Case Study
Human-centered design: How rethinking the caregiver experience led to faster, more efficient hiring
OUR CLIENT
This global home health company helps people of all ages and diagnoses live at home with comfort, safety, and dignity. Its skilled workforce of more than 30,000 clinicians and caregivers provides comprehensive care to nearly 200,000 people every year. The company’s mission-driven approach, centered on enhancing the well-being and independence of its clients, has contributed to a strong track record of customer satisfaction.
THE CHALLENGE
Fragmented, inconsistent processes negatively impacted operations, recruiting, and employee retention
Caregiver turnover is a massive challenge for the home health industry. This 50-year-old company, facing a 97% candidate attrition rate during recruitment and initial placement, identified inefficiencies in its hiring and placement process as a critical root cause. The insufficient staffing forced the company to turn away patients, creating an estimated revenue loss of $700 million.
Additionally, the organization's culture of competition rather than collaboration negatively impacted the candidate experience. This internal discord made it challenging to present a unified, welcoming workplace to potential new hires.
As the company dug deeper into the situation, leaders realized that growth through mergers and acquisitions had not been supported with necessary organizational structures, processes, and digital infrastructure to manage the increased scale effectively. As a result, personnel relied on manual efforts to keep operations running, creating inefficiencies and inconsistencies. Moreover, disparate systems led to data silos and communication breakdowns. This disjointed application and data environment hindered effective decision-making and prevented cohesive, streamlined operations.
Overall, the home healthcare company was struggling with systemic issues that negatively impacted hiring and employee retention and threatened the company’s long-term sustainability and customer satisfaction.
THE TRANSFORMATION
Implementing human-centered design for healthcare process optimization
The UST Evolve team of experience design experts delivered a comprehensive strategy based on a human-centered assessment of the company’s recruiting and operational processes and technologies. The analysis revealed that improving caregiver recruitment by a modest 3% could lead to an additional 5,500 caregivers, translating to an estimated revenue uplift of $100 million. This data-driven insight provided a compelling case for optimizing hiring processes.
From the in-depth research, we created detailed journey maps for caregivers, office staff, and employment candidates to uncover pain points and associated workarounds for each group. We then developed an “employee jobs-to-be-done framework,” prioritizing issues and systematically addressing each challenge with tailored strategies, including:
- Overhauling the company’s career website—making it more engaging and user-friendly from the moment of initial interest through the point of hiring to attract a larger pool of qualified candidates
- Optimizing the candidate application workflow—streamlining processes to reduce friction and improve the overall candidate experience
- Modernizing and integrating existing systems—to resolve application and data silos, establishing a single source of truth, improving information flow, enhancing decision-making, and reducing the risk of data errors
- Streamlining operations—by replacing manual workarounds with standardized processes and digital infrastructure, increasing efficiency, enhancing collaboration across teams, and fostering a more cohesive and supportive work environment
THE IMPACT
Targeting $100 million in new revenue opportunity by addressing recruiting and operational issues
The comprehensive solution identified the root causes of the company’s high-candidate attrition rate and subsequent caregiver shortage, significantly enhancing operational efficiencies, collaboration, and workforce satisfaction. By improving the efficiency of recruiting and scheduling processes, the company is well-positioned for continued success and has set a target of $100 million in new revenue.
If your company wants to transform processes and technologies with a human-centered design approach, learn more about our user experience design consulting services.