40,000
annual applicants
178
unique positions
30%
faster time-to-hire
The Client
Joseph Brant Hospital (JBH) is a full-service community teaching hospital based in Burlington, Ontario. The hospital serves residents in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), providing patient care through its new emergency department, 295 inpatient beds, and nine operating rooms.
JBH serves as a clinical education site for McMaster University and is designated as an academic community teaching hospital. It has earned recognition as Hamilton-Niagara’s Top Employers for eight consecutive years and employs approximately 195 physicians, 850 nurses, 2,000 full- and part-time staff, and more than 300 volunteers.
The Challenges
In 2023, JBH’s human resource (HR) team identified the need to replace its dated, legacy applicant tracking system (ATS). JBH recognized this as an opportunity to modernize its technology and streamline processes to gain a competitive recruitment advantage.
Ann Marie Foster, HR manager at JBH, described recruiting nurses, paramedical, and diagnostic professionals as fierce in the region. “There simply isn’t enough local talent to fill the number of positions that JBH and other area healthcare systems have open at any given time”, she said.
So, finding a solution that allowed the hospital to promote vacancies to a broader audience and capture, identify, and screen qualified candidates quickly topped its list of priorities.
JBH faced additional challenges due to its complex recruiting and hiring environment:
- Multi-union workforce: Each union has collective agreement language that identifies employer responsibilities for posting and filling vacancies, communicating with successful and unsuccessful candidates, and reporting recruitment outcomes.
- Highly-skilled roles: JBH has 178 unique positions across 119 departments. Each role has different education, experience, and credential requirements. As roles evolve, HR must ensure the most up-to-date versions of job postings, screening tools, and evaluation criteria are used.
- Public teaching hospital: As a publicly funded employer, JBH needed to track and accurately report on each stage of the recruitment process, from job requisition to position filled, so the hospital could identify potential gaps or barriers to making effective hiring decisions as efficiently as possible.
The hospital’s high volume of applicants (40,000 per year) and ongoing staffing requirements (50 vacancies filled per month) added to the complexities.
JBH needed real-time, precision reporting to keep up with hiring demands and improve strategic decision-making, but that was impossible due to the constraints of JBH’s legacy system. Its limitations forced the team to cobble together data, materials, and functionality from disparate tools, including SharePoint and spreadsheets, and create a series of manual workflows to manage dozens of processes.
“Every open role is a potential vacancy that could impact patient care, so there are high expectations for the recruitment team and hiring managers to fill these roles quickly. We’d used creative solutions and a lot of hard work to meet those needs to date, but we knew there were better options.”
Ann Marie Foster
HR Manager
Joseph Brant Hospital
The Solution
JBH wanted a broad range of perspectives as it selected and implemented a new solution for recruiting and hiring, so the hospital assembled a team with stakeholders from HR, information technology (IT), senior leaders, and a cross-section of hiring managers (e.g., clinical and non-clinical). The team examined what worked well and what needed improvement to create a list of must-haves and nice-to-haves.
Picking a Platform
JBH ultimately selected VidCruiter as its technology partner. The VidCruiter Recruitment Suite offered a comprehensive, interoperable platform with a robust feature set that addressed most of the hospital’s immediate needs. Beyond that, VidCruiter’s team demonstrated a commitment to sharing its professional expertise and helping JBH tailor its approach (and the platform) to achieve goals.
In addition to the core applicant tracking system, JBH adopted the breadth of VidCruiter’s Recruitment System, including job requisitions, scheduling, video interviewing (including structured digital interviews and ratings), automated reference checks, and its ADP Workforce Now connector.
Because these solutions all work together and share a unified data set, they allowed JBH to address two critical goals with a single platform:
- Generating real-time reports and dashboards that provide both granular and holistic insights to drive better business decisions
- Building integrated, automated workflows to manage the intricacies associated with each role, saving staff time and improving candidate experience
For example, JBH incorporated VidCruiter’s Interview Scheduling to identify the best times for candidate screenings and interviews. The hospital combined this with VidCruiter’s full range of interviewing solutions (digital in-person, live, and pre-recorded), offering different options based on the role and interview stage to provide candidates with flexibility depending on their location and situation (e.g., working overnight shifts).
“It’s hard to quantify how many staff hours VidCruiter’s automated scheduling saved us, but it’s significant. In the past, HR would coordinate all candidate interviews with countless back-and-forth emails between recruiters, hiring managers, and interview panelists. VidCruiter helped us streamline and automate our scheduling, providing a better experience for everyone involved.”
Ann Marie Foster
HR Manager
Joseph Brant Hospital
JBH’s HR team also adopted VidCruiter’s Automated Reference Checking, which, for many roles, eliminated manual reference checks or reliance on a third-party service provider, saving time and money.
