Mobile system comes to the aid of nursing recruiter

Applications up by one third thanks to mobile technology

Nurse recruitment firm O’Grady Peyton International has increased responses to its adverts by more than a third since inviting applications via mobile phones.

The division of AMN Healthcare, which recruits nurses from the UK to work in the US, has achieved a 35 per cent growth in advertising response since implementing the technology from supplier m-send.

The majority of candidate leads come through advertising in nursing publications.

Tim Whyld, senior IT project manager of O’Grady Peyton, says that before the mobile initiative, recruiters would often just receive a voice message with a name and number to call.

‘Finding out if the applicant was suitable usually involved a 20 minute phone call. This was a costly exercise when the majority of nurses that enquire don’t have the relevant experience or are not prepared to go through the lengthy application process, which can take up to 18 months,’ he said.

There was also no mechanism for tracing people that showed interest via the firm’s web site but who abandoned the application form.

Whyld says the company wanted a system that would prioritise the most promising candidates and capture details of anyone that responded to an advert. Now every ad includes an m-send code inviting applicants to receive a mobile phone application form by texting a code to the number.

The mobile service replies with a link containing a unique user ID that takes the nurse to the firm’s application form, where the candidate is asked profiling questions and provided with multiple-choice format responses.

Each completed page is stored against the unique user ID and the submitted response is filtered by postcode or country and emailed to O’Grady Peyton pre-screeners who pass good leads to recruiters.

‘Prioritising the leads has freed up so much time previously wasted on unsuitable applicants and has enabled us to make recruiters responsible for other revenue-generating areas including post-contract employment,’ said Whyld.

O’Grady Peyton plans to make the process even more efficient by integrating data from m-send into Salesforce.com, its customer relationship management system, to completely automate the initial applications process.