Introduction
LifeSpire of Virginia is composed of 5 senior living communities, while also offering an option for those who wish to age in place in their own home. Since its founding, LifeSpire of Virginia has been dedicated to serving residents by providing a fulfilling and worry-free lifestyle.
LifeSpire came to Hireology in July of 2022 after struggling to drive the hiring outcome they needed with their low-cost HRIS provided applicant tracking system (ATS). Since adopting Hireology, LifeSpire has made more quality hires and significantly decreased time-to-hire.
The problem
LifeSpire faced significant challenges in their recruitment process due to their reliance on their payroll provider’s ATS. This system required the team to manually post job ads to various job boards, wasting time and resulting in few high-quality candidates.
Additionally, the platform lacked customization and automation — often requiring manual intervention for almost all critical hiring tasks. As a result, LifeSpire’s recruiters were conducting much of their recruitment efforts outside of the tool.
Ultimately, LifeSpire realized that while the ATS was cost-effective, it was not designed to function as a recruiting tool. It was simply a payroll provider attempting to offer applicant tracking. This is when they knew they needed a true, purpose-built ATS that allowed for streamlined hiring and easy onboarding.
“One of the first objectives I took on in my current role was sourcing a quality applicant tracking system. The challenges we were facing in recruiting and hiring were not going to be solved with what we had in place.”
— Laura Wooton, VP of Human Resources | LifeSpire of Virginia
The Hireology solution
Since adopting Hireology, the LifeSpire team has transformed their hiring processes for the better. With the platform’s diverse sourcing capabilities, intuitive, automation-driven ATS, and digital onboarding, hiring has become easier and more effective for the organization. Read on to learn more about the key features that have helped LifeSpire make better quality hires, faster — all while cutting costs.
Job board integrations
Hireology empowers the LifeSpire team to automatically distribute new and updated jobs on the most popular job boards like Indeed — without ever leaving the platform. They’re also able to sponsor jobs and track sponsored job performance all from Hireology. This has saved them time and resulted in a higher volume of applicants..
Robust applicant tracking
Hireology offers everything the LifeSpire team needs to easily track and verify applicants. The team leverages prescreen surveys to automatically vet applicants without the manual work. They can also review all details and documents related to any candidate from one source of truth — reducing errors and driving process efficiency.
Texting
The LifeSpire team also uses Hireology to text candidates from a central inbox, providing a better hiring experience for everyone. Their team can quickly communicate with candidates without ever leaving Hireology’s centralized Inbox tool. And candidates respond faster than they previously did when the team relied on email. Ultimately this makes for significantly faster time-to-hire, allowing the team to capture better talent ahead of competitors.
Referrals
Referrals have always been an important part of the LifeSpire team’s hiring strategy. However, before HIreology the process of collecting and managing referral candidates was manual, outdated, and a burden for employees and recruiters alike. Using Hireology Referrals, the team has streamlined referral submission and candidate management — resulting in a 31% conversion rate from referral to hire in 2023!
Reference checks
The LifeSpire team is required to check references for every candidate, and doing this manually often requires two attempts to contact each reference for each hire. The time wasted relying on this process was astronomical. But with Hireology they can complete this with a push of a button.
Digital onboarding
With Hireology’s digital onboarding tool, the LifeSpire team has diligently worked to digitize many steps of the onboarding process to reduce the manual time spent by the team, provide a better experience for new hires, and ultimately improve time-to-productivity for new employees — a win-win for everyone involved.
Seamless user experience
Last but not least, the LifeSpire internal teams find the tool really easy to adopt and use. Hireology is user friendly and catered to different levels of HR experience — compared to their previous ATS, which was very difficult for HR and payroll teams to navigate.
“Hireology has helped us move from running an inefficient and opaque hiring process to a transparent and outcome driven recruiting program. We can now focus efforts on larger strategic initiatives like programming to drive employee retention and satisfaction.”
— Laura Wooton, VP of Human Resources | LifeSpire of Virginia
The results
LifeSpire’s hiring results after adopting Hireology speak for themselves.
Decreased time-to-hire
Prior to Hireology, the average time-to-hire across LifeSpire communities was anywhere between 2-3 weeks. However, this wasn’t consistently measured due to a lack of reporting functionality in their old system.
With Hireology, LifeSpire averaged 12 days-to-hire in 2023 and has maintained that average into 2024.
More hires
Since partnering with Hireology in 2022, LifeSpire made 31% more hires. The team welcomed 569 hires in 2022 and 747 in 2023 — which is an average 61/month.
Reduced recruiting agency costs
Implementing Hireology to improve overall hiring processes alongside other strategic initiatives like pay plan restructuring, updated benefits, and flexibility has allowed Lifespire to reduce its dependency on recruiting agencies for some key roles.
Looking to drive results like these?
Take a virtual platform tour today to see for yourself what Hireology can do for you!
