How Xref improves average time-to-hire | Fusion Medical Staffing

Tell us a bit about you and your background

I'm actually a nurse by trade. I’ve been with Fusion for six years now but I joined in a recruiting capacity and then worked my way into an operational role. I’m now the Director of Operations, so it’s been an interesting path to take, but it's been a fun one!

Today, I’m fairly removed from the day-to-day recruitment function but I am involved in helping to evaluate any of the tools that we're using and seeing what else is out there that could help to solve some of the problems that the teams run into, or just make them a little more efficient.

I truly love working for Fusion and I really believe there is no other company out there that is as genuine, real and caring about their end result. Our mission is to ensure that everyone we touch has a better life. And that means not just our internal employees, but their families, the facilities we support, and, of course, patients. The end result is the patient that's being cared for and making sure that they have the resources they need to get better.

What are the main challenges of healthcare recruitment?

There are always challenges when you're doing temporary medical staffing. One of our catchphrases has always been that we're “picky” and our goal is to make sure that patients are getting the best care. So, we need to do our due diligence to screen properly and provide the best quality candidates to put into these medical facilities.

Having better resources in place to be sure that we are getting valid quality references to help our candidates is incredibly important.

What influenced Fusion’s decision to move to automated processes?

Fusion has been around for 10 years and, in that time, has seen explosive growth and significant diversification. There has been a lot of pure grit, hard work and talent that has helped us to grow so fast. When you grow very quickly, you eventually realize that you're probably lacking some efficiencies and need to get a little bit more structure in place to protect the company and make sure you can continue to scale as fast as you have been. That was the point we were at when we started looking for solutions to streamline our processes.

Before we worked with Xref, we were doing our references completely manually. Our recruiters would talk with a candidate and then obtain the phone numbers and names of a couple of people that we could call to check their professional references. The recruiter would get that information from the candidate and then they would pass that along to our front desk team. The front desk team would spend probably 50-75% of their time sitting on the phone trying to get references. Then they would fill out a word document and manually upload it to the candidate's file on our recruitment software platform, Bullhorn. It was very manual and not always successful because nobody wants to answer a phone call from an unknown number anymore, especially in the middle of their workday. So it was taking several full-time staff a very large portion of their work time to get these completed.

We discovered Xref through the Bullhorn marketplace and immediately saw how our team could benefit from integrating it into our Bullhorn workflow.

What has been your experience of working with Xref and Bullhorn?

My one word to describe the Xref and Bullhorn integration would be, “seamless”.

It really has been very smooth, and that’s not necessarily been the case with other products that I've used before. I think, out of any third parties that I've worked with so far, Xref and Bullhorn have been very good about receiving and acting on feedback from us, and really understanding what it is that we're asking for. That, for me, has been very, very impressive.

The implementation itself was very easy. Some of the Xref team flew out and did some training with our teams and within a week we had everything ironed out, people were using it consistently, we really had very minimal issues. Anything we did experience was insignificant and it was corrected or changed very quickly.

And how has Xref impacted your team?

In terms of Xref specifically, it has obviously provided efficiencies for us and we were actually able to reallocate two full-time staff members once we had it up and running. So that was huge.

But I think, even more important than that, is the fact that it has decreased our turnaround time. We're screening very large quantities of candidates and you cannot have any of them considered for a job with a client unless they have references. Jobs move very quickly and if you're waiting three or four days to get a reference back, that job is going to be closed because they're not going to wait for your candidate.

It's also been nice to be alerted if there's potential fraud detection. There have been a few situations where we ultimately wouldn't want to work with the candidate when we discover what that they’re doing something suspicious. Integrity and honesty are extremely important in a candidate that's working in patient care. So, if they're going to falsify a document of any kind, that's really concerning and they’re not the type of person we want to be representing.

The Xref customer service has been excellent and the team is always willing to go above and beyond. You can’t ask for more than that and I’m always happy to recommend Xref to anyone else looking for a better reference checking experience.