Founded by Mark Baiada, BAYADA Home Health Care employs nurses, home health aides, and therapists to care for children and adults in their home. Ten of their New Jersey locations have been using Talenize for about nine months, specifically to find and hire qualified nurses to provide one-on-one care with compassion, excellence, and reliability. The company turned to Talenize due to the difficulty of finding qualified home care nurses in a tight job market, where hospital pay is higher, and many nursing school graduates are not even aware that a career in-home care is a possibility.
Jessica Wishkoff is an Interim Director / Area Recruiting Manager for the company in one of its New Jersey divisions, reporting to Tim Wimberly, Division Director. Her responsibilities have grown well beyond her title.
A former director with a Masters in Social Work, she joined BAYADA because she was impressed by how long her interviewers had been with the company. “Always a really good sign,” Wishkoff said. Today, she spends a good amount of her time working with recruiters at other BAYADA offices, helping them hone their skills, follow best practices, keep proper documentation, and present a uniform, high-quality professional image to their nursing audience and an exceptional candidate experience.
“My position has developed into much more of an advocate and a mentor,” explained Wishkoff, “but I’ve never felt as passionate about recruiting as I do now. Hopefully, I’m instilling the same feeling in our recruiting managers.”
Wishkoff remembers her early days as a director overseeing recruiters who were combing the Internet for possible candidates, then calling them to talk about a job possibility. Those time-consuming, slow productivity days are long gone for BAYADA’s recruitment managers. The company began using Talenize to find candidates that were not “the usual suspects.” The new users included Wishkoff in her New Jersey division.
“Being such a big company with a large footprint in this market,” Wishkoff said, “we’re typically getting the same clients or same prospects over and over again. What I’ve noticed with Talenize is that we’re getting prospects we’ve never spoken with before. That’s a big plus and a big opportunity for us.”
She sees Talenize as the future of recruiting, which is taking shape faster than expected. “Talenize technology keeps us at the same level as our prospects,” said Tim Wimberly. “They’re not reading the newspaper looking for jobs, they’re searching online and on their cell phones.” This is precisely why Talenize, with its mobile-friendly application process, has become increasingly more relevant.
In the past month alone, 70% of BAYADA applications have been through mobile, underlining its importance.
Wishkoff has a great appreciation for Talenize’s inherent flexibility. “I can look at Talenize analytic reports to see which of our campaigns are getting the best response and which are not generating hits,” she said. “We can tweak those right away because we’re not bound by a contract of ‘your ad has to be out there for X number of days, and you can’t tweak it.’ We can reevaluate our needs periodically, and that’s great.”
According to Wishkoff, that flexibility also extends to Talenize support, spearheaded by Kassidy Voll, Director of Client Engagement for Talenize. “When I give them feedback that something’s not working, they usually have a solution to change it,” she said. “Things are not stagnant. If I say this application question is not working and we need to figure it out, they fix it. If I’m on the dashboard and I want different information, they resolve that. I’m excited to see what the outcome will be of the changes that we’re making right now. They are only getting better and smarter to help us recruit nurses.”
Wishkoff said that she “would certainly recommend” Talenize for the flexibility and control it provides in managing job postings. And she thinks it’s the right idea at the right time, filling a resource gap in her field. “There are a lot of recruiting resources and tools for white-collar jobs,” she said. “There aren’t many recruiting resources specifically for nursing and healthcare. I’ve noticed when I research online, I get redirected, and suddenly they’re talking about hiring accountants or something. Talenize is focused on us, and I like that.”