How a Senior Care Staffing Agency Scaled to 200+ Workers with Just 9 Team Members
Picture trying to coordinate hundreds of healthcare workers across multiple retirement homes, ensuring each one has current licenses, proper documentation, and compliant contracts. Now imagine doing it with just 9 people. That's exactly what one senior care staffing agency accomplished by rethinking their entire approach to workforce management.
A Growing Pain
"We're a small team. We're about 9 people, total. And then we have about 200 and something staff that work at the various facilities,"
the agency's owner explained during our first conversation. You could hear the mixture of pride and concern in her voice – pride in their growth, concern about maintaining their high standards as they scaled.
Their days were filled with jumping between systems: downloading Indeed applications, manually entering data into spreadsheets, sending interview scheduling emails, chasing documents, and verifying credentials. Every new hire meant hours of administrative work, and with the growing demand for senior care workers, their manual processes were reaching a breaking point.
The Turning Point
What's interesting about their story isn't just that they automated their processes – it's how they approached the challenge. Rather than looking for a quick fix, they sought to understand and transform their entire workflow.
The owner had already started exploring automation tools, even experimenting with ChatGPT for solutions.
"I was kind of like, oh, I would like to learn it myself, and I'm using ChatGPT, asking all these questions. But then there's... I don't know. It just takes so long."
Building a Solution
They built their new system piece by piece:
- SmartSheet became their central source of truth
- Content Snare handled document collection
- YouCanBookMe managed interview scheduling
- SignWell took care of contract signing
But here's where their story takes an unexpected turn. Instead of just having experts implement solutions, the owner insisted on learning the automation process herself.
"I love that I'm able to sit in with the experts because I want to learn about it," she explained. "I want to learn how to do it, and if they show me a lot of these things, I'm just repeating the same steps. So once they show me I can probably do a lot of it on my own."
The Impact
Today, the agency continues to manage their growing healthcare workforce without expanding their administrative team. Their 9-person team efficiently handles:
- Tracking multiple email addresses for each candidate
- Managing credential renewals
- Ensuring compliance documentation
- Coordinating placements across facilities
Key Lessons
- Start with Understanding Before automating anything, map out your entire process. The agency spent time understanding every step of their hiring workflow, which helped them build more effective solutions.
- Build for Tomorrow Design systems that can grow with you. The agency's automated workflows can handle increasing numbers of healthcare workers without adding administrative overhead.
- Learn, Don't Just Implement Instead of depending on external experts, invest in understanding the tools yourself. This enables continuous improvement and adaptation as needs change.
For other healthcare staffing agencies feeling the pressure of growth, this story shows there's an alternative to simply hiring more administrative staff. With the right approach to automation, a small team can accomplish remarkable things.
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