Resources Mike Rodis
Artificial intelligence has helped McLean, VA-based Sunrise Senior Living improve 90-day employee retention at 265 of its U.S. communities by 27%, according to Vice President of Human Resources Mike Rodis. The company’s one-year retention rate improved by 14%.
Rodis shared the statistics related to the company’s work with Arena during a recent Argentum webinar, which Arena shared.
“We keep track of how much we spend recruiting new people and the challenge of covering shifts when we have turnover, whether through overtime or temporary labor, and all of that has gone down since we have been working with Arena,” he said. “More important is how it has affected our ability to provide great patient care by having experienced people in place for a longer period of time.”
Sunrise has 32,400 employees and each year hires about 12,000 workers, most of them to replace staff members who leave, Rodis said. The company processes 350,000 applications to make those hires.
To aid in the process, Arena pulls data from Sunrise’s applicant tracking system, from third-party sources and from its own online, interactive tool, which tests applicants’ reaction to various scenarios. The company then applies proprietary algorithms to these data in an effort to provide highly targeted recommendations on how well a prospective employee would do in a given job at a specific senior living community on a specific shift.
AI has not replaced traditional resume-reading and behavioral-based interviewing, Rodis said. “Those are very much a part of our recruiting process and very important to us,” he said. “It’s just that now we have this addition of predictive analytics, which just gives us a much better read on retention and how long someone is likely to stay at Sunrise.”
Arena said its technology has decreased turnover at client companies by a median of 38%.
In 2018, Benchmark Senior Living announced plans to work with the company. Other Arena clients have included Baltimore-based LifeBridge Health, which operates the Levindale Hebrew Geriatric Center and Hospital, which offers skilled long-term, respite, dementia, respiratory and comfort/hospice care. Overall, the company said it has worked with more than 450 residential or health-related facilities.
