Asbury Communities Tames High-Volume Hiring Complexity

Like many non-profit organizations serving older adults with community and care in the United States, Asbury has depended on a decentralized hiring process to staff its network of senior living, outpatient therapy, and pharmacy services for most of its century-long history. But the global pandemic, followed by a skyrocketing requisition load and volatile talent landscape, proved too much for the non-profit’s legacy approach to talent acquisition.

Asbury made the decision to centralize its hiring processes in 2021, and realized quickly its recruitment tool was insufficient and a better tool was needed. The search for a new system initially focused on healthcare-specific tools, but the non-profit quickly realized it required more advanced functionality than these niche solutions offered. Asbury set out to find an applicant tracking system (ATS) that could support its needs across 11 locations, four states, a multitude of roles, and diverse employment types, all while driving adoption among hiring managers.

Asbury began its implementation of SmartRecruiters in early 2023, championed by a centralized talent acquisition team that engaged individual locations early on in the process. Involving key stakeholders as the system was built out allowed for workflow customization and promoted engagement across the non-profit’s workforce of 2,700 employees, paving the way for a successful rollout of its streamlined hiring model.

“The SmartRecruiters onboarding process was a dream,” said Helene Perdue, Former Director of Talent Acquisition and Development at Asbury. “They wanted to build it to work for us. We had one location that used a different workflow, and we built it for them.” Asbury also created a training hub for hiring managers to self-educate about SmartRecruiters and offered live weekly calls where hiring managers receive personalized support from the TA team.

“I have gotten famous for using the phrase, ‘if you can shop on Amazon, you can use SmartRecruiters,’” said Helene. “After 10 minutes of walking a hiring manager through the system, you can see their anxiety die down as they realize that SmartRecruiters is truly a one-stop shop. Everything they need is right there.”

Text recruiting for on-the-go job seekers

Many of the roles Asbury hires for are filled by talent that’s highly mobile. As such, adding text capabilities with SmartMessage to the hiring process has been a major boon, helping cut email volume in half and improve candidate response times. “Texting has been a game changer,” said Helene. “Whether we send an email or a text to a candidate, it’s right there in SmartRecruiters — and so is their reply.”

Intuitive candidate relationship management

Between building email campaigns for the first time with SmartCRM and implementing a career site chatbot with SmartPal, Asbury has unlocked a whole new level of candidate experience. The TA team now has the ability to build talent pipelines of interested candidates and turn these leads into applicants. “We are pleased with the open rates and read rates,” said Helene. “We don’t think that we would have had that with another tool.”

Job distribution that amplifies reach

With its prior recruiting software, Asbury was only able to post its jobs on a limited number of job boards. With SmartDistribute, open roles are posted to hundreds of job boards, and hiring teams can now easily see top-performing sources. “SmartRecruiters put our jobs on hundreds of job boards that we didn’t have available to us before,” said Helene. “We’re able to tell hiring managers it’s not just Indeed anymore.”

Asbury’s shift to a centralized hiring process has already yielded an abundance of efficiency savings, such as shorter time-to-hire, reduction in manual work for the TA team, and ensuring that hiring teams uphold service level agreements for response times.

“Overall, our executives realize how more efficient things are now,” said Helene. “For example, we’ve easily added two hours of productive work time a day simply because we don’t have to go into our email.”

“Now recruiters are freed up to do more value-added tasks,” added Helene. “We finally have time to attend career fairs and build relationships with local organizations that will help grow our talent pipeline.” The team is also developing campaigns in SmartCRM to reconnect with candidates who could be a better fit in the future. These are especially important goals in an industry where turnover hit 79.2% in 2024 alone.

The microeffects of a centralized system can have big impacts on team morale. “We don’t feel like we’re behind when two recruiters are at an event and have an offer that needs to be sent,” Helene said. “Someone can cover because it only takes a few minutes, not hours.”