Midland Care

Midland Care supports seniors and patients across Kansas and hires for a mix of clinical and non-clinical roles that often require active credentials. Their recruiting team, led by Natalie Johnstone and Brandy Nash, must move quickly while ensuring that every candidate is truly qualified and licensed.

When this occurs too late in the hiring process, the team risks spending time on applicants who cannot move forward, delaying phone screens, slowing down the offer process and forcing hiring managers to restart the process. Smart Screening helps them identify potential gaps, enabling them to focus on candidates who meet the job requirements.

Indeed Smart Screening now sits at the top of their hiring funnel; screening applicants before they ever land in their applicant tracking system, Paycom. This creates a more enriched evaluation list that helps the team focus earlier on stronger matches and move qualified candidates forward more efficiently.

Across the first 10 roles using Smart Screening, Midland Care saw an average of 19.6 days from application to offer and 42.6 days from application to hire, giving the team clearer visibility into hiring velocity and where stronger early screening supports faster decision-making.

The challenge: High volume, credential-heavy hiring

Like many healthcare employers, Midland Care juggles three pressures at once:

• Many applicants, but an uneven mix of qualified and unqualified talent
• Credential requirements for key roles, such as CNAs and LPNs
• A lean team with limited bandwidth and need to focus on qualified resumes.

Midland needed to enable a more precise candidate review, ensuring the hiring team could focus on applicants aligned with the role’s essential criteria and clearly label when their credentials were verified.

The solution: Easily evaluate talent in Paycom

Indeed Smart Screening now screens every Midland applicant sourced from Indeed in real time using their defined criteria. Before a recruiter opens a resume in Paycom, they already have:

• A numerical fit score
• Recent experience snapshot that surfaces key details
• Flagged-for-review section that calls out potential gaps
• Responses to AI Recruiter questions

Starting with the score

For Midland Care, Smart Fit Score™ is the first checkpoint in the evaluation process. When reviewing an applicant in Paycom, the hiring team navigates to the “Resume and Documents” tab and opens the Smart Screening attachment, where the numerical score and key highlights appear.

High scores help them quickly identify strong matches, while lower scores prompt a targeted review of flagged items to determine whether deeper evaluation is needed. The score does not replace human judgment, but it directs attention to the candidates who best match Midland’s job criteria.

"When I see a candidate in the 80–90 range, it gives me confidence that they are likely a strong fit."

Natalie Johnstone, Talent Acquisition Manager
Midland Care

Scores in the 80s and 90s stand out as strong fits, while candidates scoring lower get a quick scan to confirm whether there is something worth exploring. This score enables the team to engage with the right applicants more efficiently and faster. Recruiters still screen every applicant, but they begin the review with a clearer focus, informed by Smart Screening’s preliminary findings.

Evaluating faster, with more context

Once the team sees the score, they use Smart Screening’s summary to quickly pull up each candidate’s recent experience, credentials, and any items they want to double-check. The summary presents the key details, allowing them to decide what to review next.

Midland maximizes screening speed by fast-tracking high-scoring candidates—those closely aligned with criteria and requiring minimal review—directly to phone screens. Lower scores are also reviewed. This shift has made early decisions more confident and more consistent.

Natalie captures the impact: “Smart Screening has helped us to become more efficient when determining who to speak with.”

Brandy sees the same benefit at the pipeline level. With scoring in place, she knows that the candidates moving forward are qualified: “You have a clear view of your pipeline and confidence that the candidates in it are qualified.”

The flagged-for-review section also highlights gaps or required credentials that need confirmation, giving recruiters a built-in checklist. By the time they begin a phone screen, they already know what to ask about, so they don’t discover issues later.

Natalie describes the bigger takeaway as working smarter with the time they have: “The ease of the application process and being more efficient with our time, with our human time.”

Streamlined hiring support without adding another platform to juggle

From a workflow standpoint, Midland wanted help without adding another system to juggle. Smart Screening meets that bar by integrating with their existing Paycom setup.

“I like that it is plugged into Paycom. We can go that route; we do not have to jump back and forth.” – Brandy

Recruiters stay in Paycom while screening, scoring, and verification happen in the background, enabled through Smart Screening.

Higher confidence in who to call first: For Midland, scores in the 80s and 90s are reliable signals of good fits, and anything over 50 is considered solid. This gives Midland an objective way to sort long lists of applicants.

More efficient use of recruiter time: Recruiters no longer have to read every resume in the same depth. They focus their attention where it matters most and give lower-scoring candidates a lighter, faster review.

Cleaner, more credible pipeline: License verification helps ensure that candidates progressing through the funnel actually meet credential requirements, which gives the team confidence that their pipeline is not full of dead ends.

Stronger phone screens: Summaries, flags, and verification notes give Midland more context going into the first call, so the conversation can focus on fit rather than basic fact-checking.

Why Midland recommends Smart Screening

When asked how they would describe Smart Screening to other employers, Midland’s recruiters pointed to two clear benefits: efficiency and confidence. The scoring and summaries help them decide who to engage first.

Natalie puts it simply: “Smart Screening has helped us to become more efficient when determining who to speak with. It helps us prioritize.”

Brandy focuses on daily impact and pipeline quality: “It helps day to day and gives you a much stronger pipeline of qualified talent.”

Their experience reinforces the core story behind Smart Screening: it allows Midland to verify earlier, screen faster, and gives recruiters confidence by sending candidates straight into the ATS.