Landmark Hospitals
"Smart Sourcing and Sourcing Assistant helped our team identify better candidates that we wouldn't have seen otherwise."
Michele Shaffer, VP, Human Resources
Overview
0 full-time recruiters. More than 100 hires a year.
- Problem: Landmark Hospitals needed to hire for hard-to-fill clinical roles in rural, highly competitive markets without a dedicated recruiting team.
- Solution: Landmark used Indeed Smart Sourcing, and has begun using Sourcing Assistant, to proactively reach passive candidates and keep sourcing activity moving even when HR staff are pulled in other directions.
- Result: The team moved from waiting and hoping for inbound applicants to actively identifying and contacting candidates they would not have reached before.
Landmark Hospitals is a small specialty hospital organization serving medically complex patients across three hospitals in Missouri and Georgia. With a lean HR function, no full-time recruiters, and more than 100 hires to make each year, the company needed a better way to source talent for critical nursing, respiratory, and specialty roles. Smart Sourcing gave the team a more proactive workflow. Sourcing Assistant is helping extend that model by keeping sourcing work active even when the team cannot attend to it daily.
Background
What makes Landmark’s hiring environment especially difficult is not just volume. It is the mix of roles, the acuity of care, and the markets where the company operates. Michele, the Vice President of Human Resources, described persistent competition for nurses and respiratory therapists, especially in more rural areas where candidate supply is thin and experienced talent is hard to surface.
Before Smart Sourcing, Landmark’s recruiting process was largely reactive. Michele described it as “hope, pray” — post the role, wait, and see what showed up. If an applicant made it to the interview, Landmark often had a good chance of winning them. The harder part was getting qualified people into the funnel at all.
That was a real operational challenge because Landmark does not have a dedicated recruiting team. Instead, one HR person in each hospital handles recruiting alongside onboarding, employee relations, and other day-to-day responsibilities. Recruiting is only a portion of each person’s job, which means hiring work can easily get deprioritized when other fires demand attention.
Challenge
If Landmark could not improve sourcing, the consequences were straightforward: continued dependence on agency labor and contingent search firms, mounting pressure on a small HR team, and slower progress on some of the hardest clinical roles in the business. Michele said one of Landmark’s major workforce goals is reducing the cost of agency nurses, but that effort is difficult when turnover rises and supply stays constrained.
Landmark needed a practical workflow that could help a lean team do three things:
- Proactively reach passive candidates instead of relying only on inbound applicants
- Surface stronger-fit candidates for hard-to-fill and specialty roles specialty
- Fit into a reality where recruiting is handled by generalist HR staff wearing multiple hats
"Our recruiters had to pray and hope, and now they can actually proactively reach passive candidates."
Michele Shaffer, VP, Human Resources
Landmark Hospitals
Solution
The appeal of Indeed’s sourcing workflow was simple: it gave Landmark a way to reach candidates the team could not access before.
In practice, Landmark’s choice was not just about access to sourcing tools. It was also about having a solution that could handle hiring pressure and improve their workflows.
Results
The clearest shift for Landmark came when sourcing stopped being purely passive. Michele explained that with the newer sourcing workflow, the team can now reach out directly to people who look promising and say, in effect, “We’re interested in you — are you interested in us?” That outreach created opportunities where none existed before.
Michele also described a more subtle benefit: the tools help Landmark spot candidates who may not be the best fit for one open role but could be strong for another. That flexibility matters in a small organization where recruiters and leaders know the business well and can interpret adjacent experience more creatively than a standard inbound funnel allows.
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| Recruiting structure | No dedicated recruiting team; recruiting spread across hospital HR staff | Same lean structure, but sourcing is augmented by Smart Sourcing and early Sourcing Assistant usage |
| Candidate discovery | Post the job and hope the right person appears | Proactive outreach to passive candidates who would not have been reached before |
| Daily recruiting rhythm | Recruiting could sit when other HR issues took priority | Alerts and assistant-driven activity help bring jobs back to the team’s attention |
| Specialty-role sourcing | Harder to spot non-obvious fits for niche roles | Better visibility into crossover candidates and specialty-role possibilities |
Practical benefits as a result of Smart Sourcing and Sourcing Assistant:
- More confidence that the team is seeing stronger candidates
- More proactive reach into passive talent pools
- Better support for specialty and hard-to-fill roles
- A workflow that fits a small HR team better than an always-on manual sourcing model
- A sense that Sourcing Assistant can keep work moving in the background when the team cannot give recruiting constant attention
For Landmark, the value is not that Smart Sourcing and Sourcing Assistant magically removed every staffing challenge. The value is that they gave a small team a more active role in shaping the pipeline.
The future-state story is compelling: Smart Sourcing has already helped Landmark identify better candidates they would not have seen otherwise, and Michele believes Sourcing Assistant’s value will come from the fact that “that assistant’s always working.” For a team that cannot dedicate full-time headcount to sourcing, that is exactly the point.
