Revenue, here.