Is attracting and retaining top talent keeping you up at night? It is for many of our clients in the senior living industry, and with good reason. According to an AARP Public Policy Institute study “The Aging of the Baby Boom and the Growing Care Gap: A Look at Future Declines in the Availability of Family Caregivers,” an epic caregiver shortage is on the horizon over the next 20 years that will provide challenges for individuals, families, and care providers.

Migration of Care from Family to Professionals

Traditionally, family members have been the primary caregivers as people age. However, an increasing percentage of this responsibility is shifting to professional caregivers due to lifestyle changes such as divorce, childlessness, and smaller families and will increase as baby boomers age out of caregiver roles and into the population needing care.

The AARP study points out that the caregiver support ratio is already in decline, having reached a peak in 2010 before beginning a steady loss which is expected to increase sharply. “In just 13 years, as the baby boomers age into their 80s, the decline in the caregiver support ratio will shift from a slow decline to a free fall.”

Competition is on the Rise for a Qualified Workforce

This signals an increasing need for third-party caregivers. While this presents tremendous opportunities for the senior living market, the changing population demographics also pose worrisome barriers to growth – for example, the ability to secure and retain a qualified workforce. As the industry grows exponentially, the competition for caregivers will continue to heat up.

So, what does this mean to your senior living community?  Without robust staffing, your organization’s growth could be limited.

A primary challenge is attracting and retaining young, college-educated caregivers who might not be inclined to pursue a path in senior care initially – due to lack of awareness or availability of other options. How will you market your organization as an attractive option that will reach the right job candidates? G5 can help.

Getting Qualified Caregivers to Your Career Site

The challenge begins with reaching potential job candidates. How can you drive traffic to your career site and then convert viewers into applicants? With G5’s new careers tool, you can harness the data collected from hundreds of senior living communities to build a career page that is integrated with a popular job search engine and drives the right candidates to your community. G5 can help you:

1. Build a search engine optimized web page to capture career-related searches.

2. Pull and display your job feed from your Indeed recruitment platform.

3. Give career seekers a taste for what being a member of your team would feel like by keeping them on your brand’s website for longer before sending them to your recruitment platform to apply.

4. Use Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) to reconstruct your career site to speak directly to career seeker’s journey. G5 can help optimize the display of your open positions and increase the likelihood that you will convert viewers into job applicants.

5. Digital Advertising (PPC) is a great way to complement your efforts in attracting career-minded searchers.  G5 has developed and fine-tuned a Digital Advertising career recruitment strategy that leverages the power of Facebook’s user data to reach highly-targeted segments.

G5 can also provide expert advice to help you retain your current talent. For instance, showcasing current employees through easy-to-make employee testimonials. A testimonial statement or video that describes the company culture and/or competitive salaries and benefits creates a positive impression of the organization and can reinforce a reader’s decision to complete the application process.

Eliminate duplicate work. G5 makes it easy to double down on the effort you’ve already invested in employee search tools. The G5 careers tool pulls the code from your preferred third party career search sites into the tool. This allows it to systematically pull the job listings to your career website and reflects changes made to that site – so you don’t have to maintain duplicate job listings to get the results you want.

Interested in learning more? Download this webinar to find out how to turn your digital strategy into a recruiting machine. With a strong pipeline for qualified caregivers, you can be in the position to increase occupancy at your communities now and into the future.