In a senior care facility, your most valuable asset is your staff. But with labor costs, your most valuable asset is also your most expensive asset. And as expenses continue to climb, leaders throughout the industry are looking into tools that allow them to balance both cost and care while also helping them to hire faster, manage onboarding more effectively, and engage employees to boost retention.

Unfortunately, many human capital management (HCM) platforms on the market are general solutions meant to fit the needs of a wide range of businesses. This doesn’t mean that they don’t work, but for an industry as complex as senior care, having an HCM platform that caters to your very intricate, complex needs is a must.

Why? Because you already deal with too many other challenges.

• • • The stakes are higher for senior care providers, who are responsible for caring for and serving our most vulnerable citizens.
    • Compliance requirements and staffing mandates are being scrutinized more and more, and they're tightening all the time.
    • Staffing shortages and fierce competition for top talent makes it challenging to not only hire but also retain skilled employees.
    • Labor expenditures are continuing to climb as profit margins dwindle.

So, here are 3 major evaluation points to consider when evaluating HCM software to make sure you're getting something tailored to your needs.

Crafting a Memorable Candidate Experience
High turnover in senior care is nothing new, but since the start of the pandemic, staffing shortages throughout health care have been especially bad. On top of this, there is also an abundance of open positions across many other fields, as millions of workers in the U.S. have been quitting their jobs in record numbers in what has become known as the Great Resignation. What this means for senior care is that you’re not just competing with other facilities for finding and attracting top talent but also different sectors within health care and even other industries entirely.

If you’re currently managing talent manually, then switching to a digital process will help you speed up your recruiting, keep track of applications, and maintain communication with candidates. If your talent management processes are already digital but aren’t well integrated into your current HCM suite – or if they aren’t industry specific for senior care – then ensuring your HCM software incorporates a recruiting and applicant tracking platform designed for reaching the skilled candidates you need is a must.

Features to look for include optimized job posts designed to attract both industry veterans and people exploring the field for the first time, analytics to help you better track your job posts, and trackable onboarding paperwork so you can maintain compliance. The program should also enable a seamless flow of new hires into onboarding and payroll, helping to boost efficiency and eliminate the risk of human error.

With Viventium Recruiting and Applicant Tracking powered by Apploi, you’re able to do all of that – and more.

An Onboarding Process That Is Positive and Easy
Onboarding is a continuation of the relationship that started when your new employee first learned about your company. As a result, it’s your job to develop a process for them during their time onboarding that mirrors their candidate experience.

Creating an organized onboarding experience may appear to be a formal and time-consuming task, but take a step back and consider your entire hiring and onboarding process. What are you doing now for onboarding, and what are the first impressions your new hires are going to get from it? Put yourself in their shoes: what would you want to know on your first day and first week as a new employee? What would convince you that you've come to the right place? What are some things that might make onboarding go a lot more smoothly?

Onboarding, according to the Society for Human Resources Management, is a critical moment for influencing new employees and leaving a lasting impression, and 69% of your employees are more likely to stay with you for 3 years if you start with a positive onboarding experience.

Investing in Your Employees through Learning Management Tools
According to the findings in LinkedIn’s 2021 Workplace Learning Report, when top leadership gets behind learning, employees are more engaged and programs have more impact. Yet in the 2020 edition of the Workplace Learning Report, only 27% of learning and development professionals said that their CEOs actively encouraged continuing education.

In senior care, you have to make sure that your skilled employees are prepared, ready, and able to do anything they encounter. So, when you’re evaluating an HCM platform, you should make sure that it has learning integrated because it makes it easier for your employees and helps them do their jobs successfully. And when they are content, engaged and have opportunities for training and development, they are more likely to stay with your facility longer, improving your worker retention. They will also give higher quality care to your patients, resulting in happier, more satisfied clients.

In this day and age where everything is digital and easily accessible online, there’s no reason not to give your employees the option to access learning material from anywhere at any time. Platforms such as Viventium Learning powered by Nevvon can offer training and education to all your departments and locations on topics including continuum of care, bedside manners, dementia, COVID-19, HIPPA, and ADL.

While there are a number of other criteria to consider when evaluating an HCM company, the above are critical in a rapidly growing industry like senior care, where finding and retaining talent is paramount. To find out more about our products for recruiting, applicant tracking, and onboarding, Viventium Learning, or our full suite of software solutions for senior care, visit our Talent Acquisition, Learning Management, or Senior Care pages.