Hiring and job searching are both difficult tasks — and in the healthcare world, those tasks are even harder.
Clinical workers like nurses and doctors are in constant demand, and studies have found that it takes employers months to fill those positions. That delay can cause big problems for hospitals and other care centers.
A new Seattle-based startup, Pivot Health, is aiming to help the healthcare industry solve those problems with a web-based hiring and job matching service. The company will launch the service in Washington state Tuesday, with plans to expand to Oregon and California later this year.
Pivot Co-Founder and CEO Simon Frey told GeekWire that he hopes the company can bring disruption to a highly traditional industry.
“Healthcare is the fastest-growing labor market in the U.S. and also the most inefficient,” Frey said. “On average, it takes about four months for a clinician to change jobs or for a hospital to hire talent, and every additional day that stems from that inefficient process contributes to higher admin costs, lower reimbursements for the hospital and, most importantly, it contributes to worse patient and medical outcomes.”
Frey, whose past work is in data and analytics, founded Pivot in January along with its CFO Tony Campos. They have bootstrapped the company so far and are now looking to raise their first venture round and begin building out their team.
“For a number of reasons, the HR side of healthcare has been overlooked, which we’re excited about,” he said. Most healthcare employers hire using brick-and-mortar staffing agencies, and in 2016, the industry as a whole spent $21 billion on outside staffing fees.
Part of that can be attributed to “the archaic notion that recruitment and finding talent is very much people and intuition-driven,” Frey said. “I don’t think it’s an experience or decision that you’d ever digitize 100 percent, but there are so many opportunities to better leverage data to drive that matching process between an employer and a job seeker.”
The company is looking to innovate the process by building technology that speeds things up for job seeker and employer alike. Pivot has built a database of registered clinical workers in Washington state that job seekers can pull their on data from, making the process of filling out digital application forms much simpler, Frey said.
The platform then uses a machine learning algorithm to match job seekers with employers they would likely want to work for. The platform also offers career coaching and resume advice for job seekers.
Frey also said it can help hospitals meet other goals, like increasing the number of nurse practitioners on staff or diversifying the staff they hire. The company charges employers a placement fee per hire, and the platform is free to use for job seekers.
