Vatica Health Leverages Workable to Scale Talent Acquisition Eightfold, Mastering Growth and Merger Integration

Vatica Health, a pioneering healthcare technology company, has successfully navigated an eightfold expansion in its workforce and integrated a significant merger, attributing much of its talent acquisition efficiency and seamless growth to its seven-year partnership with Workable, a leading applicant tracking system (ATS). This strategic alliance has enabled Vatica Health to scale its operations from 100 to 800 employees, manage a complex array of specialized roles, and maintain a robust hiring infrastructure amidst rapid organizational evolution, including the recent integration of Coziva in late 2025.

Vatica Health: A Catalyst in Value-Based Care

Established in 2012, Vatica Health stands at the forefront of the healthcare technology sector, dedicated to empowering primary care providers with advanced solutions for value-based care. Value-based care models represent a critical shift in the healthcare landscape, moving away from fee-for-service towards outcomes-driven reimbursement. This paradigm rewards healthcare providers for improving patient health, reducing the impact and incidence of chronic disease, and enhancing the overall patient experience. Such a complex mission necessitates a highly skilled and specialized workforce across clinical, operational, and corporate functions, including sales, product development, technology, and engineering. The company’s commitment to these intricate processes demands a sophisticated and agile talent acquisition strategy to source, engage, and retain top-tier professionals.

The journey of Vatica Health has been marked by significant milestones, demonstrating a trajectory of sustained growth and innovation. From its inception, the company recognized the intrinsic link between technological prowess and human capital in achieving its mission. This understanding laid the groundwork for a scalable talent acquisition system that could adapt to the company’s evolving needs, a challenge that many rapidly expanding tech firms face.

The Strategic Imperative of Scalable Talent Acquisition

For any organization experiencing exponential growth, particularly within the competitive healthcare technology domain, talent acquisition transforms from a reactive function into a strategic imperative. The ability to consistently attract, evaluate, and onboard qualified candidates is directly proportional to a company’s capacity for innovation, market expansion, and sustained operational excellence. Without a robust and adaptable hiring infrastructure, rapid growth can quickly lead to bottlenecks, increased time-to-hire, compromised candidate quality, and ultimately, an inability to meet strategic objectives.

Jessica Wagner, Manager of People Operations and Talent Acquisition at Vatica Health, has been a pivotal figure in this journey since joining in 2019. Leading all recruiting efforts alongside a dedicated team, Wagner has witnessed the company’s formidable growth firsthand. Her tenure began when Vatica Health comprised approximately 100 employees, and she has been instrumental in scaling the talent function to support a workforce that now totals around 800 individuals. This expansion included a significant offshore team joining through the merger with Coziva in late 2025, a development that presented both opportunities and complexities for talent integration. The successful absorption of 300 new employees and the integration of their respective hiring managers, many without prior ATS experience, underscored the robustness and intuitiveness of Vatica Health’s chosen talent platform.

Seven Years of Strategic Partnership: Vatica Health and Workable

The relationship between Vatica Health and Workable predates Jessica Wagner’s arrival. Initially, Vatica Health relied on disparate standalone platforms like Indeed and ZipRecruiter, lacking a unified system for managing candidate pipelines, coordinating feedback, or ensuring process consistency. This fragmented approach, while potentially manageable for a smaller organization with modest hiring needs, became a critical bottleneck as Vatica Health envisioned and embarked upon its ambitious growth trajectory.

In 2019, coinciding with Wagner’s integration into the team, Vatica Health transitioned from a basic job-posting plan with Workable to a more comprehensive account. The initial appeal of Workable was pragmatic: it offered a sophisticated ATS framework at a cost-effective price point, a crucial consideration for a company in its early growth phase. This strategic decision provided the foundational infrastructure needed to support future expansion without the prohibitive cost overhead typically associated with enterprise-level recruiting software.

What began as a cost-effective solution evolved into a cornerstone of Vatica Health’s operational efficiency. Over seven years, Workable has not merely been a tool but a strategic partner, adapting alongside Vatica Health through a 700-person expansion, a major corporate merger, and the full evolution of its recruiting function. Jessica Wagner articulates this enduring partnership, noting, "I get calls every year from other companies with other ATS systems trying to get us to switch over. But even with other ones we’ve looked at, the comparison and the cost perspective — we’ve been such a solid client to Workable over these last seven years. There’s really no need to move, because it’s working." This statement underscores the profound trust and proven efficacy that has solidified the collaboration.

