QualDerm Partners, a prominent dermatology organization spanning 17 states and over 60 facilities, has dramatically transformed its talent acquisition strategy by leveraging the Workable Applicant Tracking System (ATS), enabling its lean six-person recruitment team to manage a staggering 787 annual hires and up to 150 open requisitions simultaneously. This strategic shift has not only streamlined operations and significantly reduced time-to-fill metrics but also elevated the talent acquisition function to a data-driven, strategic pillar within the organization, gaining direct engagement from the CEO, CHRO, and COO. The move highlights a critical industry trend where advanced recruitment technology is becoming indispensable for healthcare providers facing intense competition for skilled professionals and the imperative to optimize operational costs associated with vacant positions.
The Landscape of Healthcare Recruitment: A Persistent Challenge
The healthcare sector continuously grapples with a dynamic and often challenging talent landscape. Factors such as an aging workforce, increasing patient demand, specialized skill requirements, and geographic distribution of facilities contribute to a highly competitive environment for attracting and retaining qualified personnel. For organizations like QualDerm Partners, which operates across a vast geographic footprint and requires a diverse array of roles—from highly specialized surgeons and physician assistants to medical assistants, front office staff, and critical call center teams—the complexity is amplified. Each unfilled position, particularly for patient-facing or revenue-generating roles, represents a direct financial cost, underscoring the urgency for efficient and effective recruitment processes. Industry data consistently indicates that the average time to fill healthcare positions can range from 40 to 60 days, with specialized roles often taking even longer, making QualDerm’s achievement of a 32-day average a notable benchmark. The cost of vacancy, encompassing lost revenue, overtime for existing staff, and potential impacts on patient care, can run into thousands of dollars per day for critical positions.
Pre-Workable Hurdles: A System Under Strain
Prior to its re-adoption of Workable, QualDerm Partners faced significant operational bottlenecks that threatened to impede its ambitious growth trajectory. Following a period of organizational expansion that included a key merger, the company had been utilizing Paylocity as its primary applicant tracking system. While functional for basic HR needs, this platform proved inadequate for the scale and sophistication required by QualDerm’s rapidly evolving recruitment demands.
The limitations were manifold and impactful. The system offered minimal data and analytics capabilities, rendering it nearly impossible for the talent acquisition team to track crucial metrics such as time to fill, time to hire, or the health of their candidate pipelines. This data void had tangible consequences: without reliable metrics, the team lacked the insights needed to identify bottlenecks, measure efficiency, or articulate the true cost of vacancies to leadership. Furthermore, the user experience was described as cumbersome and static, failing to keep pace with the rapid advancements in recruitment technology and candidate expectations. Recruiters found themselves bogged down in manual tasks, struggling to manage a high volume of applications and requisitions across multiple locations without robust tools. The absence of comprehensive data meant that strategic investment decisions in recruitment were often based on anecdotal evidence rather than empirical analysis, hindering optimization efforts.
A Strategic Return: Why Workable Was the Clear Choice
The decision to transition back to Workable was not merely a reaction to the limitations of the previous system but a deliberate strategic choice grounded in prior positive experience and a clear understanding of what a modern ATS could deliver. Iesha Vann, Manager of Talent Acquisition, whose team of six oversees all non-provider recruitment, had prior experience with Workable before the merger and recognized its potential. This familiarity, coupled with a stark contrast to their current system, made the return straightforward.
Workable offered a platform that was not only genuinely user-friendly but also actively evolving with the market, providing the dynamic capabilities essential for high-volume, multi-location hiring. Its focus on robust analytics, intuitive workflows, and a superior candidate experience aligned perfectly with QualDerm’s immediate and long-term recruitment needs. The ability to manage complex hiring plans, integrate various communication channels, and provide real-time data visibility were critical differentiators that promised to transform QualDerm’s talent acquisition function from a reactive operational unit into a proactive strategic asset. The platform’s adaptability meant it could cater to the unique requirements of recruiting across 17 states and for a wide spectrum of roles, from highly specialized medical professionals to essential administrative staff.
Managing Scale with Precision: 787 Hires, 150 Requisitions
One of the most striking achievements of QualDerm’s Workable implementation is its ability to manage an extraordinary volume of hiring with a relatively small team. Annually, the team completes 787 hires, maintaining an active pipeline of up to 150 open requisitions at any given time. This level of operational efficiency is critical for an organization experiencing continuous growth and expansion.
Workable’s advanced requisition management and hiring plan functionality have been instrumental in this success. These features allow QualDerm’s recruiters to systematically prioritize and manage openings, particularly when roles emerge in clusters due to new facility openings or staff turnover. The platform provides a comprehensive, multi-location view, enabling recruiters to oversee the entire hiring landscape across all 17 states from a single dashboard. This centralized visibility was a significant upgrade from their previous system, which fragmented their view and hindered cross-functional coordination.
Furthermore, the integration of AI screening tools has revolutionized how the team handles the immense volume of inbound applications. Instead of manually reviewing hundreds, if not thousands, of resumes, recruiters can leverage AI to quickly identify and prioritize the most qualified candidates. This automation maintains a high standard of candidate quality without compromising the speed required in a competitive market. The ability to efficiently sift through applications allows recruiters to dedicate more time to engaging top-tier candidates and strategic outreach, rather than administrative processing.
