How Presence reduced time-in-onboarding by 50% with Fountain

About Presence

Founded in 2009, Presence is a leading provider of PreK-12 schools-based teletherapy for special education-related services and mental health counseling. Their nationwide network of  licensed clinicians and mental health professionals deliver personalized speech-language therapy, occupational therapy,and mental health services to students at over 10,000 school locations via their proprietary therapy platform.   

Onboarding before Fountain Hire was ‘messy, clunky, and frustrating’

Before switching to Fountain Hire, Presence used an ATS that “was a different era of technology,” said Eric Aschwald, VP of Clinical Acquisitions at Presence, who oversees the sourcing, recruiting, and onboarding of clinical teams. For a company that needs to continually onboard clinicians, they needed a faster, more efficient system.

When searching for a new platform, Aschwald cited three main categories of consideration: candidate experience, employee experience, and the ability to help Presence achieve its greater business goals. 

“From a candidate standpoint, we wanted a system that was mobile-friendly, that was a smooth application process, and a lot faster than before, and where candidates could sequence through systems at their own pace,” he said. “The ability for our candidates to drive their own process and join our network at the right pace for them is something that we really wanted.”

In terms of employee experience, “we wanted to enable recruiters to operate at their highest skill level, add human connectivity, decrease the time they spend manually entering data into systems, and make their job a lot easier,” said Aschwald.

“The combination of those two things translates to business results. It translates to the onboarding of more clinicians, using our budget more effectively, to meeting the needs of our customers across the country.”

A customized solution for the win

The Presence team knew what they were looking for in an onboarding solution and went into specifics during their first interview with the Fountain Hire team. 

“We went through each stage of the journey for new providers and I showed [Fountain] how much manual time was spent from sourcing to the interviews themselves, adding in the notes, having to go into another system, following up with candidates,” Aschwald said. “We really elaborated that we’re spending hours on manual engagement.”

When it came time to present how Fountain could solve Presence’s pain points, Aschwald and his team were impressed by the individual attention given to their unique struggles.

“Our conversations were always very constructive and collaborative, and it was always about finding a solution for both parties,” he said. “They really showed they were taking an interest in our company, what we did, and customizing solutions based on the conversations that we had in a way that really impressed us.”

Aschwald and his team got to experience what it would be like to be a candidate by using Fountain Hire on their mobile devices.

“During the first demo, we were given the ability to apply from our phones right then and there, and we could see what a candidate would experience,” Aschwald said. “I was wowed by how customizable the stages were, how we could flex everything to our needs. I could see right from the first demo that this was going to work for our high volume demand.”

Out of the eight demos Presence took part in, they selected Fountain Hire as their solution thanks to its ability to address their key hangups.  

“Reduction of manual employee time was something that [Fountain] was ready to demonstrate they could achieve,” said Aschwald. Fountain “listened to our needs and presented Fountain in a way that would satisfy us, and it really has.”

Expectations: Exceeded

When looking at Presence’s 10 different onboarding stages, “across every stage, Fountain has made it better,” said Aschwald. Automated texting, the speed with which candidates can transition between stages, and the system’s flexibility, which allows them to launch new clinician types when needed, have enabled Presence to make faster decisions about whom to onboard to meet evolving needs. 

Presence defines their time-to-onboard as the time between “applied” and the completion of certain onboarding tasks. Before Fountain Hire, this time averaged around 30 days. But after Fountain Hire, “we have seen the fastest person go through in about six days.”

Time savings aren’t limited to time-to-onboard. Presence also commends Fountain Hire’s record-keeping and database capabilities.

“In our previous ATS, it was hard to triangulate records for an individual person,” Aschwald said. “With Fountain, we can see what a person has applied for, all the notes, all the history, all the documents from their journey, and it’s all in one place. That can save 10 to 20 minutes per person.”

Fountain Hire’s analytics also help Presence make in-the-moment onboarding decisions. 

“Analytics have been really helpful for how we want to drive business changes and give us good insight into how markets are performing in certain geographies to meet capacity needs,” Aschwald said. As for future functions, “I’m excited to use Fountain to inform policy decisions on how we onboard by geography and by availability.