Healthcare employers face a familiar recruitment problem: attracting applicants is only half the battle when lengthy applications, repeated interviews and poor communication can cause candidates to disappear before hiring teams ever reach them. Vi Living says it addressed that problem through a two-year redesign of its recruitment experience, cutting candidate drop-off by 88% while increasing applicant flow by 140%.

Vi Living, a U.S. provider of continuing care retirement communities, has received the 2026 HR Healthcare Innovation Award for Talent Acquisition, recognizing Assistant Vice President of Talent Acquisition Claudine Trudeau for leading a two-year overhaul of the company’s candidate experience.

The award was presented at the HR Healthcare 2026 Conference in Boston. While awards are often the least interesting part of an HR technology story, Vi Living’s results point to a broader issue facing healthcare employers: recruitment technology is increasingly being judged by whether it removes friction from the hiring process rather than simply adding another layer of software.

Vi says its initiative redesigned the candidate journey around fewer steps, faster communication and a simpler application process. The company worked across its corporate Talent Acquisition organization and community HR teams to change how candidates interact with the organization from initial application through hiring.

The results are notable. Vi Living reports an 88% reduction in candidate drop-off, a 140% increase in applicant flow and a 45% reduction in time spent in the hiring process.

The organization also reduced interviews by 47%, increased employee referrals by 50% and brought the application process down to less than three minutes.

Those numbers suggest the transformation was not limited to a cosmetic redesign of a careers page. Reducing interviews and shortening the application process changes the operating model for recruiters and hiring managers, potentially allowing candidates to move through the funnel faster while reducing administrative work.

That matters particularly in healthcare and senior living, where organizations compete for nurses, caregivers, hospitality staff, administrators and other roles in a labor market where speed can influence whether a candidate accepts an offer elsewhere.

The strategy also reflects a larger shift in talent acquisition technology. Employers are increasingly trying to treat candidates as users of a digital experience rather than simply entries in an applicant tracking system.

That means measuring recruitment processes through metrics such as application completion, candidate abandonment, time to hire and referral activity alongside traditional measures such as cost per hire.

The change is especially relevant as recruiting platforms incorporate automation and artificial intelligence. Vendors across the HR technology market, including Workday, Oracle, SAP SuccessFactors and iCIMS, have invested in technologies designed to automate recruiting workflows, improve candidate matching and reduce administrative tasks.

But automation alone does not guarantee a better candidate experience. A highly automated hiring process can still be cumbersome if candidates have to repeatedly enter information, navigate long forms or participate in unnecessary interview stages.

Vi Living’s results point toward a more basic principle: removing friction can be as important as adding intelligence.

The company’s decision to cut its application process to under three minutes is particularly significant. Applications are the first major conversion point in the recruitment funnel. If an employer loses candidates before they submit an application, downstream investments in recruiting automation and candidate engagement have little opportunity to deliver value.

The 140% increase in applicant flow reported by Vi also illustrates why candidate experience has become an operational issue rather than simply an employer-brand concern.

Employee referrals rose 50% during the initiative, suggesting that the redesigned experience may have influenced existing employees’ willingness to recommend the organization. However, the company does not publicly attribute each individual improvement to a specific technology or intervention, so the figures should be viewed as outcomes of the broader transformation rather than evidence that one recruitment tool produced the gains.

For enterprise HR leaders, that distinction matters.

A recruitment transformation requires coordination between Talent Acquisition, HR operations, hiring managers and technology teams. Reducing interviews, for example, is as much a process and governance decision as it is a technology decision.

The Vi Living case also highlights the growing importance of candidate experience in healthcare recruitment. Senior living organizations operate at the intersection of healthcare, hospitality and workforce management, meaning their employees directly influence the resident experience.

Vi operates 10 Life Plan Communities across the United States. Its hiring strategy therefore has implications beyond filling vacancies: faster access to qualified employees can affect how quickly communities respond to staffing requirements and maintain service levels.

Trudeau credited the company’s Talent Acquisition and community HR teams for the transformation, while Vi CEO Gary Smith said the initiative strengthened the organization’s ability to attract and engage talent.

The larger lesson is less about the award itself and more about what Vi measured.

As HR departments evaluate recruiting technology, the strongest business cases are increasingly likely to focus on measurable funnel improvements: how many candidates abandon an application, how long hiring takes, how many interviews are necessary and how effectively employees participate in referrals.

AI will continue to change talent acquisition, but the next phase of HR technology may be defined just as much by simpler digital experiences.

For employers competing in tight labor markets, making a candidate wait less may prove as valuable as making the recruiting system smarter.

Market Landscape

The talent acquisition market is moving from basic applicant tracking toward end-to-end candidate experience management.

Modern recruiting platforms increasingly combine applicant tracking, candidate communications, scheduling, assessments, analytics, automation and AI. Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, Oracle and specialist recruiting platforms such as iCIMS compete around different combinations of these capabilities.

Vi Living’s approach illustrates an important counterpoint: technology does not necessarily need to become more complex to improve recruiting outcomes. Simplifying applications, reducing unnecessary interviews and improving communication can produce measurable gains before an employer introduces more advanced AI.

For enterprise HR teams, the most useful benchmark is therefore not simply whether a platform offers generative AI. It is whether the technology and redesigned processes improve conversion, speed and candidate engagement without sacrificing hiring quality or compliance.

Top Insights

• Vi Living’s two-year talent acquisition transformation cut candidate drop-off 88%, showing how simpler digital hiring experiences can improve recruitment funnel performance.
• Applicant flow increased 140% while hiring-process time fell 45%, giving healthcare HR teams measurable benchmarks for evaluating candidate experience investments.
• Reducing interviews 47% and applications below three minutes highlights process redesign as an important complement to recruiting automation and AI.
• Employee referrals increased 50%, suggesting that candidate and employee experience can reinforce each other within healthcare and senior living recruitment strategies.
• Vi’s award underscores a broader HRTech shift toward measuring recruiting platforms through conversion, speed, engagement and operational outcomes rather than automation alone.

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