Case studies

BlueCross reduces advertising spend by 65 percent with JobAdder

As our CEO said, ‘it’s a no-brainer.’ It was really quite obvious when we took a score-card approach that JobAdder was the way to go

Taking the helm 

BlueCross is the largest private aged care provider in the Australian state of Victoria, providing care and support since 1993. With 33 residences across Melbourne, BlueCross employs about 4,500 employees of which 75% are casual. “There’s a  high level of “casualisation” in our industry and it’s quite common for individual care workers to work across a number of providers or work for one at a  number of different sites,” explained Joel Broughton, Head of Talent Acquisition. 

Despite a small recruitment team of three people, they place around 1,500 candidates a year, with around 80% of those falling into four job categories. “We’ve got one recruiter as a volume specialist looking after those and another who looks after the remainder, making use of talent communities,” he said.

Prior to JobAdder, the company had been using an ATS implemented in 2007 that hadn’t been updated for six years due to being highly customised. “The updates were not relevant and we couldn’t have used them. It was really difficult for our recruiters to use with pipelining talent or having talent communities. It was unsearchable and we couldn’t search for anyone unless we knew their name or email address,” Joel recalled.   

As a result, recruitment developed into a decentralised model, where the hiring manager was in control. “The team would advertise the role, get applications in and the hiring manager would go through them all and run the whole process. They’d then come back to the team with an offer to a candidate and we’d generate a letter of offer. All we’d do was top and tail the process,” said Joel, adding that the talent acquisition team was essentially a job aggregator. 

With the database having no search capabilities, every role was advertised because “it was easier than trying to find those candidates again. The candidate experience was awful and the hiring managers were doing all the heavy lifting,” he said. There was a clear need for a centralised model without adding further headcount. 

The team considered four ATS’ in the market including JobAdder but as Joel noted, “As our CEO said, ‘it’s a no-brainer.’ It was really quite obvious when we took a score-card approach that JobAdder was the way to go. 

“I’d used the agency portal before and for me, JobAdder is like the Apple of ATSs. Once someone uses Apple, they never go to Samsung. There are other systems out there that have got more bells and whistles or do something better but I’m still not going to change. It’s the meeting of art and science. It does everything that we want…more than everything,” he said.

Strength in numbers 

“I’ll use it almost every day,” said Joel about JobAdder’s powerful data analytics tool, pulling up specific reports for 1:1s with his team. “It highlights where they’re not using the system properly. One instance was where [we could see] people were taking longer to get to offer than they are to the hire stage and that suggested the team wasn’t taking candidates through all these stages on JobAdder.

Another instance is being able to track candidate sourcing spend. “There were instances where we would advertise for a receptionist twice in one day, across two different jobs. And that happened over and over again. Since we’ve moved to JobAdder, we’ve reduced our job board expenditure by 65%, saving us thousands of dollars while our agency usage has dropped by 30-40%,” said Joel, adding that “JobAdder’s definitely paid for itself in just a few months.”

Executives at the company now receive frequent PowerAdder reports on sourcing or advertising efforts where they previously had no visibility of what was happening in talent acquisition. “We look at what jobs we have open, how long they take to fill, how much we’re saving,” said Joel. 

Speaking of savings, Joel noted that “PowerAdder saves us a ridiculous amount of time and is a brilliant system. You could just use Excel and dump everything in there and manage manual analytics like we were previously doing, but I was spending hours of my time on it. My [volume specialist] really loves the numbers and likes to know how she’s doing compared to the rest of us.”

PowerAdder offers insights across a number of dashboards. “I love the efficiency dashboard because while it highlights where the system’s not being used, it also highlights a level of quality as well. People love to know how they’re going and where they can improve. PowerAdder’s a really important part of lubricating the conversations that we have internally,” he added.  

Easy, powerful, cool

When referring JobAdder to others, Joel touches on the ease. “Everything about it has been easy; from sales to implementation and it’s easy to use and JobAdder’s easy to deal with.” Joel then pointed out that “JobAdder’s cool to be associated with. Like if you drive a really nice car, you’d want to park it where everyone can see you getting out. JobAdder has that feel to it, but it’s not pretentious.” 

On JobAdder as a solution, he said “it’s more powerful that you think it is” noting that the platform doesn’t try to be something that it’s not. “There are HRISs that try to be an ATS but they’re not. Then there are ATSs that try to be an HRIS. JobAdder stays in its lane and what it does, it does well.” 


In-house
Bolton Clarke

Recruitment pressures The Productivity Commission (2011) predicted that 3.5 million Australians will be accessing aged care services every year by 2050, …

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