Eleven care homes in one region, each advertising separately for the same roles. They competed with each other for the same local applicants, and paid twice over to reach them. A candidate could be approached by three different homes in the same organisation within days. None of the eleven homes had done anything wrong on its own. The overlap was invisible until someone added it up across the region.

Eleven homes bidding against themselves

Kvarnhem’s homes each ran their own recruitment, which made sense while each was staffed mostly from its own street. In a tight labour market, the same candidate could receive three separate approaches from the same organisation inside a fortnight.

It also meant something less obvious. A strong applicant living between two homes was, in effect, a candidate for whichever one happened to advertise first. That was rarely the home that actually needed them most. Nobody could see the pattern from inside a single home, because no home could see who the others had already contacted.

Sourcing once for the region

Kvarnhem now sources into one regional pipeline in Yardstick Pipeline rather than one per home, and each home draws candidates from it. Applicants apply once and are considered for every site within realistic reach of them.

Travel time is built into the match itself, rather than treated as an afterthought. A candidate is shown the homes they could actually work at. They are not shown every vacancy open across the region regardless of distance. A home more than ninety minutes away is filtered out automatically, so the match reflects a shift somebody could realistically make twice a day.

The pipeline does not decide staffing levels for any home. It simply means eleven separate sourcing efforts became one. A candidate is read once instead of once per application.

The homes still hire

Each home still interviews and makes its own offers. What is shared is the reach and the first reading of an application, not the decision about who actually joins a particular team. A home can decline every candidate the pipeline sends it, and several have, without affecting what the other ten see.

Results across the region

11 care homes are now staffed from a single shared pipeline, up from eleven separate recruitment efforts that rarely spoke to each other. The number has been stable since the second month, once every home had moved its open roles onto it.

Duplicate approaches to the same candidate are down 45%. A home can now see that another home already contacted someone, before reaching out again itself. The check takes seconds, not a phone call between coordinators.

The decision to hire has not moved. 100% of offers are still made by each home’s own manager, and the pipeline only changes how a candidate first gets in front of them. Interviews and start dates are still set locally, home by home.

What they are doing next

Kvarnhem is reviewing whether two neighbouring regions should share sourcing the same way, given how often their catchment areas already overlap in practice.