QualDerm Partners, a leading dermatology organization operating across 17 states and more than 60 facilities, has demonstrated exceptional efficiency in its talent acquisition efforts, completing 787 hires in a single year with an average time-to-fill of just 32 days. This impressive performance, managed by a lean team of six talent acquisition professionals overseeing up to 150 open requisitions simultaneously, has been attributed to the strategic implementation and robust utilization of Workable, an advanced applicant tracking system (ATS). The company’s success story underscores the transformative potential of specialized technology in navigating the complexities of high-volume, multi-location healthcare recruitment.
The Dynamic Landscape of Healthcare Recruitment: A Pressing Challenge
The healthcare sector today faces an unprecedented talent crisis, characterized by persistent shortages across various roles, from highly specialized providers like surgeons and physician assistants to essential support staff such as medical assistants, front office personnel, and call center teams. The demand for healthcare services continues to surge, driven by an aging population, expanding access to care, and the increasing prevalence of chronic conditions. This demand often outpaces the supply of qualified professionals, leading to intense competition for talent. According to recent industry reports, the average time to fill healthcare positions can often exceed 45-60 days for critical roles, significantly impacting patient care and organizational revenue.
For organizations like QualDerm Partners, which boasts a workforce of just over 2,000 employees and a wide geographic footprint, these challenges are magnified. Recruiting at scale, across diverse roles, and in a highly competitive market demands not only a sophisticated strategy but also the technological infrastructure to support it. Every day a provider chair sits unfilled in a dermatology clinic, for instance, directly translates to lost revenue and potential delays in patient access to care. Therefore, the ability to rapidly identify, engage, and onboard qualified candidates is not merely an HR function but a critical business imperative.
QualDerm’s Journey: Identifying the Need for a Modern Solution
Prior to its current success, QualDerm Partners faced significant hurdles in its recruitment processes, particularly following a period of rapid organizational growth and a pivotal merger. The existing applicant tracking system, Paylocity, proved inadequate for the scale and complexity of their hiring needs. This legacy system presented several critical limitations that hindered efficient talent acquisition.
The primary challenge was the severe lack of robust data and analytics capabilities. Key performance indicators (KPIs) crucial for high-volume healthcare recruiting—such as time to fill, time to hire, and candidate pipeline health—were either entirely unavailable or impossible to track with reliability. This data vacuum had profound operational consequences. Without quantifiable metrics, QualDerm’s talent acquisition team struggled to understand the true cost of open positions, making it impossible to build a data-driven case for strategic investments in recruitment improvements. For example, without knowing the average time to fill, it was difficult to calculate the precise revenue impact of a vacant dermatologist position or to identify bottlenecks in the hiring process.
Furthermore, the user experience of the previous platform was cumbersome and unintuitive, creating unnecessary friction for recruiters and hiring managers alike. In a fast-evolving talent market, the system felt static, unable to adapt to new recruiting methodologies or provide the agility required to compete effectively for top talent. Iesha Vann, QualDerm’s Manager of Talent Acquisition, whose team of six oversees all non-provider recruitment across the entire organization, recognized these limitations acutely. Her team frequently managed as many as 150 open requisitions at once, a volume that an inefficient system could quickly turn into chaos.
Fortunately, some members of QualDerm’s talent acquisition team, including Vann, had prior experience with Workable before the merger. They understood the capabilities of a well-designed ATS and what it could deliver in terms of efficiency, data visibility, and user experience. When the opportunity arose to re-evaluate their recruitment technology, the decision to return to Workable was, as Vann noted, "straightforward." The team understood that an investment in a modern, dynamic platform was essential to support their strategic growth and operational demands.
The Workable Advantage: Transforming Recruitment into a Strategic Asset
The transition back to Workable marked a significant turning point for QualDerm Partners. The platform immediately offered a stark contrast to their previous system, providing a solution that was actively evolving, genuinely usable, and purpose-built to support the kind of high-volume, multi-location hiring QualDerm required. This shift transformed the talent acquisition function from a reactive, administrative process into a proactive, strategic business driver.
