Interview with Peak Vista Community Health Centers

By Faith Bliga

Peak Vista Community Health Centers is an ApplicantStack customer in the Healthcare industry. Recently I sat down with Elin Corey to interview her about how their organization is using ApplicantStack to improve their hiring process.

Can you tell me a little more about Peak Vista Community Health Centers?

Peak Vista is primarily located in Colorado Springs. We currently have 17 healthcare centers dealing with seniors, family and women’s health and behavioral health. We partner with community health organizations and hospitals, agencies, homeless clinics and school districts. We also provide a mobile care unit to the local school districts and homeless clinics.

Elin, what is your actual role at Peak Vista?

I am an Employment Specialists employing Administrative and non-licensed staff. We have another recruiter who uses the system for hiring the licensed staff positions, which become open less frequently and require a different application process.

What were the recruiting challenges that led you to the decision to search for an applicant tracking system?

Our recruiting process was completely paper-based. We receive 100’s and 100’s of resumes and applications and would review them manually which took up a huge amount of our time. Many of the applicants do not meet our minimum qualifications. We also manually sent the applicants to multiple managers and it was very time consuming and inefficient.

What kinds of jobs do you recruit for?

Everything from administrative staff to licensed healthcare professionals.

Any particular places your post your jobs?

We post our jobs to Indeed, SimplyHired and Better Jobs.com , the free job boards that ApplicantStack provides. In addition, we automatically post selective jobs to Monster (also a function provided by ApplicantStack), the local newspaper, Craig’s List and occasionally a specialty job board.

What criteria were important to you when you were evaluating applicant tracking systems?

Cost is always a top concern, as we are a non-profit organization. We were looking for all of the standard functions to post jobs, accept online applications and manage our applicants. ApplicantStack met and exceeded all of our criteria and expectations.

Can you recall why you chose ApplicantStack over other available services?

ApplicantStack was willing to initiate new functionality and adjustments as needed and showed a genuine concern for our needs. ApplicantStack met all of our criteria and expectations, including some additional functions, which led us to our decision to choose them as our vendor.

How has your process improved since you started using ApplicantStack?

We definitely improved our time management. We can now automatically prescreen applicants through the scoring functionality. We hire mostly bilingual applicants, and state this requirement in our job descriptions. However, we continue to receive many interested applicants who do not have the language capability. Now we can focus on only the individuals who meet our requirements which is a huge time saver. We can also easily forward applicants to multiple hiring managers at the same time, especially when I am not sure which manager might have the greatest need or the most interest. The scoring capability has been very helpful.

What would your response be to someone who asked you about using ApplicantStack?

To sum it up, I’d say ApplicantStack is very simple to use and very comprehensive. Their team is very helpful, responsive and knowledgeable.

My final question, just for fun…..If you could have any other job in the world, other than the one you have now, what would you want to do?

I would love to work in Human Resources. I like to work with people and would enjoy the people interaction more than the systems and paperwork!