In a strategic move to address the escalating demands of high-volume healthcare recruitment, QualDerm Partners, a prominent dermatology organization, has successfully leveraged Workable’s Applicant Tracking System (ATS) to significantly enhance its talent acquisition capabilities. This transformation has resulted in remarkable gains in hiring volume, reduced time-to-fill, substantial time savings for recruiters, and elevated executive visibility into critical hiring metrics, setting a new benchmark for efficiency in the competitive healthcare talent landscape.
QualDerm’s Strategic Shift in Talent Acquisition: Addressing High-Volume Healthcare Recruitment
QualDerm Partners operates a vast network of over 60 facilities across 17 states, supporting a workforce of more than 2,000 employees. The organization’s growth trajectory has necessitated a robust and scalable recruitment strategy, evidenced by its impressive 787 hires completed in a single year. This monumental task falls largely to a lean team of six, led by Iesha Vann, Manager of Talent Acquisition, who oversees all non-provider recruitment. This team is frequently tasked with managing up to 150 open requisitions simultaneously, ranging from highly specialized medical roles like physician assistants and medical assistants to crucial administrative and support staff for front offices and call centers. The sheer volume and geographic dispersion of these roles underscore the critical importance of a sophisticated and adaptable recruitment platform.
The healthcare sector, particularly specialized fields like dermatology, faces unique and persistent challenges in talent acquisition. An aging population, coupled with a growing demand for specialized medical services, has created a perpetual shortage of qualified professionals. Furthermore, the industry is characterized by high turnover rates in certain administrative and support roles, necessitating continuous recruitment efforts. This environment demands not just efficient hiring, but also a strategic approach to candidate engagement, compliance, and data-driven decision-making. QualDerm’s journey with Workable illustrates a successful navigation of these complexities, transforming their talent acquisition function from a reactive operational necessity into a proactive strategic advantage.
The Evolving Landscape of Healthcare Recruitment
The modern healthcare recruitment landscape is defined by several key factors: intense competition for skilled professionals, the need for stringent regulatory compliance, and the increasing expectation for a seamless and engaging candidate experience. Hospitals, clinics, and specialized medical groups are all vying for a limited pool of talent, making speed and efficiency paramount. Recruiters are often stretched thin, managing large caseloads while trying to maintain quality and ensure compliance with ever-evolving healthcare regulations.
Historically, many healthcare organizations have relied on outdated or generic HR systems that struggle to keep pace with these demands. These legacy systems often lack the specialized functionalities required for high-volume, multi-location hiring, leading to fragmented processes, poor data visibility, and an inability to accurately measure key performance indicators. The absence of reliable metrics, such as time-to-fill or cost-per-hire, can blind leadership to the financial impact of prolonged vacancies and hinder strategic planning. In a field where an unfilled provider chair directly translates to lost revenue and potential impacts on patient care, the stakes are exceptionally high.
Pre-Workable Challenges: A Legacy System’s Limitations
QualDerm’s previous experience with talent acquisition highlighted these systemic shortcomings. Following a period of significant organizational growth and a pivotal merger, the company had been operating its applicant tracking on Paylocity. While Paylocity served certain HR functions, it proved inadequate for the dynamic and data-intensive requirements of QualDerm’s recruitment efforts. The platform suffered from several critical limitations:
- Minimal Data and Analytics Capability: The system offered limited reporting, making it nearly impossible to track essential recruitment metrics such as time-to-fill, time-to-hire, or the health of the candidate pipeline. This absence of data left the talent acquisition team without crucial insights to optimize their processes or justify strategic investments.
- Difficult User Experience: Recruiters found the interface cumbersome and unintuitive, leading to inefficiencies and frustration. A clunky user experience often results in lower adoption rates and increased manual workarounds, detracting from productivity.
- Static Product in a Dynamic Market: The platform felt unresponsive to the rapid advancements in recruitment technology and candidate expectations. In a fast-evolving talent market, a static system quickly becomes a bottleneck rather than an enabler.
The inability to track metrics like time-to-fill had direct and quantifiable operational consequences for QualDerm. In the dermatology sector, every day a provider position remains open represents lost revenue from patient appointments and procedures. Without the data to quantify this "cost-per-vacancy," the talent acquisition team lacked the leverage to advocate for resources or implement targeted improvements. This data void meant decisions were often made anecdotally rather than strategically, hindering the organization’s ability to optimize its talent pipeline and maximize financial performance.
Crucially, members of the QualDerm team had prior positive experiences with Workable before the merger. This familiarity provided a clear understanding of what a well-designed, modern ATS could offer. When the opportunity arose to transition to a new platform, the decision to return to Workable was a clear choice, driven by a desire for proven functionality and a user-centric design.
