Accelerating the Hiring Process, Especially for Hard-to-Fill Positions

Welcome to “Objectives in Action,” our ongoing series that features teams from across the organization that are working to make our four Top Company Objectives a reality. These strategic objectives, when executed well, will help us achieve our vision.

Top Company Objectives featured in this article:

• Make our field-based roles the obvious choice for top talent.
• Harness AI to transform how we engage, support, and care for those we serve, empowering our teams to achieve superior health outcomes.
• Bring our operating margins and cost structure in line with the rest of the industry. 

In the spotlight: The HR Talent Acquisition team

The hiring situation: Until earlier this year, the Talent Acquisition team was using Workday to track job candidates as they move through the hiring process. While Workday is a strong system for HR, payroll and finance, it has limited functionality when it comes to tracking job applicants: Key parts of the hiring process—like sharing resumes and collecting feedback—often had to be done outside the system through emails or other manual methods. Also, the reporting and analyzing of hiring information required manual workarounds to extract data, making it difficult to view trends or make real-time, data-informed decisions.

In addition, Workday often required the use of separate systems and vendors to handle core recruiting tasks like interview scheduling, which created extra steps and inefficiencies for both recruiters and hiring managers. The VNS Health Careers Site was managed by a third-party vendor as well, which led to delays in updating content, making design changes, and accessing reliable analytics.

To make matters more challenging: In Personal Care, there wasn’t an applicant tracking system at all. Candidates applying for Home Health Aide roles had to submit paper applications, and the hiring process was fully manual.

The big picture: Hiring decisions were taking longer than they should. Recruiters and hiring managers had limited visibility into candidate progress, and it was difficult to refine recruitment strategies without reliable, up-to-date data.

Our Top Company Objectives in action: In late 2024, after carefully evaluating several recruitment software solutions, the Talent Acquisition team—under the leadership of Amy Mitchell, Vice President, HR Systems and Services, and Kristen Rosen, Director, Talent Acquisition—selected iCIMS (pronounced “Eye-Sims”), a cloud-based, AI-powered platform built specifically for talent acquisition. The team rolled out the new platform to VNS Health’s career website last December, then launched its applicant tracking system in mid-May of this year.

The results were immediate and dramatic: “Every part of VNS Health—including Personal Care—is now using the iCIMS talent acquisition platform for job candidates,” says Gail Thakarar, Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer.  “In fact, on the very first day that we launched the platform, the Personal Care talent acquisition team connected with 3,000 home health aide candidates, which was phenomenal. Before we would have had to contact each of those candidates individually, so it’s really accelerated the hiring process—especially for hard-to-fill positions.”

With iCIMS, every step of the hiring process—from sourcing and reviewing resumes to interviews, communication, and job offers—is now centralized in one place. The platform also utilizes AI to provide real-time dashboards with key recruitment metrics.

“iCIMS is a leader in AI recruiting,” says Kristen. “They were recently recognized with the AI-Based HR Solution of the Year award at the 2025 AI Breakthrough Awards. Thanks to this platform, we can quickly review and engage large numbers of applicants, identify top talent faster, and track each candidate through every stage of the hiring journey. Candidates also have visibility into their own application status, which greatly improves their experience. We’re excited to keep building on these capabilities.”

Key takeways: The iCIMS platform has simplified and automated what was once a manual, time-consuming application and recruiting process—especially for our personal care Home Health Aide recruiters. As the single location for all recruiting data, metrics, and analytics, iCIMS makes it easier to identify strong candidates and provides greater visibility into our performance. The new platform, in addition to empowering team members with its AI capabilities, is also advancing our Top Company Objectives to make field-based roles the obvious choice for top talent and contributing to cost management through increased efficiency across the hiring process.

Next up: The Talent Acquisition team is currently leveraging iCIMS’s AI-powered analytics to refine outreach strategies and candidate engagement. As next steps, the team is continuing to roll out additional iCIMS functionality—including a digital assistant, video capabilities, and onboarding tools for Home Health Aides.