How Pflegia scales internal hiring while transforming nursing recruitment

Pflegia is a Berlin-based recruitment platform that connects nursing and care professionals with healthcare facilities across Germany. The nursing sector is one of Germany’s most severely understaffed industries, so demand for Pflegia’s services is rising, and with it the pressure to keep expanding its internal team to meet that demand. Ingo Hüttinger, Recruiter at Pflegia, manages this hiring operation through Join, keeping hundreds of applications organised across open roles and moving candidate conversations forward without losing track.

The Challenge: A wide funnel that needed a system behind it

Germany’s nursing sector is defined by chronic turnover: roughly one in three young nurses leaves the profession within five years, and nursing vacancies stay open more than 200 days on average. The worse the shortage gets, the more facilities turn to Pflegia. And the more Pflegia grows, the more internal hires it needs to keep pace. That internal hiring workload falls largely on Ingo Hüttinger and a small team. At peak, they manage up to 36 open roles at once.

Their approach mirrors the philosophy Pflegia brings to its clients: speak to more people, give motivated candidates a genuine chance regardless of CV gaps, and look for the people worth hiring inside a large pool. Ingo calls them the “Golden Nuggets.”

Finding those people requires a wide funnel, but it also creates a new challenge: once hundreds of applications are coming in, the team needs a reliable way to spot the strongest candidates quickly and keep every promising conversation moving.

No single place to track candidates across multiple open roles. Before consolidating on Join, the team was spread across disconnected systems and spreadsheets. With no central view, tracking where every candidate stood across every open role was a constant source of error. The candidates worth pursuing were getting lost in the noise. “When everything isn’t organised in one place, your hiring team gets frustrated. With dozens of spreadsheets, things go wrong constantly. It’s easy to lose oversight entirely,” said Ingo.

Coordinating multiple candidate conversations daily. At peak, Pflegia runs more than 28 candidate conversations a day, spread across three to five interviewers simultaneously. Without a centralised communication system, every interview invitation, every scheduling exchange, and every status update had to be handled manually. At that volume, manual coordination doesn’t scale.

Slow, manual job posting across key channels. Good candidates do not stay available for long. Pflegia needed to get every role in front of candidates on LinkedIn, Indeed, and Stepstone quickly, but publishing and managing postings channel by channel made the process slower than it needed to be.

No data on which posting channels delivered quality candidates. Pflegia posts across multiple channels at the same time. But without data on which boards were producing qualified candidates versus just inflating application counts, every decision about where to spend on job promotion was a guess. And guessing with a limited budget means wasted spend and missed hires.

“If you want strong growth, you can benefit from Join. It gives you an analytical overview of applications from different channels, so you can see where candidates are coming from, compare what works, and make better decisions as you scale.”

The Solution: One system to run a high-intensity hiring operation

Pflegia started using Join in early 2021, and it quickly became the system the team relied on to run hiring day to day. Getting started was straightforward: their first job ad was live within hours, without a long setup process or a break in momentum. For Ingo, the value was simple. Join gave the team one place to manage the work, so they could spend less time switching between tools and more time finding the right people for their own team.

A pipeline that gives every candidate a fair chance

Using pipeline management, every open role has a clear process and a structured overview of exactly where each candidate stands. The team can see at a glance who needs attention and who is ready to move forward, without digging through various inboxes or spreadsheets. This central view is what makes Pflegia’s approach work at scale. “When you are reviewing hundreds of applications across multiple roles at the same time, you need a system that gives you a clear overview. In each role, I always know exactly where every candidate stands: who’s in which step, at any point.”

Automated communication that keeps conversations moving

With up to 28 candidate conversations a day, Pflegia needed communication to run without constant manual follow-up. Join’s in-built messaging and interview scheduling let the team manage candidate communication from one place, using role-specific email templates and calendar links that help candidates book directly with the right interviewer. Even with three to five interviewers running conversations in parallel, scheduling stays simple and the team can keep candidates moving without the usual back-and-forth.

“Creating and posting a job ad is very fast, and the biggest time saving comes from automating candidate communication, scheduling interview invites, and sending standardised emails. That’s incredibly valuable when you’re dealing with high application volumes,” said Ingo.

Multiposting and channel analytics that help fill roles faster

For Pflegia, reach and speed go together. The team needs to get roles in front of candidates quickly, but also understand which channels bring in the right applications. With multiposting, Pflegia can publish jobs across channels like LinkedIn, Indeed, and Stepstone from one place, instead of creating and managing each posting separately.

When a role needs more visibility, the team also adds paid promotions directly through Join. That gives Pflegia a faster way to boost hard-to-fill or time-sensitive roles, while keeping both organic and paid applications inside the same system.

The channel analytics in Join then show how each job is performing across different sources: where applications are coming from, which channels are producing qualified candidates, and how performance compares across roles. That means promotion decisions are no longer based on gut feeling alone. Pflegia can see what is working, invest where it makes sense, and keep improving its hiring strategy over time.

“We know from our data on Join which job boards perform well for us. We can see how many people came through each channel, whether they were qualified or not, and compare across roles. We’ve found our groove,” said Ingo.

The Results: High volume, under control

410 applications per role on average. Across 167 roles created since 2021, Pflegia has received more than 68,000 applications through Join. Instead of treating that volume as a burden, Pflegia can work through it role by role, with every candidate organised in one pipeline and every next step visible.

Less manual work in every candidate conversation. With email templates, calendar links, and interview coordination handled through Join, the team no longer has to manage every invite, follow-up, and scheduling exchange by hand. That gives three to five interviewers a simple way to keep up to 28 conversations moving in parallel each day.

Operational roles closed in under a week. For roles like Account Manager and Business Development, Pflegia can move from first conversation to signed contract in under a week when the fit is clear. “We try to leave as little time as possible between rounds,” said Ingo. “We know we have to be fast for the good candidates and we follow through on that.”

“If Join disappeared tomorrow, it would completely blow up our candidate management. We’d have no pipeline and no application flow. We’d have to start over entirely.”

That is the real result: Join has become the system Pflegia trusts to keep a high-volume hiring operation under control. Applications come in from multiple channels, conversations keep moving, and the team can stay focused on the candidates most likely to become the next “Golden Nuggets.”

Pflegia is a recruitment company that takes its own internal hiring as seriously as it takes its clients’. With one recruiter managing roles across the company through a single system, it is proof that high-volume hiring does not require a large team or a complex stack. It requires the right system. Pflegia found theirs.