Key Metrics: A Testament to Efficiency and Quality

The impact of Workable on Vatica Health’s talent acquisition strategy is evident in a series of compelling metrics that highlight significant gains in efficiency, quality, and scalability:

• Time Saved: Recruiters save an average of 15 to 20 minutes per candidate screening. In an environment where the team manages 30 to 40 concurrent specialized roles, this translates into a substantial return of capacity, allowing recruiters to focus on strategic outreach, candidate engagement, and deeper collaboration with hiring managers rather than administrative overhead. Industry benchmarks suggest that a typical phone screen can take 30-45 minutes, so a 33-45% reduction is highly impactful.
• Inbound Quality: An impressive 95% to 98% of roles are filled through inbound applicants. This high inbound quality significantly reduces the need for active sourcing, despite Vatica Health holding a LinkedIn Recruiter seat. This indicates that Workable’s job posting capabilities and Vatica Health’s employer brand are effectively attracting a highly relevant candidate pool, a critical advantage in a competitive market where active sourcing can be resource-intensive and costly.
• Concurrent Roles: The talent acquisition team, comprising Jessica Wagner, three contract recruiters, and an HR generalist (a total of six individuals), efficiently manages 30 to 40 open roles simultaneously. This full hiring load spans clinical, operations, and corporate functions, showcasing the team’s high productivity and Workable’s ability to streamline complex workflows across diverse departments.
• Time to Hire: Vatica Health maintains an average time to hire of approximately 45 days. This consistent velocity across a diverse and specialized role mix is a key indicator of an optimized and efficient hiring process. In the fast-paced healthcare tech sector, where talent scarcity can prolong hiring cycles, a consistent 45-day average demonstrates significant operational excellence and a competitive advantage in securing talent.
• Longevity: Seven years on Workable underscores the platform’s enduring value. This long-term partnership signifies Workable’s capacity to scale seamlessly alongside the business, from 100 to 800 employees, without necessitating a disruptive system change – a common pain point for rapidly growing companies.

Transforming the Hiring Landscape: Workable’s Impact

Workable’s suite of features has fundamentally reshaped Vatica Health’s hiring processes, introducing levels of efficiency and consistency previously unattainable:

1. One Posting, Multiple Markets: A major administrative burden was lifted by Workable’s ability to consolidate multi-location job postings. Previously, the team had to create individual listings for each geography (e.g., Rochester, Buffalo) for roles like registered nurses. Now, a single posting can cover all relevant locations simultaneously. This streamlines the process for hiring managers, who view one unified pipeline instead of ten separate ones, and eliminates the considerable administrative overhead associated with managing and closing duplicate postings. This feature is particularly valuable for companies with distributed workforces or those hiring for common roles across multiple regions.

2. Automation That Removes the Manual Layer: Workable’s robust automation capabilities are deeply embedded throughout Vatica Health’s hiring pipelines, dramatically reducing manual coordination. Examples include:

   • Automatic dispatch of clinical assessments when a nurse candidate advances.
   • Automated notifications to disqualified candidates.
   • Sequential deployment of welcome emails and reference-gathering follow-ups upon a successful hire.
     This automation has freed up significant recruiter time, as Jessica Wagner explains, "It’s cut down on a lot of manual process that we were doing previously. Now we just move them through, and we don’t have to worry about whether we emailed this candidate or followed up." This strategic use of automation allows the recruiting team to focus on higher-value activities like candidate engagement and strategic planning.

3. Scorecards That Keep the Process Consistent: With a diverse team of contract recruiters and numerous hiring managers across various functions, maintaining consistency in candidate evaluation is paramount. Vatica Health leverages Workable’s customizable scorecards to ensure every recruiter asks the same core questions during prescreens. This standardization ensures that the information presented to hiring managers is structured, objective, and comparable across all candidates, leading to more informed and equitable hiring decisions.

4. The Metaview Integration: 15 to 20 Minutes Back per Screening: A high-impact efficiency gain came through the integration of Workable with Metaview, an AI notetaker specifically designed for recruiting. This eliminated the manual note-taking that previously consumed valuable time during candidate screenings. What once took 45 minutes now takes 30 to 35, thanks to Metaview recording conversations and dropping a hyperlink directly into the candidate’s Workable profile. This allows hiring managers to review interviews without scheduling separate debriefs, a significant time-saver that compounds rapidly across a team managing dozens of active roles. This integration highlights the power of a flexible ATS that can connect with specialized tools to enhance specific parts of the hiring funnel.

