April 7, 2025
Hire Talent for Compassion and Personality—Not Experience
Hiring based on experience alone can hold your community back.
In this Senior Living Minute, Deborah Potter challenges the traditional hiring mindset in senior living and advocates for prioritizing personality, empathy, and emotional intelligence over resumes. Hiring for compassion instead of just experience helps build stronger teams and better connects with families at critical decision points.
Learn how bringing in the right people—not just the most familiar ones—can help your community elevate care and fulfill its mission.
Transcript: Hire Talent for Compassion and Personality—Not Experience
What I see all the time—and when I say ‘us,’ I mean senior living leaders—is that we play it safe with hiring.
I’m a huge advocate for hiring someone whose personality is the best fit—someone who is authoritative, compassionate, empathetic, and emotionally intelligent. That’s the kind of person I want in front of another human being.
But what I often see is hiring based solely on a resume that says, ‘I’ve done this exact job.’ And that means we’re often just recycling mediocre talent.
If we want to embrace real sales success in senior living, we have to bring in stellar new talent, people who can connect with prospects feeling fear, uncertainty, and trepidation at a major crossroads in their lives.