Sunshine Retirement Living

Challenge

Sunshine Retirement needed excellent frontline workers to keep their communities thriving. But without an efficient hiring process, these workers were hard to find.

Solution

The team at Sunshine standardized their recruiting process with Apploi, cutting down on days to hire and helping consistently attract and hire strong candidates.

Sunshine Retirement Living, a leading operator of retirement communities and senior living facilities across the United States, had a problem. 

The ability to offer excellent care across Sunshine Retirement’s communities came down to employing excellent front-line workers. But those essential positions—such as caregivers and housekeepers—were also the most difficult roles to fill.

As Sunshine’s Human Resources Director, Ali Cason saw this issue firsthand. “For a lot of our positions, our primary method of recruiting was to post one job ad on the biggest sites,” she recalled. “But when we’re filling frontline positions, that’s often not where those candidates are looking.”

There was no one clear issue that was holding back Sunshine’s recruiting. But one thing was clear: the traditional recruiting methods that might work for other roles weren’t helping Ali’s team connect with frontline workers.

The Solution: A Revamped Hiring Platform

To find qualified frontline candidates, Ali’s team needed tools that would put them in touch with frontline workers—and offer insight into what, if anything, was going wrong. 

That’s when they first discovered Apploi. As a healthcare-specific workforce management platform, Apploi offered hiring tools that had been designed with frontline positions in mind. As Ali learned about Apploi’s automated hiring workflows and job post distribution, she sensed this was a tool that could bring Sunshine Retirement to a new era of efficient and effective recruitment. 

“When I was introduced to Apploi, the idea that a job post could be put out to multiple different websites through the click of a very simple button was huge for me,” Ali said. “The other part that really sold me was the automated conversations. In this industry, where we’re working with lots of caregivers and frontline staff, we need to be able to give quick responses and keep them engaged. Doing that through Apploi was so simple and so easy. That made me know Apploi was gonna be the right direction for us to move.”

Results: Efficient Frontline Recruiting

With Apploi’s implementation, Sunshine Retirement experienced a significant transformation in its recruiting process. 

Sunshine’s communities had previously relied on manual job postings. This process was both time-consuming and difficult to monitor. But with Apploi, department leaders at every community could find candidates efficiently—and Ali had the chance to see what was actually happening. 

“We have communities all over the United States,” Ali shared. “They have various methods of bringing in candidates, and varying hours and availability. So this quick, easy process where they can log in and immediately open a job ad or see candidates has been great.”

With a straightforward and user-friendly platform at their disposal, leaders at each Sunshine Retirement’s community could more easily find the right candidates—whether they spent hours of their day on tasks related to hiring, or just minutes. 

“Now in Apploi, we can literally just go in, click that little eyeball button, and it’s open,” said Ali. “And if we don’t need it anymore, we just click again, and it’s closed. It eliminated a lot of that very manual process.”

A Data-Informed Hiring Strategy

When Sunshine was relying on a manual hiring process, it was challenging to track trends or see where breakdowns occurred. But with Apploi, Ali’s team could pull reports and dive directly into hiring activity at specific facilities. That made it far easier to identify issues and offer support.

For Ali, that meant the difference between relying on second-hand information from facilities across the country and getting into the data herself. “Now,” Ali explained, “when I get these phone calls from communities saying they need agency workers because they can’t get enough candidates, I can pull up Apploi and go, okay, what’s happening here? It’s given us a higher level of insight into the candidates the communities are really getting, and how they’re managing their workflow. It was easier to manage those analytics and pull them quickly on Apploi rather than through a job board.”

Driving Success Across Communities

Reviewing Apploi’s analytic insights, the Sunshine Retirement team was also able to dig into market discrepancies. If one community received plenty of applicants, but another did not, why was that?

Sunshine Retirement’s Human Resources Generalist, Isaac Reynolds, found himself asking just this question. He was working with two communities located just twenty miles apart—but their candidate flow couldn’t have been more different.

At first glance, this discrepancy was mystifying. Why would one community attract so many more candidates, despite being located in the same location and hiring the same roles? 

Frontline Recruiting With a User-Friendly System

Today, Sunshine Retirement is successfully filling frontline roles with Apploi. Even as the candidate shortage continues to affect post-acute businesses, finding the right tools has made a huge difference across Sunshine’s communities.

“This was probably the easiest integration that I’ve done with any new vendor,” Ali says. “With the other recruiting platforms that we’ve used previously, there’s been consistent maintenance that has to be done. The fact that I don’t have to get my hands into Apploi’s system to maintain it consistently is something I’m very grateful for. It is the most hands-off system that we have—and we have a lot.”

“But with Apploi, it’s easy, and there’s nothing hidden. It just runs. It’s like we were sold the car, and now, the car runs. Sure, we change the oil every once in a while—that’s no big surprise. But in general, it does exactly what we want it to do.”