It wasn’t until Marie Harber, HR business partner at workplace health services provider RediMed, and her team started manually sifting through hundreds of applications for a single role that they realised a flaw in their hiring system. Recruitment software Employment Hero was in place, but no one was using it to its full potential.

When Marie joined RediMed, a fast-growing health company founded in Perth and with more than 450 employees nationwide, she inherited a hiring process that was disjointed and inefficient.

“Each hiring manager was putting up their own ads on [employment job board] Seek,” she tells Business Builders. “That meant inconsistent branding, varied recruitment processes, and no standardisation across the board. It was a reactive approach with lots of manual input.”

One bad hire = many bad outcomes

With 13 years in recruitment, Marie had seen firsthand how disorganised, rushed hiring can cost a business dearly. She recalls a past role in hospitality where a manager urgently filled a food and beverage position by hiring the first applicant they saw. The result? A poor fit who quit just weeks later.

“You’ve got all that wasted time of training and onboarding, plus added stress on the team, only to start over,” Marie says. “It all came down to not properly assessing the candidate’s fit, motivations, or background.”

At RediMed, Marie was determined to implement smart, efficient hiring processes. The company already had Employment Hero, the world’s first employment operating system that brings hiring, HR, payroll and benefits under one platform, and manages the entire employee lifecycle.

But people at RediMed weren’t taking advantage of its full suite of features, especially the time-saving capabilities for recruitment.

“Now, we run everything through Employment Hero,” she says. “We push ads from the platform, issue contracts, generate position descriptions, and onboard new hires, all in one place – no more creating PDFs and then uploading them, which is time-consuming.”

Removing unnecessary manual steps has made setting up contracts, position descriptions and letter templates a lot more efficient. “I use a standardised template, particularly for the layout [of job ads],” she adds.

Speeding up the hiring process

Improving collaboration between multiple hiring managers is another pro of the Employment Hero system, Marie says.

“I can add hiring managers in the system so if I think somebody looks particularly strong, I can put a note on the candidate file, tag one of the hiring managers, and they get a notification. This helps speed up the hiring process and also helps us get higher quality or better fit candidates, because if you’ve got a couple of eyes on it, there’s less chance of missing something,” she shares.

From standardising processes to improving candidate experience, Employment Hero has transformed how RediMed hires.

“It’s helped us be more efficient and consistent,” says Marie. “We’re saving time, hiring better and building our brand reputation as an employer of choice.”

Members of the RediMed team. Image: RediMed.

Marie also sees the benefit of the reporting function. “We’ve now got a cadence for monthly people reporting so we can be a bit more strategic in the area of performance management,” she says. “Annual performance and probationary reviews are all online and digitised now, rather than having these separate bits of paper everywhere that are then uploaded.”

Setting up automated workflows has allowed for more seamless onboarding at RediMed. “For example, we assign people to probationary staff automatically, and we’ve created checklists so when somebody onboards, there are tasks created to prompt people to do their various parts of the onboarding process,” says Marie.

Tackling the problem of ‘recruitment ghosting’

One of the main complaints of job candidates is being ghosted by recruiters and HR departments. It’s something Marie feels strongly about and as such, she encourages her hiring managers to get back to people within 48 hours.

The bulk messaging facility in Employment Hero makes this a breeze. “We can send bulk emails to candidates, whether that’s to let them know they’ve been unsuccessful or that we’ve received their application and to give them an indication of when we’ll next be in touch,” says Marie.

“We want RediMed to be seen as a responsive, professional employer, even by unsuccessful applicants.”

Time-saving tools like screening questions also help in automatically filtering and disqualifying unsuitable candidates. Marie admits that in one early recruitment round – where she received more than 400 applications – she hadn’t yet set up screening questions in Employment Hero. “It would’ve made things much quicker,” she admits.

New ways to hire

Since then, she’s leaned into the platform’s features. For a recent receptionist hire, Marie used screening questions on work rights, salary expectations, and location to efficiently reduce the applicant pool. “We got 150 applications, screened 10 to 15 by phone, interviewed three, and hired one,” she says. “That person’s been with us for around three months and seems to have settled in particularly well.”

Marie is now exploring Employment Hero’s AI-powered recruitment tech that connects employers with qualified, pre-screened candidates without needing to advertise on job boards.

“For entry-level roles where we get hundreds of applications, it makes sense to search the platform’s existing talent rather than default to posting a job ad,” she says.

That way, strong candidates who weren’t right for a current opening can be put into an internal talent pool for future opportunities. It’s a win-win for the business and prospective talent.

Ready to save time, money and stress in your hiring process? Find out more about Employment Hero.

This article is brought to you by Business Builders in partnership with Employment Hero.

Feature image: Supplied.