The Decision to Re-Embrace Workable: A Return to Efficiency
The re-adoption of Workable by QualDerm Partners was a deliberate move, informed by past positive experiences and validated by the stark contrast with their previous system. Where the former platform was perceived as limited and outdated, Workable offered a robust, actively evolving, and genuinely user-friendly solution tailored to high-volume, multi-location hiring. The core differentiators that cemented Workable’s appeal included its intuitive interface, comprehensive feature set, and its commitment to continuous innovation in recruitment technology. This return was not merely a swap of software; it represented a strategic investment in a platform designed to meet the complex and dynamic needs of a growing healthcare organization.
Transforming Operations: Managing Scale Across 17 States
Managing a constant flow of up to 150 open requisitions across 60+ facilities in 17 states presents immense operational challenges. Roles often open in clusters, driven by facility expansions, seasonal demands, or staff turnover, requiring the recruitment team to absorb significant volume without compromising quality or organizational efficiency. Workable’s robust features have provided the necessary infrastructure to manage this complexity effectively.
- Streamlined Requisition Management and AI-Powered Screening: Workable’s requisition management and hiring plan functionalities enable QualDerm’s team to systematically prioritize and organize openings. This ensures that high-urgency roles receive immediate attention while the broader recruitment pipeline remains coherent and manageable. The platform’s multi-location visibility is a game-changer, allowing recruiters to oversee the entire talent landscape across all 17 states from a single, unified dashboard—a capability that was previously unattainable.
Furthermore, Workable’s integrated AI screening tools have become indispensable for handling the high volume of inbound applications. Instead of manually sifting through hundreds of resumes for dozens of roles, recruiters can rapidly identify and prioritize the most qualified candidates. This not only significantly accelerates the initial screening process but also helps maintain a consistent quality of candidates moving through the pipeline, all while reducing potential human bias in the initial review stages. The efficiency gained allows recruiters to dedicate more time to engaging with promising candidates and strategic sourcing, rather than administrative tasks.
Quantifiable Success: The Power of Data in Recruitment
Perhaps one of the most significant impacts of Workable at QualDerm has been the introduction of reliable, actionable data into the recruitment process. Before Workable, the organization operated without a clear understanding of its hiring efficiency, most notably lacking a reliable way to measure "time to fill." This was a critical blind spot for a healthcare organization where provider availability directly impacts revenue and patient care capacity.
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Establishing a Time-to-Fill Benchmark: Today, QualDerm proudly tracks an average time to fill of 32 days. To put this in perspective, industry benchmarks for healthcare roles, especially specialized or provider positions, can often range from 40 to 60+ days due to scarcity of talent and complex credentialing processes. QualDerm’s 32-day average represents a highly efficient operation, providing a crucial baseline for their cost-per-vacancy analysis. This metric now serves as a key performance indicator, offering leadership a data-driven lens through which to evaluate recruitment performance and identify areas for further optimization. The ability to quantify the financial impact of open positions has fundamentally changed how the organization approaches talent investment. As Iesha Vann states, "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."
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From Operational to Strategic: Elevating TA’s Role: The ability to accurately track candidate sourcing channels, pipeline movement, and ultimate hiring outcomes has profoundly elevated the talent acquisition function within QualDerm. What was once a largely administrative and operational department has transformed into a strategic partner, capable of providing insights that inform broader business decisions. Leadership is now actively engaging with real-time hiring data directly within the Workable platform, rather than relying on delayed or secondhand summaries. This direct access fosters greater confidence in recruitment strategies and accelerates decision-making processes, aligning talent acquisition more closely with the organization’s overarching business objectives.
Innovating Candidate Engagement: From Video Interviews to Texting
In today’s highly competitive market for clinical and administrative talent, candidate experience and responsiveness are powerful competitive advantages. Workable’s features have allowed QualDerm to significantly enhance its candidate journey, making it more efficient and engaging.
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Asynchronous Video Interviews: A Game Changer for Efficiency: One of the clearest demonstrations of Workable’s efficiency impact came through its video interview feature. The call center, known for being one of QualDerm’s highest-turnover positions, frequently presents challenges with high-volume recruitment. Faced with more than 10 simultaneous openings for this role, traditional screening methods would have consumed an exorbitant amount of recruiter time, further slowing an already time-sensitive process.
By activating Workable’s video interview feature, QualDerm could screen candidates asynchronously and at scale. Recruiters sent video screening requests, allowing candidates to record their responses at their convenience. Hiring managers could then review these recordings without the logistical complexities of scheduling live interviews, which often involve multiple calendars and time zones. The tangible result was a remarkable saving of 20 to 30 hours of recruiter time within a single 30-day period. This time saving is equivalent to several full workdays, allowing recruiters to focus on more complex tasks, candidate nurturing, and strategic sourcing.
