Soar Autism Center sees increased volume of hires with Fountain
Results
116%
Soar Autism Center is a rapidly growing healthcare provider that specializes in therapy for children with autism. As demand increased for their services, Soar faced several challenges scaling their workforce to expand to new markets. Without enough therapists, Soar couldn’t achieve their mission to improve access to effective, compassionate, and child-centered autism therapy. Of top concern to Chief of Staff Tim Purdie was the overall improvement and refinement of Soar’s recruitment process.
Bogged down in manual work
One of the biggest hurdles Soar faced was managing a high volume of applicants while ensuring a smooth candidate experience. Manual hiring processes were creating bottlenecks, and slowing down the team’s ability to respond to candidates quickly. They also wanted the ability to utilize data-driven capabilities to inform hiring decisions and improve the hiring process.
Reduce the amount of interview no-shows
Interview no-shows were a big problem for Soar. Candidates would schedule interviews and fail to attend, leading to wasted time and missed opportunities to fill critical roles.
“Someone would schedule an interview and then just not show up,” explained Tim. “If we could know that person wasn’t going to show up, we could at least try to get another applicant in sooner.”
Applicants dropping out of the process
The Soar team was flummoxed by the number of applicants dropping out of the process when presented with a lengthy (but vital) questionnaire. This exodus reduced the pool of viable candidates and increased strain on the recruitment team.
As Tim described, “For specific roles, the questionnaire assesses who has worked with children before, who has comparable experience, and important criteria like that. But people weren’t answering the seven or eight question questionnaire.”
Too much manual work for the recruitment team
Tim’s team was also burdened with manual tasks, such as transferring candidate data from job boards to their previous applicant tracking system (ATS), and manually scheduling interviews. These tasks took up a significant amount of their time, limiting their capacity to focus on higher-value tasks, and creating a slow, fragmented process for applicants.
Lengthy time-to-hire
All of these issues–a serious drain on resources and hiring capacity–led to a long time-to-hire for the average candidate.
Tim and his team needed a system that could handle more application volume and increase the conversion rate of applicants to hires as the company expanded into new markets. They were looking for a solution that offered the ability to:
- Test different workflows: so that Tim and his team could see what aspects of the application process were causing candidates to drop off.
- Track applicant sources: to identify which of the various platforms each applicant had originated from, to give Soar a better understanding of what sources were performing best.
Fountain has truly given us the bandwidth to focus on the quality of people that we interview and the quality of people we give offers to.
A true workforce scaling solution
Fountain’s workforce solutions provided the automation and testing capabilities that Tim and his team were looking for, with the robust analytics they needed to drastically improve their candidate experience.
Automation and A/B testing
Fountain enabled Soar to run A/B tests on different application processes, such as shortening questionnaires, to see if this reduced the dropoff rate. This flexibility to experiment with application flow provided insights that led to higher completion rates.
Soar also implemented: reminders to reduce no-shows, and confirmation requests for candidates before their scheduled interviews. These helped the Soar team anticipate potential absences and take action to fill open slots in advance.
Customization
Fountain enabled the team to create highly customized workflows for each specific role. High-volume roles like RBTs have a different recruitment flow compared to more specialized positions like board-certified behavior analysts (BCBAs) or speech-language pathologists (SLPs). With this customization, each application process now feels unique to the role being recruited.
Videos and other additional resources were embedded into Fountain, replacing manual emailing with a more efficient centralized system.
Centralized application process and scalability
One significant gain from implementing Fountain was the ability to funnel applicants from various platforms like Indeed, LinkedIn, and the Soar website into a single, unified system. This eliminated the need for manual data entry and ensured that every candidate was tracked consistently throughout the hiring process.
Fountain also enabled the Soar team to handle the increased scale of applications with flow routing. If an applicant’s responses don’t meet a specific criteria or quality, that applicant can be routed to a different flow. This enabled the Soar recruitment team to solely focus on qualified candidates and not waste time sorting through subpar applications.
Interview scheduling
Fountain’s self-scheduling feature allowed applicants to choose their interview slots, freeing recruitment staff from time-consuming back-and-forth scheduling communications. This automation also allowed recruiters to focus on conducting better-quality interviews and improving candidate evaluations.
Fountain’s analytics allow us to track our key metrics in real time, giving us a clear picture of how each stage of the hiring funnel is performing.
More qualified applicants getting hired faster
The introduction of Fountain significantly improved Soar Autism Center’s recruitment outcomes including:
- Reduction in Interview No-Shows
Automated reminders and confirmation messages reduced the number of candidates failing to attend scheduled interviews. By predicting no-shows earlier, the team could backfill open slots and ensure their recruitment pipeline remained full. - Faster Time-to-Hire
The combination of process automation and A/B testing allowed Soar to make incremental improvements that reduced time-to-hire. For instance, shortening the questionnaire helped move candidates through the process faster, and having offer letters integrated into Fountain helped finalize hires more quickly.
Increased Efficiency
Fountain’s automation allowed the recruitment team to focus on higher-value tasks. Instead of manually processing applications and scheduling interviews, the team could concentrate on improving the quality of candidates selected for interviews, ultimately refining the caliber of hires.
Fountain is central to our recruiting process. We use it to manage multiple hiring workflows tailored to different roles and automate repetitive tasks like scheduling interviews. We can easily track where candidates are in the pipeline, identify bottlenecks, and make data-driven decisions to improve our hiring efficiency.
A bright future ahead
Soar Autism Center’s partnership with Fountain is poised to grow as the center expands into additional markets. Fountain’s built-in scalability allows the Soar recruitment team to handle increasing volumes of applications, without fear of overwhelm. As Soar continues to refine its recruitment processes, the flexibility of Fountain’s platform—particularly its automation, A/B testing capabilities, and analytics—will play a critical role in sustaining Soar’s growth.
By automating key workflows, reducing manual tasks, and providing actionable insights through analytics, Soar can ensure they have the right therapists and technicians in place. With Fountain’s help recruiting and retaining top talent, Soar Autism Center can focus on what they do best: transforming autism care for children. The collaborative relationship between Fountain and Soar Autism Center continues to evolve, with both teams working closely to ensure the platform meets Soar’s growing needs.