Achieving Unprecedented Scale and Efficiency
One of the most immediate and profound impacts of Workable was its ability to manage QualDerm’s substantial hiring volume and geographic scale. With up to 150 open requisitions active at any given time, often opening in clusters due to facility expansions or staff turnover, the operational demands on the recruiting team are immense. Workable’s robust requisition management and hiring plan functionality allowed the team to systematically stack, categorize, and prioritize openings. This ensured that high-urgency roles received immediate attention while the broader candidate pipeline remained organized and manageable.
Critically, the platform provided multi-location visibility, enabling a recruiter to gain a comprehensive overview of all hiring activities across QualDerm’s 17 states from a single, centralized view – a capability that was simply impossible with their previous system. This holistic perspective drastically improved coordination and resource allocation.
The integration of AI screening tools further enhanced efficiency, becoming a core component of how the team manages inbound application volume. Instead of manually sifting through hundreds or thousands of applications across dozens of open roles, recruiters could quickly identify and prioritize the strongest candidates. This intelligent automation maintained recruitment quality without sacrificing the speed essential for high-volume hiring.
The Metrics That Matter: Data-Driven Decision Making
Perhaps the most significant transformation brought about by Workable was the establishment of reliable, actionable data. Before Workable, QualDerm had no consistent or accurate way to measure critical metrics like time to fill. This was a substantial deficiency in a healthcare organization where provider availability directly influences revenue generation.
Today, QualDerm proudly tracks an average time to fill of 32 days. This figure is not merely a statistic; it serves as a crucial baseline that anchors their cost-per-vacancy analysis. By understanding this metric, leadership now possesses a data-driven lens through which to evaluate recruiting performance, identify areas for improvement, and quantify the return on investment for talent acquisition initiatives.
"We couldn’t track time to fill in Paylocity. Now we have a yearly average of 32 days, and that number is important because we use it to keep cost per vacancy as low as possible," stated Iesha Vann, highlighting the direct financial and strategic implications of this newfound data visibility. The ability to track candidate sourcing, pipeline movement, and hiring outcomes has elevated the TA function from a purely operational role to a strategic partner in QualDerm’s overall business objectives. Executive leadership is now engaging directly with real-time hiring data, fostering greater confidence and alignment in strategic workforce planning.
Revolutionizing Candidate Engagement and Recruiter Efficiency
Workable’s innovative features have also dramatically improved candidate experience and recruiter efficiency, particularly through its video interview and communication functionalities.
Video Interviews: Significant Time Savings and Expanded Access
One of the clearest examples of Workable’s efficiency impact at QualDerm came through the video interview feature. The call center, which experiences high turnover, frequently presented the team with scenarios of 10 or more simultaneous openings. Traditional screening methods for such high-volume roles would have consumed an enormous amount of recruiter time and significantly slowed the hiring process.
By activating Workable’s video interview feature, QualDerm was able to screen candidates asynchronously and at scale. Recruiters could send video screening requests, allowing candidates to record their responses at their convenience. This eliminated the need for complex scheduling coordination and enabled hiring managers to review recordings flexibly. The tangible result was an impressive saving of 20 to 30 hours of recruiter time within a single 30-day period during a high-volume hiring cycle.
The success of this feature has led to its expansion beyond the call center. Senior leaders, including those who previously had limited visibility into early-stage candidates, now actively participate in reviewing video screens. This has not only streamlined the initial assessment phase but also fostered greater collaboration and transparency in the hiring process. "Anyone can watch them now, including leaders. It opened up the process," a QualDerm spokesperson observed, underscoring the feature’s role in democratizing access to candidate evaluations. The team is actively identifying additional roles and workflows where video interviewing can be strategically applied throughout the year.
Texting, Self-Scheduling, and a Seamless Candidate Journey
In today’s competitive talent market, particularly for clinical and administrative roles, candidate responsiveness is a critical competitive advantage. QualDerm leverages Workable’s texting feature throughout the entire hiring process—from initial outreach and interview scheduling to pre-start communications. The immediacy of text-based communication has significantly reduced candidate drop-off rates and maintained high levels of engagement at every stage, catering to modern communication preferences.