The success of this initiative has led to its expansion beyond the call center. Even senior leaders now participate in reviewing video screens, gaining unprecedented visibility into early-stage candidates. This executive engagement underscores the value seen in the feature, and the team is actively identifying additional roles and workflows where video interviewing can be applied throughout the year, further streamlining their processes. As one team member noted, "Anyone can watch them now, including leaders. It opened up the process." -
Enhancing the Candidate Journey with Modern Communication Tools: QualDerm utilizes Workable’s integrated texting feature throughout the entire hiring process—from initial outreach and interview scheduling to pre-start communications. The immediacy of text-based communication is crucial in a market where top talent receives multiple offers. It has demonstrably reduced candidate drop-off rates and kept candidates actively engaged at every stage, fostering a more positive and responsive experience.
Similarly, Workable’s self-scheduling functionality has drastically reduced the administrative burden on the recruiting team. Instead of manually coordinating interview calendars across over 60 facilities, candidates can directly book into available slots that align with their schedules and those of hiring managers. This eliminates tedious back-and-forth communication, accelerates the time-to-interview, and provides candidates with greater control over their journey.
On the front end, QualDerm also made a significant investment in building out their branded careers page within Workable. This creates a polished, consistent, and professional entry point for all candidates, regardless of whether they discovered the opening through a job board or directly, reinforcing QualDerm’s employer brand.
Ensuring Compliance and Streamlined Workflows
Healthcare hiring is uniquely subject to stringent regulatory and compliance requirements, which many general-purpose ATS platforms struggle to accommodate. QualDerm has proactively integrated critical documentation directly into its Workable workflows, ensuring seamless compliance and robust record-keeping.
- Robust Documentation and Offer Letter Management: An example of this integration is the use of job description acknowledgment forms. These forms, which fulfill specific regulatory requirements, are now an integral part of the standard hiring process within Workable. All such documents reside within the platform alongside other candidate records, ensuring a complete, centralized, and auditable hiring file for every hire. This capability is vital for demonstrating compliance during audits and mitigating legal risks.
Furthermore, the entire offer letter workflow is now fully managed within the Workable platform. This includes generation, customization, distribution, and acceptance tracking. The COO, among other leadership team members, has adopted this feature, finding it intuitive and straightforward. This integrated approach ensures consistency in offer delivery, streamlines approvals, and maintains a clear audit trail for all contractual agreements.
Executive Buy-in: A Testament to Platform Effectiveness
Perhaps the most compelling indicator of Workable’s profound success and deep integration within QualDerm is the direct engagement from the organization’s top leadership. The CEO, CHRO (Chief Human Resources Officer), and COO (Chief Operating Officer) all actively use the platform. This isn’t passive observation; it signifies active participation in hiring workflows, reviewing candidate profiles, and engaging with hiring data.
This level of executive adoption is rare for an ATS and speaks volumes about both the usability of the Workable platform and the critical importance that hiring visibility and data-driven decisions have assumed at QualDerm. For the talent acquisition team, this executive engagement translates into enhanced credibility and influence. The data they generate lives in a shared, transparent environment, allowing leadership to engage with it directly. This reduces the friction typically associated with reporting cycles, increases confidence in hiring decisions across all organizational levels, and ultimately empowers the TA team to operate more strategically and effectively.
Broader Implications and Future Outlook
QualDerm Partners’ experience with Workable provides a compelling case study for other healthcare organizations grappling with similar recruitment challenges. The demonstrable improvements in time-to-fill, recruiter efficiency, and candidate experience are not merely operational gains; they translate directly into enhanced financial performance and a stronger competitive position in the talent market. By reducing vacancy costs and accelerating the onboarding of essential staff, QualDerm can ensure uninterrupted patient care and revenue generation. The strategic shift in talent acquisition also positions HR as a more impactful business partner, armed with data to inform executive decisions.
Looking ahead, QualDerm is poised to continue leveraging Workable’s evolving features, exploring further integrations and optimizations to maintain its edge in talent attraction. The success story underscores a broader trend in the HR technology landscape: the increasing demand for intelligent, integrated platforms that can not only automate tasks but also provide actionable insights and enhance the human element of recruitment.
QualDerm’s Endorsement and Industry Relevance
Without reservation, QualDerm Partners wholeheartedly recommends Workable. For healthcare organizations navigating the complexities of high-volume, multi-location recruiting in a fiercely competitive talent market, Workable delivers the essential elements: speed, comprehensive visibility, robust compliance support, and a candidate experience that genuinely reflects the professionalism and values of the organization. QualDerm’s team of six effectively manages 787 annual hires and up to 150 open requisitions simultaneously, operating with the unwavering confidence that comes from having the right technological infrastructure and strategic partner in place. Their journey exemplifies how a modern, well-implemented ATS can be a cornerstone for talent acquisition excellence in even the most demanding industries.
