As much as healthcare is one of the largest and most crucial industries in the country, it faces widespread talent shortages, especially in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. The technological changes, in addition to the rise in demand for medical services, have compelled healthcare organizations across the globe to implement proper policies and build strategic talent pipelines to attract the best candidates. Recent developments in the field of talent acquisition technologies have enabled healthcare recruiting to become more cost-effective by improving costly time-to-fill metrics, reducing agency spend and streamlining the hiring process. Empowering healthcare establishments to realize this trend is what Katon Direct is all about. With over 17 years of experience, the company offers a wide range of talent acquisition services that help clients hire passionate and qualified healthcare professionals in a faster, smarter, and more affordable way.

In conversation with Manage HR, Katon Direct’s Managing Partners, Anthony Gentile & Marc Weissman speak about the company’s background, how they help connect healthcare companies with potential candidates, steps they take for a competitive edge in the market, their roadmap and most importantly, their seamless onboarding process.

Can you provide a brief overview of Katon Direct?

Katon Direct provides holistic recruitment solutions designed to help any recruiter or recruitment department find and attract qualified healthcare professionals. With over 16 years of experience, we are continuously evolving our strategies to improve not only our clients’ lives, but the lives of the talent they are looking to hire. When talented people identify with the organizations they work for, they thrive and our healthcare improves.

What are the major challenges and pain points your clients generally face and how does Katon Direct address them?

The biggest hurdle our clients face is the lack of qualified applicants and lack of a robust talent pipeline. Finding qualified applicants requires creating job postings that drive more applications into existing systems. Given traditional job-board advertising doesn’t extend its reach to job seekers effectively, this is quite a cumbersome process. Here is where we come in with our programmatic job advertising solutions. By using intelligent software, our customers can easily place their job board postings across the internet, which were previously confined to specific job sites.

Another challenge is the lack of a proper talent pipeline for passive candidates. These potential/ passive applicants respond best to communication and establishing relationships with recruiters.
To counter such obstacles, we provide database marketing through a robust data set. Our ability to communicate effectively with those candidates helps recruiters connect and analyze their talent proactively. Also, traditional job-board advertising methods requires manually posting to a job board. This is where our programmatic job advertising technology comes in. Its intelligent software system simplifies the process, so clients no longer have to post jobs manually. Leveraging this approach delivers better results and more qualified applicants in the most cost-effective way. Simultaneously, we assist job seekers and nurture them as they develop healthy connections that eventually increases their chances of securing their application.

Additionally, the “capacity issue” is what most of our clients are concerned about today. There is a massive gap between access to resources and efficient professionals in the healthcare sector. We assist them by working to bridge the gap between recruiters and candidates during the entire recruitment journey.

Could you elaborate more on Katon Direct’s client onboarding process?

Our expertise is deeply rooted in our understanding of the market—the demands and needs of our clients and an emphasis on achieving it with greater efficiency. We dig deep into our robust data sets to preidentify the audience and then design the marketing strategies and the processes to connect the client with the right candidate. We help our clients build relationships and identify trends so that it leads to higher application rates, a broader talent pool, increased talent efficiency, and a reduction in overall recruitment spending. It helps to actively engage both the candidates and our clients, which ultimately improves the workforce quality. We have also developed our backend process to manage all of our projects, obtain a client-facing project management tool and a client success manager to interact with our clients and provide regular reporting .

In addition, talent sourcing is becoming increasingly popular among recruitment teams. The most challenging issue recruiters face is that they cannot communicate directly with the candidates in a personalized manner. Most importantly, in the healthcare sector, a recruitment team does not have the necessary bandwidth to efficiently engage with their applicants. Our team of talent sourcers will make the calls, send the emails, and communicate directly with candidates seeking information regarding a particular job based on their interest, to make them aware of the brand.

Could you cite a successful case study or any milestones that Katon Direct has recently acquired?

Katon Direct works with hospital systems and home health care companies of all sizes - no matter how big or small. We have clients from medical practices and long-term care. We assist them in hiring doctors or nurse practitioners. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for healthcare professionals has increased at a rapid rate ,making it equally hard for recruiters and healthcare companies to hire qualified professionals. In order to counter these challenges, we execute a large number of campaigns across the U.S. to bring the required support staff onboard to address the COVID-19 crisis.

Over one-third of cases and deaths from COVID-19 in the U.S. came from long-term care, nursing homes, and assisted living facilities. These organizations are looking to increase their medical staff immediately. We have several clients in that space and one in particular, operates in about 26 states across the country. They were looking to ramp up the nursing support staff in their nursing home and when they approached us, we quickly identified their problems and developed a campaign that proactively reached out to nurses and nursing assistants in the markets. As a result, we were able to deliver impactful messages and drive more traffic to their recruiters and sourcing team. Ultimately, we helped them improve n their campaign and get more candidates to apply.

What does the future look like for Katon Direct?

In 2003, Katon Direct received its start as a data company. Today, everything relies on data-driven solutions, which inspired our new purpose.. We strongly believe that the future of Katon Direct is based upon the power of our data sets, that we built over a 16 to 17 year span. By building significant technology solutions and partnering with existing ones, our company can provide better candidate experiences and seamlessly drive more personalized engagements for our clients.