Karo Healthcare saved €800K in agency use with Workable

Karo Healthcare, facing the imperative to hire top talent to support company growth across Europe, sought a strategic approach to talent acquisition. Yulia Kazakova, the Head of Talent Acquisition and Employer Branding, spearheaded this initiative, leveraging the power of Workable to overcome obstacles efficiently.

This case study delves into the intricacies of Karo Healthcare’s journey, exploring the challenges faced, the solutions implemented, and the remarkable results achieved through fast implementation, automation, structured hiring, job board integrations, and insightful reporting.

The transformation not only accelerated the recruitment process but also led to a threefold increase in the successful hiring of top talents.

Challenges

• Hire top talent to support company expansion
• Expand into new markets in Europe
• Reduce agency spend

Solutions

• Fast implementation
• Automation & structured hiring
• Job board integrations
• Reporting

Results

• Implemented in less than a month
• Recruited across 8 key locations
• €800k saved

A growing company

Yulia explains the situation when she started the search for ATS software, “In the beginning it was only me running our recruiting. The challenge was to find a solution that would allow global recruitment across 8 key locations.”

Starting as a one person team, there was a need to stick to Karo’s values when it comes to running their business. As Yulia says, “Karo is first a Swedish company. And having a strong Scandinavian heritage our values are based around promoting inclusivity, being mindful employers and providing our employees a workplace where they feel engaged and motivated.”

With growth and expansion underway, it was important to maintain Karo’s identity.

“An interesting thing is that Karo is a corporation and it’s the healthcare domain, so it doesn’t sound like a place where things move quickly, but with us, it’s the opposite,” Yulia says.

“We have a philosophy of skilled entrepreneurship meaning that we want to stay small and dynamic. We are competing in some markets with established industry players, but at the same time, we are just 400 and some people. This helps us to be reactive and fast, flat and more agile, bringing more impact to the market.”

“We have a philosophy of skilled entrepreneurship meaning that we want to stay small and dynamic. We are competing in some markets with established industry players, but at the same time, we are just 400 and some people. This helps us to be reactive and fast, flat and more agile, bringing more impact to the market.”

The team at Karo needed software that could enable them to hit goals, maintain their identity and provide data and transparency to shape their recruiting.

Fast implementation brought results quickly

One of the reasons Yulia chose Workable was that it could be set up quickly, so Karo could see the impact right away.

“We were able to start using the system at a basic level within a week which was super fast,” says Yulia. “To get everything up and running where employees had the right access, templates were set up and we were fully implemented, it took us 30 days – just one month – to finish everything.”

“To get everything up and running […] took us 30 days – just one month – to finish everything.”

Other software would simply have taken too long to implement. In Yulia’s experience, “To compare with similar solutions we talked to, their set up and onboarding could take up to 6 months. We just didn’t have the time. We needed something that would work immediately and that was quite a good experience with Workable.”

Things didn’t stop there. With an eye for employer branding, Yulia used Workable to build a brand new careers page.

“We were able to continue customizations on our own after implementation. That includes the career page,” she says.

“We use the careers page to host a lot of our employer branding and it provides quite a smooth candidate experience. When they see our roles, they also see our values, what we’re standing for, benefits packages, et cetera.”

Automation and structured hiring improved efficiency

As a new recruiter came on board to support Yulia, she identified that her team needed to prioritize efficiency.

“Because we had so much hiring to do, Workable was an amazing help and relief to have,” says Yulia. “There was a lot of work that we had just stopped doing because it was all manual.”

The first component that Karo needed was structure.

“We were able to get a recruitment flow in place that provided more structure. Being structured with hiring pipelines has helped us provide a good candidate experience where we don’t lose track of candidates or forget about anyone.”

“We were able to get a recruitment flow in place that provided more structure. Being structured with hiring pipelines has helped us provide a good candidate experience where we don’t lose track of candidates or forget about anyone.”

Then, they needed to automate common, tedious tasks so they could focus on more important work. This not only freed up more time, as Yulia explains, it helped to provide a better candidate experience too.

“Automations help us keep candidates informed while reducing our workload. We can have automations for disqualified candidates, interview setup, sending assessments,” says Yulia.

“Candidates know more about what’s happening with their application and we can move quickly with them. We can finally track how many days it takes to reach out to a person for things like rejection emails and interview setup.”

“Automations help us keep candidates informed while reducing our workload. […] Candidates know more about what’s happening with their application and we can move quickly with them.”

Automatic emails were a big help, but so was self-scheduling.

“With Workable, we’ve been able to automate a lot of our interview scheduling. Self-scheduling has greatly reduced the amount of time we had to spend waiting to hear from candidates, comparing calendars and rescheduling.

“We can just send the self-schedule link, the candidate picks a time and it’s all connected to the interviewer’s calendar.”

Job board integrations improved recruitment marketing

Getting the word out about job openings across locations has become easier for Karo. Workable’s 200+ job board integrations mean that Karo’s jobs get exposure on both big sites and niche boards.

“We started advertising more since Workable provides job advertisements,” says Yulia. “It has good integrations with job boards like LinkedIn, and even smaller job boards which make more sense for recruiting for our specific business. Workable is one system integrated with everything and it’s all connected.”

“Workable is one system integrated with everything and it’s all connected.”

Creative testing of job posts has meant that Karo can refine their approach to hiring across locations. “We were able to A/B test posts to see what performs the best and we could recruit simultaneously in different locations and see where talent is coming.”

Over all, these integrations have meant less reliance on external recruiters. Karo can find the right candidates just by hitting the ‘publish’ button.

Reporting kept leadership informed

With so much expansion, there was a need for more reporting to keep budgets in line, help leadership make decisions and show results.

As Yulia tells it, “Workable also helps us anticipate questions that we may get about our hiring. Being a small company, there are situations where you can expect questions coming about performance. As the company grows, it starts to be hard to control who is hiring.”

“We used Hiring Plan to put approval flows in place, which helped to streamline this and control the budget as well, so our board members love it.”

The Hiring Plan feature in Workable was a key solution.

“We used Hiring Plan to put approval flows in place, which helped to streamline this and control the budget as well, so our board members love it. They have the full overview in front of them, they know what is going on. And being a data-driven company, this kind of transparency wouldn’t be possible without the functions that are available in Workable right now.”

Moreover, with Workable, Karo can now track custom fields and information across jobs and candidates.

“Because Workable is such a highly customized system,” says Yulia, “we can add any fields we want to track, any metrics that are important for us, and then basically export whatever we want.”

“[Workable] helps us make smarter business decisions.”

Yulia also describes how this all impacts decision-making.

“It helps us make smarter business decisions. We can track the reason for a hire and which budget it comes from. We can also track diversity. We can track candidates’ sources to know where talent is coming from and decide how to invest our recruiting budget.”

Karo saved €800,000

Karo saved money by leveraging the opportunities they found through Workable.

A fast implementation meant no time was wasted and that changes could happen quickly. Automations helped Yulia’s team scale their workload, while providing benefits to candidates in the form of extra (and timely) communication. Job board integrations got the word out about openings. And reporting meant that they could see the savings and learn how to optimize their recruiting.

“We’re a data-driven company and I can tell you that we saved over 800,000 euros, thanks to Workable.”

Yulia sums it up:

“We’re a data-driven company and I can tell you that we saved over 800,000 euros, thanks to Workable, on hires that would either happen manually or happen through agencies. So that was huge and if we compare it to the cost of Workable it absolutely makes sense having this.

“We are not even considering hiring a recruitment coordinator or someone who would take all these administrative and coordination tasks because it’s just not needed. So, it’s also one head count, one FTE person, which we simply don’t need.”