Introducing
Organisations turn to Dedicare to plug staffing shortages and gain access to specialist expertise in nursing, medicine and social work. Dedicare can help organisations to avoid costly recruitment processes and manage quick staffing changes and evolving needs. Dedicare’s pool of nurses, doctors and social workers can also be utilised in sparsely populated areas where there are shortages of expert health and social care professionals.
With staffing needs growing due to aging populations in the Nordic countries, plus more complex and specialist care requirements, Dedicare provides an invaluable service to municipalities, Government and private organisations. Social and at-home healthcare is also expected to rise as Governments increasingly focus on keeping patients out of hospitals and in their homes.
In the long term, Dedicare aims to grow into one of Europe’s leading healthcare and social work staffing companies. To achieve this, it needed a more efficient and faster way of placing its workers into the right roles.
Operating across the Nordics, Dedicare is in direct competition to fill available roles with its specialist nurses, doctors and social workers. When a position needs to be resourced, the order is sent to Dedicare and its competitors at the same time. There are almost 100 companies operating in the sector, with 40 authorised under the industry’s collective staffing agreement.
Therefore, to remain ahead of the competition, Dedicare must find a candidate for an open role faster than other staffing companies, additionally validating their experience and qualifications.
Historically, this was a very manual and time-consuming process. Dedicare’s recruiters had to manually sift through all incoming emails from clients and candidates, plus attached documents relating to open positions. They would have to use the ATS (Applicant Tracking System) to find suitable candidates for roles and then get in touch with them over the phone or via email. Completing these steps rapidly made the difference between getting a role fulfilled for a client or losing it to a competitor.
Globus’ Virtual Staffing Assistant automatically interprets incoming orders and extracts key information such as job details, competences’ requirements, and available shifts to recommend pre-selected candidates to Dedicare’s recruiters. Whereas previously Dedicare’s recruiters had to manually read and understand multiple orders in various formats, such as emails and documents, with Globus, they can instantly see all relevant (order) information and suitable candidates at-a-glance.
Furthermore, many of Dedicare’s clients issue orders and update documents throughout the day, which required constant monitoring by the Dedicare team. With Globus’ Virtual Staffing Assistant it is now done automatically.
This has saved hours of manual work every day for each recruiter. Enabling them to focus on value-added tasks like building relationships with clients and candidates. As Mattis Kjellin, CIO of Dedicare, explains, “Our internal recruiters can now spend much more time on recruiting the best candidates, relationship-building with placed ones and spend more time on growing our business.”
Globus also utilises a much broader pool of candidates compared to manual searching via Dedicare’s ATS. Candidates who may previously have been overlooked can now be matched to relevant roles, increasing the quality of hire.
Because matches are done instantly by the Staffing Assistant, the time to hire has also reduced and Dedicare is able to out-pace and out-bid its competitors for available jobs.
When implementing its product, Globus worked closely with Dedicare’s end-users and domain experts to ensure the Globus product fully met all needs. This focus on usability led to very positive feedback from both candidates and Dedicare’s internal team.
Jan Kristiansen, COO and Co-founder of Globus explains, “The Globus development team prides itself on the quality of the Globus product, developed through an agile approach with our clients. When launching the Globus’ Staffing Assistant for Dedicare, a number of interviews with Dedicare’s team, clients and candidates was carried out to make sure our product could meet the needs of everyone - and that it really added value to their day-to-day operations.”
The Globus product helped to streamline communications between Dedicare and its clients and candidates, automating two-way interactions with just the click of a button. It’s user-centric approach also considered how candidates want to communicate with recruiters - often on-the-go, between jobs, on the commute or during breaks. As a result, candidates are now able to access and choose their preferred shifts from any device and instantly send their preferences back to Dedicare.
People can communicate through various channels such as email and SMS messaging in the application. Further increasing the user experience and cementing Dedicare as an employer of choice because of the ease of working with them.
Business area manager of Dedicare Nurse, Pantea Zethelius discusses the benefits of this approach, stating, “Globus’ Virtual Staffing Assistant gives greater flexibility not only to the consultant, who can easily see which shifts are still unfilled, but also to the caregiver who will have their shifts organised more efficiently. To succeed, it is critical to have an effective tool that supports this.”
Globus focuses on making its product simple and intuitive. However, it also provides user training to help each consultant use the product to its full potential and to become Globus-certified users.
Within a couple of hours, users were able to quickly understand the system and its different workflows. This made rolling the product out in a decentralised environment a lot easier. Kjellin adds, “We’ve found that, traditionally, training in a new tool can often be a challenge. But with Globus, after a few hours of training the user can be fully operational, follow different workflows and understand the application.”
New features to be released would allow for an even better flow and more accurate matching, based not only on qualifications and past experiences, but also on where the candidate wants to work.
Kjellin finishes with a reflection of the Globus implementation, “This project has gone beyond expectations. Globus adds to our existing processes by automating our order interpretation, communication, matching and verification. Globus really listened to our needs and that has been a huge factor in the project’s success.”
Helge Bjorland, CEO and Co-founder of Globus adds, “Globus AI is a company driven by its vision of improving quality of life. We quickly determined that there is a huge potential in healthcare and especially with making sure that the right people are allocated to assignments.
“Together with Dedicare, we developed an AI-based software that would revolutionize their staff allocation process. In order to do this the software had to understand incoming requests and automatically match each assignment with the optimal healthcare professional. This goal aligned perfectly with our vision as it would ensure that every patient got the best possible care.
“It has been a very exciting journey so far and it is exhilarating to be at the point where the product is now actively used by customers who depend on it for their daily work.”