5. Hiring Manager Visibility Without the Friction: Engaging hiring managers effectively without overcomplicating their experience is a perennial challenge for recruiting teams. Workable’s intuitive interface, combined with its tagging and commenting functionality, has resolved this for Vatica Health. When a recruiter completes a screen and logs feedback, they tag the hiring manager directly in the system. The manager receives an immediate notification and can click through to the candidate profile and feedback in one action, eliminating login friction or time-consuming searches. As Wagner notes, "It’s there, and they can see the feedback without having to dig," fostering greater transparency and collaboration.

6. Reporting That Informs the Business: As Vatica Health has grown and integrated Coziva, leadership demand for comprehensive recruiting data has intensified. Jessica Wagner utilizes Workable’s reporting features to generate quarterly diversity reports, track critical metrics like time-to-hire and time-to-fill, and provide weekly pipeline updates to individual hiring managers. This allows managers to visualize candidate progress at any given moment. What was once a manual, Excel-driven process is now largely automated, providing real-time, actionable insights that inform business strategy. The team is actively migrating more of their manual tracking into Workable as its reporting capabilities continue to expand.

7. Self-Scheduling That Candidates Actually Appreciate: New hire surveys at Vatica Health consistently reveal positive feedback regarding the recruiting experience, with candidates frequently citing efficiency, timely updates, and the self-scheduling feature as highlights. This positive candidate experience is crucial for employer branding and attracting top talent. The team is now evaluating making self-scheduling a default automated action at the HR phone screen stage, automatically sending the scheduling link when a candidate advances, further enhancing efficiency and candidate satisfaction.

Navigating Mergers and Acquisitions with Integrated Systems

The merger with Coziva in late 2025 represented a significant organizational inflection point for Vatica Health. Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are notoriously complex, particularly for HR and talent acquisition, which must integrate disparate cultures, compensation structures, and, crucially, talent management systems. The addition of 300 employees and an entirely new cohort of hiring managers, many without prior ATS experience, could have presented a substantial hurdle.

However, Workable’s intuitive design and Vatica Health’s established processes proved instrumental in smoothing this transition. New managers from the merged organization found Workable easy to navigate, requiring minimal formal training. This ease of adoption prevented the ATS from becoming a bottleneck during a critical period of integration, allowing Vatica Health to quickly consolidate talent pipelines and maintain hiring momentum across the newly expanded organization. This seamless integration capability is a testament to the platform’s user-centric design and Vatica Health’s strategic implementation.

Broader Implications for Healthcare Tech Recruitment

Vatica Health’s success story offers valuable insights for the broader healthcare technology sector. The industry is characterized by rapid innovation, intense competition for specialized talent, and evolving regulatory landscapes. In this environment, an agile and efficient talent acquisition strategy is not merely an operational necessity but a competitive differentiator.

The ability to maintain a 45-day average time-to-hire, fill 95-98% of roles through inbound applicants, and manage 30-40 concurrent specialized roles with a lean team highlights what is possible when robust technology is paired with strategic execution. This case demonstrates that investing in a scalable ATS like Workable allows companies to:

• Accelerate Growth: By efficiently onboarding talent, companies can seize market opportunities more rapidly.
• Enhance Candidate Experience: Streamlined processes, automation, and self-scheduling contribute to a positive experience, strengthening the employer brand.
• Improve Data-Driven Decision Making: Comprehensive reporting provides insights that inform strategic HR and business planning.
• Future-Proof Operations: A flexible ATS can adapt to organizational changes, including mergers and expansions, without requiring costly overhauls.

Looking Ahead: Future of Talent Acquisition at Vatica Health

Seven years after its initial implementation, Vatica Health is a fundamentally different organization, poised for continued evolution. The company is actively looking forward, with strategic initiatives on the horizon. A new HRIS partnership is being forged, and Workable’s 2026 feature roadmap is in view. The primary goal for Vatica Health is to close the last remaining gap in its recruiting process: the manual handoff between Workable and the HRIS once a hire is made. By fully integrating these systems, Vatica Health aims to create an even more seamless, end-to-end recruiting lifecycle, further minimizing friction and maximizing efficiency.

This strategic vision underscores Vatica Health’s commitment to continuous improvement in its talent operations. The journey from a nascent company to a leading healthcare technology firm, powered by a robust and adaptable talent acquisition system, serves as a compelling model for sustainable growth and operational excellence in the modern enterprise.