AA Healthcare

Challenge

AA Healthcare’s hiring process was time-consuming and expensive. No matter how much money the team invested, they still couldn’t find enough applicants for their roles.

Solution

The AA Healthcare team dove into Apploi’s reporting tools to understand exactly how to allocate their budget. With a new process through Apploi, they quadrupled their applicants and reduced recruiting costs.

Yaakov Karsh had been in healthcare long enough to be wary of new software. Hiring was already an often decentralized, time-consuming process—and clunky programs only made his job more challenging.

Yaakov knew the pains of poor software firsthand. Before joining AA Healthcare, he had overseen the implementation of a new system that was, in his words, “riddled with glitches and fails.” Implementing the system was painful, and when it was installed, it often sat unused.

This was the perspective that Yaakov brought with him when he joined AA Healthcare as Director of Recruitment—a healthy dose of skepticism and the understanding that successful staffing required a unique level of oversight and clarity.

As AA Healthcare’s first Director of Recruitment, Yaakov got to work gathering data about staffing in the past year. His first thought was to find an AA Healthcare community that was recruiting successfully, and then implement their strategy across the other locations.

How would he find this data? He decided to check AA Healthcare’s staffing platform—the healthcare-specific HR tool, Apploi.

AA Healthcare Gets to Know Apploi

The team at AA Healthcare had used Apploi for some time, but the platform was new to Yaakov. To kick things off, he got on the phone with an Apploi representative with the hope of tracking down AA Healthcare’s historical hiring data. This conversation led to an even bigger discovery—Apploi’s metrics tools were advanced enough to help AA Healthcare develop a whole new recruiting strategy.

“There were certain things she was saying that I just didn’t believe a system could do,” Yaakov laughs, remembering early conversations with his Customer Service Representative. “I didn’t take anybody’s word for anything when I first started. But I learned that, with Apploi, the system actually was what everyone told me it was.”

Yaakov was always following industry hiring trends, so he had strong assumptions about what he’d find in AA Healthcare’s metrics—lots of candidates from the top job boards, and a few stragglers from social media. But as he delved into Apploi, his expectations were completely upturned.

The reality of AA Healthcare’s recruiting looked nothing like what he’d expected. Some of the job sites that AA Healthcare leaned on the most were turning up almost no candidates, while the most successful channels were rarely discussed.

With this data in hand, Yaakov made an audacious proposal: to reallocate the hiring budget, cut down on sponsorships for lower-priority roles, and focus on the channels that were actually bringing in qualified candidates.

A Brand New Strategy for Healthcare Hiring

For many healthcare employers, the idea of flipping recruiting upside down is pretty daunting. But Yaakov’s team agreed to his plan, allowing him to refocus on the most effective hiring channels and cut the cost of job sponsorships in half.

Changing the budget was only part of this new strategy. Yaakov’s team also dove into Apploi’s tools, making the most of features they’d never used before. After discovering that they could automate communication with Apploi, AA Healthcare put together an explosive re-engagement campaign. Using Apploi’s customizable fields, the team emailed 700 previously employed nursing aides in one email blast. They broke down base salaries and potential bonuses and added a strategically worded call to action—to great success.

“I think we hired 17 people off that one blast,” Yaakov shares. “At that time, we were so understaffed—we hadn’t hired someone in two weeks. But when we utilized that email blast, that was a game changer for us.”

AA Healthcare was done wasting time and money on an underperforming status quo. Instead, with the help of Apploi’s analytics and communication tools, they were able to take recruiting in a whole new direction.

Quadrupling Applicants and Slashing Recruiting Costs

“We started seeing this incredible stuff we weren’t even expecting to see in the first place,” Yaakov says. He thinks back for examples, and then shares how much it used to cost AA Healthcare to secure a single candidate—around $35 to $40 per applicant.

That’s a fantastic reduction in recruiting costs. But is AA Healthcare getting the candidates they need? Yaakov says that even that metric has improved.

Working Together to Build a Better System

Nowadays, Yaakov is a valued member of the Apploi community. He reaches out to the customer support team regularly to stay on top of industry trends and best practices. “Basically what I learned,” he says, “was that if something was taking me too long and it felt like there had to be an easier way to do it, there always was.”

The Apploi team has learned from his team too—recently, Yaakov saw an influx in candidate communications, and went looking for tools to help track texts and emails. Ideally, he wanted to download a log of all the messages the AA Healthcare team was sending, so he could gain quick insight into communication at different locations.

At the time, that feature didn’t exist. But within a few weeks, the Apploi team reached out to Yaakov, informing him that they’d been inspired to create the tool he was hoping for and inviting him to be a beta user.

“I was looking for a report that would allow me to stay on top of the back-and-forth on a macro level. And this thing happened. Somebody went out of their way to request this report. Somebody built it, and it works.”

Sharing Hiring Success

Yaakov’s been generous with his findings within his professional and personal communities. He shared the word about Apploi with friends, and even introduced the platform at the business he shares with his brother. Recruiting costs are down, applications are up, and some of the fear and frustration around hiring has ebbed away.

“There are people who aren’t paying any attention to this part of recruiting and don’t know there’s this sort of solution available,” says Yaakov. “But if they don’t compare this system to the other available systems out there, they’re just going to be losing out on time, energy, and the ability to be more successful. Compared to the system I was using, Apploi is just a pleasure and a breeze.”