Case Study
How Comfort Keepers Farmington set up their recruitment process with Pipefy
Centralizing data, automating tasks and connecting processes allowed three franchise branches to save over 20,000 hours of work.
About Comfort Keepers Farmington
Comfort Keepers is an international organization that provides in-home care services to seniors and other people who need help with their daily activities. Their care providers can help with bathing, dressing, grooming, transportation, and housekeeping, as well as providing companionship and personal care.
The company operates in a franchise format, with each independently owned and operated franchise territory contributing to the overall success of the international organization.
Setting up for efficiency
Erin White, franchise co-owner of the Farmington and Howell, MI, locations of Comfort Keepers, opened the Farmington branch from scratch. Within six months, the business had many candidates for employment to manage.
The need for a platform to organize the hiring process became apparent. “We looked into a few different ATSs and used a few, but we wanted something that was more customizable,” Erin remembers.
In March 2018, this search led the business to Pipefy. Erin was able to implement the software on her own without the need for initial assistance. “I just kind of jumped in, started tinkering with it, and figured it out.”
The recruitment process starts with importing applicants’ data into Pipefy via a form. Recruiters have access to this data, even that of applicants who were rejected in the past, but apply again. Interviews with qualified candidates are also conducted in Pipefy, with interview questions and answers included in the corresponding applicant’s data. This gives the team a quick view of all applicants’ responses and enables them to make informed hiring decisions.
Selected applicants are sent hiring forms via a Pipefy integration with DocuSign. Pipefy also collects and stores the documents in a centralized database. When digital admission is complete, Pipefy creates a card in Comfort Keepers’ caregiver database to which several other employee-related processes are connected. This gives the company easy access to each caregiver’s records, including performance reviews, absences, and more.
Way beyond recruiting
The initial plan was to use Pipefy for applicant tracking only, but Erin soon discovered there was much more she could achieve with Pipefy. The information gathered about candidates during recruitment could be helpful in other areas, so connecting them to related workflows made sense.
As Erin connected these processes, new opportunities to streamline operations appeared. Her Comfort Keepers branches currently use the platform for recruiting, time-off requests management, onboarding, invoicing, availability, employee injuries reporting, etc.
“I really like the customizability of Pipefy. We can tailor the system to match our processes, and as the industry changes and evolves, we can make those changes too and keep things efficient,” she observes.
The company also has a centralized and easily-accessible place for caregivers’ data. This not only allows quick access to each team member’s history and performance, but also makes it easy to retrieve this data in other processes, expanding Comfort Keepers’ capacity for automation. This is especially convenient for Erin, as most of her staff is field-based. Managing this information without a centralized platform would have been a massive challenge for her.
During the harsher moments of the COVID-19 pandemic, this was vital. “During the pandemic, we used Pipefy to track vaccination status, manage whether a client or employee has COVID, and set up a process to make sure they understand what’s expected of them in that case,” Erin recalls.
As of 2023, Erin’s Comfort Keepers branches have generated roughly 328,164 automation jobs. This translates into around 27,347 hours saved with Pipefy. Considering their recruiting process exclusively, this saved over 20,000 hours.
“A lot of the automations significantly reduce the workload on the staff so that they can focus on doing the things that we need people to be doing, rather than just clicking around and doing things that can be automated,” says Erin. “They give me peace of mind because I know how they’re set up, and I know how they work, and that if there are issues I can figure out what happened.”
Next steps
Quality Assurance is the next business operation Erin plans to manage with Pipefy. This is a process in which supervisory staff visit clients to check on their health status and satisfaction with Comfort Keepers caregivers. This was formerly managed with a shared spreadsheet, but Erin believes it can become more efficient in Pipefy.
Erin started in 2016 with only the Farmington territory of Comfort Keepers. In January 2018, she acquired the Howell franchise territory from an owner who operated the branch for about 15 years. That owner still had a paper-based management system, which Erin transitioned into Pipefy. In April 2021, a third territory was acquired, expanding the company into the West Bloomfield, MI area.
“It was interesting to see how people managed to run this business without the tools we’re so used to relying on,” Erin notes. She doesn’t think the recent expansion could have happened without Pipefy’s efficiency improvements.
Erin believes other Comfort Keepers franchises could reap similar benefits from Pipefy. “The industry is definitely headed in a more technology-oriented direction, so I’m confident that there are people doing cool things and open to new ways of doing things efficiently and ultimately maximizing their businesses,” she notes.
