Zimmet Healthcare Services

Challenge

Zimmet was trying to help the independently owned hospices they oversaw find and hire quality candidates. But without insight into each hospice’s hiring process, it was tough to know whether staffing problems were due to the candidate shortage or inefficient operations.

Solution

The Zimmet team implemented Apploi at every hospice they worked with, streamlining operations across every community, and greatly simplifying billing and oversight.

How Zimmet Regained Trust in the Healthcare Candidate Market

Just a few years into the hospice business, Zimmet wasn’t getting enough candidates.

On the surface, the problem seemed simple—there was a candidate shortage, which made it tough to find applicants for the hospice locations that Zimmed worked with. But without any deeper understanding of where hiring was stalling out, that was all Ari Stawis, Director of Professional Services & Development, knew.

“We just weren’t finding hits,” explains Ari, talking about his experience working with independently owned hospices around the country. “We weren’t even getting any nurses or any applicants. Obviously, the concern from the operational end was that we didn’t have staff—but it was a deeper concern of, we’re not even getting applicants, so are they even out there in the market?”

Given the state of the healthcare industry, it was easy to accept that there just weren’t enough job seekers out there to satisfy needs. But that didn’t solve the problem—and it wasn’t an answer Ari was going to accept. The healthcare industry was facing a candidate shortage, but that didn’t mean the Zimmet team should or could give up on their hiring. If anything, it meant they needed to optimize their process in a new way.

Room for Improvement

Looking across the hospices Zimmet was involved with, Ari knew the standard hiring process could be stronger. Searching for ways to improve recruiting, he took a good look at the strategies already in place.

Ari worked with administrators, owners, and office managers at a slew of individually owned hospices. When one of these workers needed to make a hire, they would first notify Ari, who would then approve the role and pass it along to Zimmet’s back office. Office workers would take it from there—posting the job, setting up paid ads, and forwarding resumes to each hospice.

Every step of this hiring process seemed logical, but it asked a lot from the back office, both in terms of bandwidth and billing. Relying entirely on paid job ads was costly and not always efficient. And to keep records organized and accurate, Zimmet’s team had to spend time every month reviewing and reconciling billing.

“From a billing perspective, it complicated things,” says Ari, remembering that initial process. “It was all being billed to one central location, and then we would have to farm it out.”

In other words, at the end of every month, the back office had to manually match job ads to their respective hospice communities. It was a recurring project that, with a better system, really didn’t need to exist.

Finding a Solution

For a long time, Ari had been aware of Apploi, the only hiring platform designed specifically for healthcare businesses. Apploi had partnered with Zimmet at events such as the Zimmet conference—and Ari had gotten the chance to know and work with Adam Lewis, Apploi’s founder. 

That was how the Zimmet team wound up introducing a new hiring process to all the hospices they worked with. By inviting administrators from each hospice onto the Apploi platform, Ari gave them something they’d never had before—direct control over job postings. 

Suddenly, the Zimmet back office workers didn’t have to spend their time manually posting open roles to job boards. And with hospice administrators owning their own job posts, there was no longer any need to reconcile job post billings at the end of the month. 

Operational Insight and a Changing Process

Immediately, using Apploi gave Ari the ability to see exactly how administrators, executive directors, and office managers went about filling their open roles. 

With this greater visibility, Ari could see which resumes were coming in and monitor how his team was using the platform. “It gives me a good idea of whether people are using the system the proper way. Are they processing the applications and going through the system efficiently? That has been a tremendous help for me.”

Ari believed that if one part of the process wasn’t working, it was generally an indication of more issues. He was able to use Apploi not just to hire, but also to quickly gauge the efficacy of his team at large.

“It was a good case study for me to see how organized everyone was, how they’re managing that process, and how quickly they’re interviewing and following up. Before, I was really living blindly in that regard. Sure, I could have asked for Indeed access and gone through each job individually, but that would’ve taken up a lot more work and just was not as realistic from my perspective.”

Connecting With Candidates

Now, Apploi is an everyday part of hiring for all the hospices that Zimmet oversees. At each hospital, workers use it to post, distribute, and fill their open roles—and since Apploi automatically distributes these posts to dozens of job boards, with built-in tools such as prescreening and 1-click apply, these hospices quickly saw an increase in both the quantity and quality of applicants.

“I go in probably twice a week just to see if we have any new applicants for the positions we’re looking for,” says Ari. “That then allows me to follow up and say, hey, I know you told me we need to hire someone. Well, I see that there are five applicants in Apploi. What’s the latest status of that?”

The candidate shortage certainly made hiring challenging, but that didn’t mean Zimmet’s staffing team couldn’t work towards progress—and, as a result, help hospices find more and better applicants.

“I have a few icons that are always open on my internet browser, and one of them is Apploi. I’m aware of every job that is needed in the hospices, and I can see how many applicants come in and what the story is. Not only has Apploi brought in more and better candidates, it has also given me the ability to see how efficiently everyone works operationally.”