Taking better care of candidates with AI | This is ViVa! Zorggroep's story
Care workers orientate at times when recruiters are not at their desks - evenings, weekends, between shifts. ViVa! Zorggroep noticed that it is difficult to respond quickly and personally then, especially with the volume of enquiries they receive. AI colleague Vivian changed that. Not by replacing human contact, but rather by making room for more attention and commitment.
Working with attention and commitment
ViVa! Zorggroep is a well-known elderly care organisation in the Kennemerland region (North Holland). With more than 4,000 employees and 1,300 volunteers, they dedicate themselves to a healthy and pleasant life of around 11,000 clients. A big task, but if you do it together, you succeed. Attention and commitment are not only the starting point towards clients, but also in their recruitment.
Only with numbers like that can it be a challenge to give candidates the attention you would like. Amy Narold, Recruitment Marketer at ViVa! Zorggroep says: "We process thousands of responses every year and get a lot of enquiries from potential candidates in the region. This goes on all the time, including evenings and weekends. We like to respond quickly, but manually this is simply impossible to keep up with. So we started looking for a way in which this can be automated and still personalised."
More questions than the team could keep up with
Before ViVa! Zorggroep started working with AI agents, questions from candidates came in to the customer information centre. Amy says: "Especially in healthcare - because of the irregular schedules - you see that candidates orient themselves outside office hours. Many questions come in every day and some of them the customer contact centre was able to answer just fine, but they are obviously not completely at home in recruitment. Specific questions were forwarded to us, so there was still pressure on our team. Especially since you want to give candidates quick answers, even if they contact you at weekends or in the evenings."
Choosing an AI agent
Amy and her colleagues went looking for possible solutions. Important here: it has to be an improvement for both candidates and recruiters. "AI is very popular in our team and we quickly came to the conclusion that an AI agent could solve our challenges, because it can really start a conversation and respond to the candidate's personal questions and preferences. And that 24/7," says Amy.
ViVa! Zorggroep has been using MrWork s software for several years for campaigns, soft conversions and lead generation, so the move to the MrWork AI Hub felt logical. Amy explains: "MrWork is a very nice sparring partner - actually an extension of our team. They know our organisation inside out, so this expansion felt very approachable. We also found it important that the AI agent would be fully integrated into our work-at-home site, with the lead campaigns and the ATS. The choice for the AI Hub was therefore quickly made."
The tasks of AI colleague Vivian
Together with MrWork , ViVa! Zorggroep developed an AI colleague: Vivian. She guides candidates in the orientation and selection process by answering questions and referring them to the best-suited vacancies after a pre-screening.
Amy talks enthusiastically about the innovation: "It is a relief that AI colleague Vivian is always there for our candidates. Every day a lot of responses come in - from 'what's the status of my application' to niche questions about qualifications and positions - and Vivian handles them kindly and helpfully. I estimate that it saves us as much as a working day a week, and for candidates it's really nice to be able to have the conversation at their own times."
In addition, Vivian ensures that the recruitment team only has to deal with quality applications by pre-screening responses that come in through lead campaigns. "With lead campaigns, you lower the threshold to respond enormously, but that also ensures that you get quite a lot of responses from candidates who unfortunately don't fit in. Now that Vivian asks questions about qualifications, working region and preferences, we can point candidates directly to the best-suited vacancies. If candidates do not yet have the right qualifications, Vivian presents them with work-study options," Amy says.
"I estimate that AI colleague Vivian does save us a working day a week and for candidates it is very nice to be able to start the conversation at their own moments."
Amy Narold, Recruitment Marketer
Vivian gets a little better every day
"The great thing about an AI agent is that you can continuously fine-tune and optimise. We monitor the interviews and check whether Vivian helped the candidate well. If we see something that could be improved next time, we can easily adjust it ourselves in the MrWork AI Hub. In this process, MrWork supports us so that we can increasingly take up this training ourselves," Amy said.
One AI colleague, many results
With the addition of an AI colleague, ViVa! Zorggroep's ambition was to improve the candidate experience while reducing the pressure on the recruitment team. The numbers speak for themselves: we succeeded!
- Higher engagement on the work at site → 50% more page visits per session, 30% longer session duration and 25% more interaction
- Average increase of 14% in number of applications, in last months even 38% more applications
- Approximately one working day per week saved at recruitment and customer information team
The time they save on executive tasks is now spent on strategic work - where humans make the difference. "I can fully focus on our campaigns and labour market communication, and especially with such a scarce target group, this is so important. My recruitment colleagues can pay more attention to candidates, for example by making an extra follow-up call, and have more space to advise vacancy holders," said Amy.
More human contact through AI
"When implementing our AI colleague, we put the candidate first. It sounds contradictory, but it is precisely because of AI that we can give candidates more personal attention. Because we automate the initial communication with AI, it creates time for recruiters and vacancy holders to be extra involved with the candidates who fit with us," Amy said.
At ViVa! Zorggroep, new AI steps are planned in the near future, for example the further development of the AI agent and AI tools for content creation. Amy has a keen view on the balance between humanity and technology: "I see AI as a tool to do my job well. If you don't use it, you miss out on so much. If you deploy it smartly and at the right times, you don't have to worry about it not working well or being impersonal. It then actually contributes to a better experience, for recruiters and candidates."
"We had no distinctive story, campaigns were occasional and inflow variable. With 65+ vacancies open, something had to change."
Amy Narold, Recruitment Marketer
