A Healthcare Organization with a Lean HR Team
Guttenberg Municipal Hospital & Clinics serves several small communities in northeast Iowa, where hiring can be difficult given the region's smaller talent market. When roles open, the human resources (HR) team needs to move fast to keep operations running smoothly and avoid missing out on strong candidates.
Finding Top Talent in a Rural Community
While low turnover is a point of pride for Guttenberg, supported in part by participation in Iowa’s Public Employees’ Retirement System (IPERS), hiring for nurses and paramedics isn't always easy.
Location is the biggest barrier. Healthcare roles in smaller, more remote communities can be harder to fill with a limited pool of qualified candidates, even when organizations offer strong benefits and deliver excellent patient care.
As a result, hiring efforts are shaped by a few key challenges:
A limited pool of qualified candidates for specialized roles
A location that can make it harder to attract talent
Competing priorities across HR, leaving less time to focus on recruiting
When Mary Kay Kirgis joined as HR director two years ago, she came in with prior experience using isolved. That familiarity helped her get up to speed quickly and focus on the parts of the recruiting process that needed the most attention.
Starting a New Role with Familiar Tools
Before joining Guttenberg, Kirgis had implemented isolved at Crescent Community Health Center, where she transformed a fully manual recruiting process into a connected applicant tracking system (ATS).
“I had to go to ZipRecruiter, Indeed and a couple of local job posting sites and post everything myself,” Kirgis said. “Every day, I had to check all of those places to see if there were any ads or any applicants. It was very tedious.”
Because of that experience, she knew how much time using an ATS and broader end-to-end human capital management (HCM) platform like isolved People Cloud™ could save. So, when she learned Guttenberg was already using isolved, it became one of the reasons she took the job and felt confident stepping into the role.
Enhancing Hiring Processes with AI Recruiting and Automation
At Guttenberg, Kirgis depends on isolved Attract & Hire to create a great candidate experience across the talent acquisition process by leveraging its AI-driven tools, automation and enhanced talent sourcing capabilities. Here’s how those tools are helping her team work more efficiently:
Saving time with AI recruiting tools
Kirgis uses AI-powered Job Ad Writer, which walks her through a few prompts about the job and the company to generate a polished first draft. She estimates that it saves her about 30 minutes per posting, or two to three hours each month, depending on how many roles are open. She skim-reads each draft for anything obvious, but says she rarely has to make significant changes to job descriptions.
“I don’t have to spend more than ten minutes writing a job ad. I was on the beta team for that feature, and I can’t say enough good things about it.”
Mary Kay Kirgis
HR Director at Guttenberg Municipal Hospital & Clinics
As part of the Job Ad Writer beta program, she tested early versions of the functionality and shared feedback that helped optimize it for recruiting teams. Her advice for other HR leaders considering isolved is to take the process in manageable steps and speak up when something needs attention.
Broader candidate outreach from a single posting
One of the biggest advantages has been broader job distribution. Instead of manually posting to individual job boards, she can automatically post open positions to thousands of boards, including LinkedIn, reaching far more than she could manage on her own.
“Even if it’s a hundred boards, it’s more than I could ever do myself,” Kirgis said.
That outreach has made a difference in candidate engagement and how quickly job seekers discover new openings. Some open staffing roles now receive applications within hours of posting. A recent patient account representative opening, for example, drew three applicants within the first two hours.
While clinical roles remain harder to fill due to the smaller talent pool and rural location, most positions no longer require the team to “go searching” for applicants.
Moving from paper to digital requisitions
One of her “aha” moments came when she discovered the digital requisitions feature. Previously, the organization used paper job requisitions that had to be filled out, carried to each approver for signatures and then handed off to HR before a posting could be built. Today, approvals move through email, eliminating manual handoffs and helping the team post open roles faster.
Using AI-assisted matching to speed up screening
Kirgis also uses Attract & Hire’s AI-powered Candidate Match to screen potential hires. The tool highlights top-matched skills, provides a job match score and surfaces other helpful metrics, giving her and hiring managers a quicker way to review candidate data and keep the process moving smoothly.
She sees the feature as a way to streamline screening, not replace professional judgment. The job match score helps her focus on top applicants faster, while her expertise ultimately drives decision-making.
Building a stronger, searchable talent pool
This visibility of the recruiting platform has also strengthened the hospital’s talent pipeline. Kirgis can easily search a database of candidate profiles by last name and quickly tap into the general application pool when a new role opens.
“With isolved Attract & Hire, I really appreciate how easy it is to find past applicants,” she said. “If I know someone’s name, I can type it in, and their record pops right up. It’s easy to archive, organize and get things done.”
Having organized and accessible candidate records makes it easier to revisit talent for future openings without starting every search from scratch.
Impact at a glance
Here’s how those improvements show up in their daily work:
2–3 hours saved per month on job ad creation
One-click posting to thousands of job boards
Electronic job requisitions instead of paper forms
A searchable talent pool to revisit potential candidates
Faster onboarding for new hires
Kirgis also says isolved’s recruiting software has helped reduce burnout by removing time-consuming tasks and giving her more time in her workday to focus on the organization's broader needs.
That people-first mindset extends beyond recruiting. In an HR.com podcast, Kirgis shared how HR technology helps healthcare teams spend less time on paperwork and more time supporting caregivers and staff.
Connecting Every Stage of the Employee Experience
Once a hiring decision is made, candidate information flows directly from Attract & Hire into People Cloud through built-in integrations, reducing duplicate data entry and allowing Kirgis to send onboarding forms within minutes. New hires can complete most paperwork on their phones in real time, and the HR team steps in only when someone needs help. Guttenberg uses multiple isolved solutions today, including:
Benefits administration
Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA) administration
Flexible spending accounts (FSAs)
isolved Share & Perform
With everything in one platform, the team can streamline HR tasks and support employees without extra workflows or managing multiple solutions. Looking ahead, Kirgis hopes to implement isolved Learn & Grow as the next step in providing a fully connected experience across the entire employee journey.
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