The home-based care sector is no stranger to labor shortages and high turnover. This is due in part to the challenges of today’s job market, but partially self-imposed: Employers need to improve their hiring practices. As the home care industry grows, building a strong, stable staff will be paramount to providing quality care.
Today’s senior has a 70% chance of needing long-term services and support, with 76% of adults 50 and older preferring to receive those services at home, according to AARP. Yet the home-based care industry is plagued with workforce shortages.
Maryland-based Arena Analytics challenges employers across health care, and especially within home health care, to try something new. Through predictive analytics, Arena’s platform predicts and identifies people who will thrive in an organization, and augments the hiring pool by expanding the traditional definitions of talent. These measures ensure that providers have a high performing workforce on which they can depend.
Look deeper, hire better
To remain competitive and ensure full staff coverage, home health care providers have no choice but to look beyond their usual candidate pools. Candidates who have done the job before may top your list, but in a labor shortage, it’s crucial for hiring managers to consider those who might not meet the experience requirement.
“Your past experience is not necessarily a predictor of success in a particular role,” says Arena Analytics Chief Marketing Officer Solange Jacobs. “The best candidate is not necessarily the one who has held the job before. We use AI to parse the special and unique combination of traits, skills and attributes that will make a person the right fit for a particular role in a particular location at any given time, and we compare that against the special and unique combination of traits that made others successful in the same roles in the past to find the patterns. Humans simply can’t do that.”
Agencies and operators embracing this new approach to hiring are intent on stabilizing their workforces. They recognize that labor shortages are nowhere near slowing and the only way to remain competitive is to creatively optimize how they hire, manage, promote and retain their workforces.
“People are at the heart of our business. The patient experience is paramount of course, but we can’t forget the people who deliver that experience,” Jacobs says. “At Arena, we believe that people are your strategic, competitive advantage. And our technology empowers you to bring the right people into your organization and keep them for the long haul.”
The power of data
While hiring managers use resumes and application data to drive hiring decisions, Arena uses data and analytics. The platform collects continuous feeds of data, including market data about the local economy, HR data about historical hires and terminations, and applicant data from a range of stimuli to predict workplace outcomes. Using this information, Arena customizes predictions to the outcomes that matter most to organizations, including employee retention, turnover reduction, and patient satisfaction.
Unlike behavior assessments, Arena’s AI is not looking for patterns in the people a home health agency hires. Instead, the platform seeks to find similarities among those who were employed when a firm was delivering on its stated outcomes — from retention to time and attendance to staff engagement and even sales yield.
According to Home Care Pulse, the turnover rate in 2020 across U.S. home care agencies was 65.2%. Arena Analytics’ recommended hires (“likelies”) lead to first-year turnover at 23% less than industry average. The company suggests that data makes the difference.
“As a side effect, Arena’s models increase the diversity of your teams and help ensure that your teams better reflect the racial and socio makeup of the communities you serve,” Jacobs says. Though not through any fault or malevolence, good people who would thrive in select roles are probably being arbitrarily excluded.
What hiring “right” means for an agency’s bottom line
Employee turnover is a major business expense. The hard costs around training and onboarding new employees are costly and time-consuming, as are the soft costs of losing institutional knowledge and experience. With these mounting expenses, turnover is more than just an HR issue. It is an organizational issue.
Providers that implement Arena to address turnover have seen immediate savings. One large skilled nursing operator was experiencing 53% turnover among new hires within 180 days. Partnering with Arena resulted in a 28% reduction in new hire turnover, with an estimated annual savings of $520,000.
For another Arena client, a senior living provider, turnover fell from 37% to 19%, with a $152,000 savings in the first year. Given the overlap in labor challenges, Arena believes that home-based care agencies may well see similar results.
Hiring the “right” candidates from day one allows organizations to eliminate the consequences of unintended bias and results in better health outcomes for seniors and other vulnerable members of our society. By relying on predictive analytics to support data-backed hiring decisions, Arena Analytics is empowering providers with the organizational stability needed to succeed in a tight economy.
This article is sponsored by Arena Analytics. To learn more about how Arena can help your organization hire the right candidates, visit Arena.io.