Data as a Strategic Imperative: Quantifying Performance and Cost
Perhaps the most profound impact of Workable on QualDerm Partners has been the transformation of its data capabilities. The absence of reliable time-to-fill metrics under their previous system was a significant strategic vulnerability, particularly in a healthcare environment where provider availability directly correlates with revenue generation. Today, QualDerm proudly tracks an average time to fill of 32 days. This metric is not merely an operational statistic; it serves as a critical baseline for their cost-per-vacancy analysis, providing leadership with a data-driven framework to evaluate recruitment performance and make informed investment decisions.
Iesha Vann emphasized the importance of this data, stating, "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." This ability to quantify the financial impact of recruitment efficiency has elevated the talent acquisition function from a purely operational role to a strategic one. Leadership, including the CEO, CHRO, and COO, now actively engages with real-time hiring data directly within Workable, fostering greater confidence in recruitment outcomes and enabling more agile decision-making at the executive level. This transparency and data-driven approach are crucial for sustained growth and profitability in the healthcare sector.
Unlocking Efficiency: The Power of Video Interviews and Automation
Workable’s video interview feature exemplifies the significant efficiency gains realized by QualDerm. For high-turnover positions, such as those within the call center, where the team faced over 10 simultaneous openings, traditional screening methods would have consumed an exorbitant amount of recruiter time and severely slowed the hiring process.
By implementing Workable’s asynchronous video interviews, QualDerm successfully screened candidates at scale. Recruiters could send video screening requests, allowing candidates to record their responses at their convenience. Hiring managers and even senior leaders could then review these recordings without the logistical complexities of scheduling live interviews. This innovation resulted in an estimated 20 to 30 hours of recruiter time saved within a single 30-day period—a substantial reduction in workload during peak hiring cycles.
The success of video interviews in the call center context has led to its broader adoption across the organization. Leadership now actively participates in reviewing video screens, providing early-stage insights into candidates that were previously unavailable. This expanded use case underscores the feature’s versatility and its potential to streamline recruitment workflows for a variety of roles throughout the year, further enhancing overall organizational efficiency.
Elevating the Candidate Journey: Texting, Self-Scheduling, and Branding
In today’s highly competitive talent market, particularly for clinical and administrative roles, a superior candidate experience is a significant competitive advantage. QualDerm has meticulously optimized its candidate journey using Workable’s integrated features. The texting functionality is employed throughout the entire hiring process, from initial outreach to scheduling reminders and pre-start communications. The immediacy of text-based communication has proven instrumental in reducing candidate drop-off rates and maintaining consistent engagement at every stage, a crucial factor when candidates often juggle multiple job offers.
Self-scheduling has similarly alleviated a considerable administrative burden on the recruiting team. Instead of manually coordinating interview calendars across over 60 facilities, candidates can directly book into available interview slots. This eliminates tedious back-and-forth communication, accelerates the time to interview, and provides candidates with a more flexible and respectful experience.
Furthermore, QualDerm invested significantly in building out a polished, branded careers page within Workable. This ensures that regardless of the initial job board a candidate applies through, their entry point into QualDerm’s application process is professional, cohesive, and reflective of the organization’s brand identity. This attention to detail in the candidate experience is critical for attracting and retaining top talent in a demanding market.
Ensuring Compliance and Streamlined Documentation
Healthcare recruitment is subject to stringent compliance requirements that often pose challenges for generic ATS platforms. Workable’s flexibility has allowed QualDerm to embed critical documentation directly into its hiring workflows. This includes essential forms like job description acknowledgment forms, which fulfill regulatory requirements and are now an integral part of the standard hiring process. All such documents are securely stored within Workable alongside other candidate records, ensuring a complete, auditable, and compliant hiring file for every new hire.
The entire offer letter workflow is also fully managed within the platform, a testament to its comprehensive capabilities. Even senior leadership, including the Chief Operating Officer, has adopted this feature, finding it straightforward and efficient. This integration ensures consistency, reduces manual errors, and provides a clear audit trail for all hiring-related documentation, which is paramount in a highly regulated industry like healthcare.
Executive Adoption: A Testament to Success
Perhaps the most compelling evidence of Workable’s deep integration and success at QualDerm Partners is the direct engagement from its executive leadership. The CEO, CHRO, and COO are not merely passive recipients of reports but active users of the platform, participating directly in hiring workflows. This level of executive adoption is rare for an ATS and signals both the platform’s intuitive design and the strategic importance that hiring visibility has assumed within the organization.
For the Talent Acquisition team, this executive buy-in translates into significant advantages. The data they generate resides in a shared, transparent environment where leadership can directly interact with it. This dramatically reduces the friction associated with traditional reporting cycles, fosters greater trust in recruitment data, and empowers more confident and collaborative hiring decisions across all organizational levels. It underscores a shift towards a truly data-driven culture where talent acquisition is recognized as a key driver of business success.
A Resounding Recommendation for Healthcare Recruitment
Without reservation, QualDerm Partners unequivocally recommends Workable. For healthcare organizations navigating the complexities of high-volume, multi-location recruiting in an intensely competitive talent market, Workable provides the essential tools for success. It delivers the speed required to secure top talent, the visibility necessary for strategic decision-making, comprehensive compliance support, and a candidate experience that upholds the professionalism and brand integrity of the organization.
QualDerm’s achievement of managing 787 annual hires and up to 150 open requisitions with a lean team of six recruiters stands as a powerful testament to the efficacy of Workable. This success story illustrates how the right technological infrastructure can empower talent acquisition teams to not only meet but exceed demanding recruitment targets, ensuring that critical healthcare roles are filled efficiently and effectively, ultimately supporting patient care and organizational growth. As the healthcare industry continues to evolve, the strategic integration of advanced recruitment platforms like Workable will remain a critical differentiator for organizations seeking to build and maintain a robust, skilled workforce.