Similarly, Workable’s self-scheduling functionality has substantially reduced the administrative burden on the recruiting team. Instead of manually coordinating interview calendars across QualDerm’s 60-plus facilities, candidates can directly book into available slots. This eliminates tedious back-and-forth communication, accelerates the time to interview, and provides a more candidate-centric experience.
Furthermore, QualDerm has made a meaningful investment in building out its careers page within Workable. This commitment ensures a polished, branded, and professional entry point for candidates, regardless of how they discovered the job opening. A well-designed careers page enhances the employer brand and sets a positive tone for the entire candidate journey, reinforcing QualDerm’s commitment to attracting top talent.
Ensuring Compliance and Building Executive Trust
Healthcare hiring is subject to stringent compliance requirements that general-purpose ATS platforms often struggle to accommodate. Workable has allowed QualDerm to embed critical documentation directly into their hiring workflows. This includes, for instance, job description acknowledgment forms that fulfill regulatory requirements as part of the standard hiring process. These essential documents are securely stored within Workable alongside all other candidate records, ensuring a complete, auditable, and compliant hiring file for every hire. This level of integrated compliance significantly mitigates legal risks and streamlines administrative overhead.
The offer letter workflow has also been fully digitized and managed within the Workable platform. The ease of use and efficiency of this feature has led to widespread adoption, with the Chief Operating Officer (COO) among the senior leadership team members who have recently integrated it into their approval processes, finding it straightforward and highly effective.
Perhaps the clearest indicator of Workable’s profound integration and success at QualDerm is the remarkable level of engagement from the highest echelons of leadership. The CEO, CHRO, and COO all actively use the platform, not as passive observers of reports, but as direct participants in hiring workflows, reviewing candidates, approving offers, and engaging with data. This unprecedented level of executive adoption reflects both the platform’s intuitive usability and the degree to which hiring visibility and efficiency have become a top leadership priority. For the talent acquisition team, this executive engagement means that the data they generate resides in a shared environment where leadership can interact with it directly, significantly reducing the friction associated with reporting cycles and fostering greater confidence in hiring decisions at every organizational level.
Broader Implications and a Future-Ready Approach
QualDerm Partners’ journey with Workable offers a compelling case study for the broader healthcare industry. In a sector where talent shortages are chronic and the financial stakes of delayed hiring are substantial, the ability to streamline recruitment, enhance data visibility, and improve candidate experience is paramount. QualDerm’s success demonstrates that investing in a purpose-built talent acquisition platform can transform a traditionally administrative function into a strategic engine for growth and operational stability.
By achieving an average time to fill of 32 days for 787 annual hires with a team of just six, QualDerm has set a new benchmark for efficiency in high-volume, distributed healthcare recruiting. This achievement not only secures the talent needed to support patient care and revenue generation but also positions QualDerm as an employer of choice in a fiercely competitive market. The strategic shift from merely tracking hires to actively managing the cost per vacancy underscores a sophisticated, data-driven approach to human capital management.
Looking ahead, the trends championed by QualDerm—such as AI-powered screening, mobile-first candidate engagement, asynchronous interviews, and comprehensive data analytics—are becoming the standard for modern talent acquisition. Organizations that embrace these technologies are better equipped to attract, engage, and retain top talent, ensuring their resilience and growth in an ever-evolving market.
An Unreserved Recommendation for the Future
When asked if QualDerm Partners would recommend Workable, the answer was unequivocal: "Without reservation." For healthcare organizations grappling with high-volume, multi-location recruiting in a competitive talent market, Workable delivers the critical elements the field demands: speed, unparalleled visibility, robust compliance support, and a candidate experience that mirrors the professionalism of the organization itself. QualDerm’s lean team of six manages an incredible 787 annual hires and up to 150 open requisitions at once, and they do so with the confidence and precision of a team empowered by the right technological infrastructure. Their success serves as a powerful testament to the transformative impact of strategic technology in achieving operational excellence and sustainable growth in the challenging world of healthcare talent acquisition.
