The Problem: Replacing an Automated Solution that Felt Painfully Manual

For GrapeTree Medical Staffing, it’s not about choosing technology over the human touch – it’s about having their priorities in order. That means relying on technology to unlock efficiency and eliminate tasks that recruiters and candidates don’t enjoy, and pouring more energy, time, and thoughtfulness into cultivating strong and long-lasting relationships – something only human beings can do well.

“Our biggest focus is always getting qualified healthcare professionals through the placement process and ready to work as quickly as possible,” says Peterson, “and making sure that we’re the agency of choice to the clients and healthcare workers who want to use an agency. When candidates and clients know they can trust us to work quickly, accurately, and thoughtfully, they’re so much more likely to choose us again and again, regardless of what’s happening in the broader economy. Having good technology that saves us time and helps us work smarter is a big part of that.”

In the case of their previous automated reference checking solution, however, it turns out that they might have been better off just running references manually.

“With our previous provider, we didn’t even know how to get in touch with our contact person,” says Peterson. “We never heard from them. Everything about the system was so manual and cumbersome that we ended up spending more time trying to fix mistakes, log into the platform, fill out all these forms, and wait weeks to get the references back. Then we’d have to manually enter the information back into our system of record because the reference checking platform didn’t integrate with our symplr ATS. And then, finally, we’d have to deal with this long and tedious report that didn’t tell us what we needed to know. Our clients didn’t want to filter through all that and frankly, neither did we.”

The Result: A Platform for the Present and the Future

In an era of uncertainty and fluctuations in client demand, as well as continually stressed qualified labor pools, RefAssured has helped GrapeTree stay agile in the present and prepare for whatever the future holds.

In just the first quarter of going live on RefAssured, GrapeTree has already saved almost $600,000 worth of recruiter hours and has completed nearly 7,000 reference requests. They’ve also generated more than 1,700 new candidate leads, providing a valuable pipeline of skilled healthcare professionals – a demographic that is always in short supply.

“Using RefAssured has been a significant change for us, both compared to the previous automated platform we used as well as our manual process that came before it. We didn’t know how big of an impact RefAssured would have until we started using it. And it’s been even more positive than we predicted or could have hoped.”

RefAssured’s listening culture – and approach to collaborative partnership with its customers that result in long-lasting relationships – came as a pleasant surprise to GrapeTree.

“RefAssured is invested in making an already great platform even better using customer feedback,” says Peterson, “and listening and working with customers as though we were all on the same team. Some companies forget about you once you’re a customer and they’ve sold to you, but not RefAssured. They continually sell the value of the platform to us and have ongoing conversations to make sure we get the most out of it. I keep thinking we’re in the honeymoon phase with them, but we went live in early March so that’s a really long honeymoon. I believe at this point it’s just who they are!”

While 2024 has proven to be a complicated year for healthcare staffing agencies, many of whom have been taking a “wait and see” approach to navigating economic headwinds and placing increasing levels of scrutiny on new software purchases and technology investments, Peterson thinks this approach is short-sighted and misses the true value of ROI for moving a business forward.

She states: “Before we even launched with RefAssured, we did a deep dive to understand the efficiencies that it would provide us, the time we’d save our specialists from having to do everything manually and do all the uploading, downloading, and busy work involved with the system we used before. The time we’re saving with RefAssured, the ease with which it integrates with our ATS, the more profitable work that our specialists can focus on now – it quickly exceeds the cost of the platform in the new value it generates. This is just basic math. If we hadn’t bought RefAssured, we wouldn’t have all these benefits that make our business operate better.”

The GrapeTree team has also taken advantage of the platform’s unique capabilities, such as candidate self-ratings, which they use to validate quality and identify possible areas of opportunity with candidates. They’ve also embraced the platform’s analytics dashboards, which provide a real-time look at platform usage, adoption rates, how quickly references are completed, ROI metrics, and performance by individual onboarding specialist.

“It’s become a form of friendly competition over here among the specialists,” says Peterson, “but also allows us as leaders to see who’s outperforming and what behaviors they might be exhibiting that make them so efficient, so that we can get the rest of our people to be just as efficient. It allows us to measure overall team productivity and helps us deep dive ways to continually improve.”