Apploi raises $25M to address the healthcare hiring crunch

Healthcare has a hiring crises. Nearly 20% of medical workers have quit their jobs during the pandemic, according to a recent Morning Consult survey. Some studies estimated the healthcare system’s burnout cost at about $4.6 billion a year before the spread of COVID-19, a number that has likely risen.

Organizations have increasingly ramped up benefits and hiring in an effort to address the challenges. But they still face roadblocks, including overly long onboarding and vetting for employees.

Adam Lewis pitches the platform he founded eight years ago, Apploi, as the solution. Originally aimed at a hirers and job seekers across a range of industries, Apploi has since narrowed its focus to healthcare as it looks to stand out in a sea of HR startups.

Image Credits: Apploi

Investors are rewarding the pivot with an infusion of fresh capital. Apploi today announced that it raised $25 million in a Series B round led by m]x[v Capital with participation from Defy and Underscore, bringing the company’s total raised to $38 million.

Pivoting to healthcare

When Lewis spoke to TechCrunch in 2015, he framed Apploi as a way to allow service industry workers to “put their best foot forward” with tools to share videos of their personality and skills. The company offered mobile-, web- and kiosk-based apps designed to help users submit multiple applications while providing companies “with the data that they need to make informed decisions.”

Apploi is decidedly more employer-focused, now, having invested in a suite of hiring and onboarding tools tailored for healthcare companies. For example, Apploi can assist with the collection, monitoring and updating of staff credentials with reminders to keep nurses’ and caregivers’ licensures up to date. Digital employee records integration helps recruiters reconnect with past applicants, while built-in messaging (for email and text) and interview scheduling ostensibly simplifies the hiring process.

“Early on, we noticed very unique challenges existed in healthcare — an industry that has significant demand. Because of this, in 2018, the company decided to focus exclusively on the healthcare industry, in helping organizations provide the best care to the most vulnerable populations by hiring and retaining the right people,” Lewis told TechCrunch via email. “The company offers an end-to-end software-as-a-service platform to help healthcare organizations recruit, onboard, credential and manage high-volume hires, particularly nurses and nursing aids.”

Apploi also keeps tabs on the conversion rates of job posts, showing where candidates are coming from and can track job post-performance across social sites or follow candidates throughout a recruiting workflow. Beyond this, Apploi can kick off screenings and walk candidates through steps including license verification, background checks and miscellaneous paperwork tasks before extending an offer.

Apploi’s tools are all very exhaustive — at least from the outside looking in. And there’s plenty of venture capital in the health tech industry, with Silicon Valley Bank reporting that health tech companies raised $39.7 billion in 2021. But the trick for Apploi going forward will be continuing to differentiate itself from vendors like Lantum, Vivian Health (formerly NurseFly) and Incredible Health.

Lewis asserts that Apploi is already accomplishing this, pointing to its 2020 acquisition of healthcare credentialing platform Healthgig. Apploi, whose workforce numbers over 100 people, has 6,000 customers and claims that revenue grew 130% in 2021.

“The additional funding will allow us to develop additional healthcare-specific functionality throughout our whole suite of products to ensure a tailored and superior end to end experience,” Lewis said, “as well as increasing our sales and marketing functions across the country … Our product is adored by customers with 99.6% monthly retention.”