Implementation and Integration
Getting stakeholder buy-in throughout the selection and implementation process was crucial for the hospital’s success. JBH’s team said VidCruiter’s superior account management and support, paired with the customization options that the platform provided, resulted in a uniquely positive experience.
“VidCruiter handled most of our needs out of the box with the platform’s built-in flexibility. And when we identified a niche requirement unique to our business, we never got a “no,” which we often encountered with other vendors. Instead, VidCruiter always partnered with us to find workable solutions. It was a refreshing implementation experience.”
Danielle Crumpton
HRIS Coordinator
Joseph Brant Hospital
JBH’s HR team has been able to take feedback from internal stakeholders and combine that with VidCruiter's consultation about best practices to improve processes and build customized, automatic workflows and materials tailored for each role.
For example, posting a role across job platforms, such as LinkedIn and Indeed, used to be a manual process (and one that sometimes got missed). VidCruiter worked with JBH to create a custom career site. Now recruiters can post vacancies simultaneously on internal and external sites and have all information flow into one central database, giving recruiters and hiring managers:
- A comprehensive view of all applicants
- The ability to filter, sort, and prioritize top candidates
- Detailed applicant histories via VidProfile, which matches current candidates to their previous submissions and shows the status and outcome for each role
Training and Adoption
Another key component of the successful implementation was the customized training materials developed by VidCruiter and JBH to mirror the hospital’s custom workflows. Foster said the quality of this training content raised awareness about what was happening and instilled a willingness to embrace those changes across HR and hiring managers.
JBH’s recruiting and hiring approaches now align more with organizational goals and provide a better experience for current and prospective employees, and the team plans to build from here.
“Revisiting our internal procedures helped us to optimize what we were doing and add clarity and accountability at every stage. VidCruiter’s real-time reporting and granular insights allow us to improve continuously by precisely identifying bottlenecks and issues so we can focus on value-added, strategic priorities.”
Ann Marie Foster
HR Manager
Joseph Brant Hospital
The Results
JBH continues to capitalize on VidCruiter ATS efficiencies and roll out new functionalities as they arise, but the hospital has already seen immediate improvements.
For example, early results show the average time-to-hire is now 41 days. That’s 30% lower than the organization’s approximate 60-day average time-to-hire over the past several years. While the exact numbers will rise and lower over time, the overall trend is moving significantly in the right direction.
Foster said JBH also has gained the ability to create reliable, consistent recruiting and hiring processes, from beginning to end, that simply weren’t possible before. These automation and template benefits include:
- Requisitions: From position requests to approvals, VidCruiter allows JBH to route and track communications and turn approved roles into job postings.
- Postings: Managed templates ensure that each position contains the latest requirements and job summaries as recruiters post them across internal and external job boards.
- Applicants: All applicants flow into the same database, allowing recruiters to curate and prioritize candidates that match the appropriate criteria for the position.
- Screenings: Recruiters and hiring managers know what to look for in candidates, whether that’s an initial resume review, phone call, or a pre-recorded interview. Screening guides and evaluation forms allow them to indicate whether a candidate should move forward.
- Interviews: Recruiters know how many rounds of interviews a candidate should go through, in what order, and who should be included. Automatic scheduling gives candidates options (e.g., in-person or pre-recorded) based on their shifts and availability and how that matches with the hiring manager, panel, or guest interviewers. Information about what to expect, text, and email reminders are automatically sent.
- Evaluations: Interviewers rate candidates based on a consistent set of criteria to increase transparency in the hiring process.
- Offers: JBH has over 90 offer letter templates that address specific information about the role, union, compensation, etc. VidCruiter templates help JBH manage version control and ensure it sends up-to-date offers consistent with recent hires, terms and conditions of employment, minimizing the risk of errors at this critical, complex stage.
“VidCruiter’s templates and robust VidProfile applicant histories are like taking a snapshot of a vacancy and looking across time to ensure it was handled appropriately every step of the way. Consistency is important in all environments but especially critical in a union environment.”
Ann Marie Foster
HR Manager
Joseph Brant Hospital
The Conclusion
Recruiting, hiring, and tracking requirements that most healthcare systems face make it difficult to find the right technology partner. JBH’s HR team embraced that challenge by working with stakeholders to prioritize needs and partner with VidCruiter to uncover creative solutions to complex issues.
The JBH-VidCruiter partnership demonstrates how the joint alignment of technology, the expertise of best practices, and a truly collaborative relationship between customer and vendor focused on the same goals can produce results that exceed expectations. The hospital has been able to automate the management of hundreds of positions and thousands of applicants, get real-time insights about every stage, and focus more on goals vs. day-to-day tactics and activities.
“From my perspective, VidCruiter has been the best software implementation I’ve been involved with. We now have a system we can rely on. We have responsive support that we can rely on. And we have a partner willing to work with us to solve any issue or problem, always trying to get us to our goals.”
Ann Marie Foster
HR Manager
Joseph Brant Hospital
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