Customer Stories 
Summary
For a healthcare organization of Bupa’s scale, attracting candidates was never the hard part. The harder task was moving from broad-reach attraction to a direct sourcing approach that brought in candidates with stronger intent from the start. As AI makes applying easier and faster, high application volumes can create more noise and make it harder to identify genuine intent early.
Avature helped Bupa grow and engage its talent community more strategically. This reduced application volumes by more than half and brought in higher-intent candidates. Bupa has built stronger pipelines, reduced dependence on job boards and created a hiring model designed to improve conversion earlier in the journey.
About Bupa
Bupa is an international healthcare company serving over 68 million customers with 100,000 employees globally. Across health insurance and health provision, it supports people through clinics, hospitals, dental centres, aged care services and digital health, guided by its purpose of helping people live longer, healthier, happier lives and making a better world.
The Challenge: Creating Readiness Before Application
As Bupa looked to improve hiring outcomes, the team saw a gap between reach and readiness. A post-and-pray strategy built around job boards and other broad-reach channels could still generate large numbers of applications, but not always candidates who understood enough about Bupa to apply with stronger intent.
That meant too much was happening after people applied, which led to more screening and more rejection later in the journey. That also put candidate experience and employer brand at risk. Bupa needed a stronger starting point: one where employer brand could help candidates understand the organization earlier and make more informed decisions before applying. It also needed a more effective way to engage talent through its own channels.
The Solution: A More Intentional Path From First Interest to Hire
Bupa moved away from relying on job boards and focused on helping candidates understand the company before they apply. By guiding candidates through its own channels and keeping them engaged over time, the team built a more targeted pipeline and made hiring faster.
Awareness Before Application
Bupa reshaped attraction around a brand-led direct sourcing strategy. Instead of relying on external job advertising to define the first interaction, the team used employer brand activity to bring candidates into channels it could shape more deliberately.
Its careers site, direct marketing efforts, events and talent community became the main entry points, giving candidates a clearer path into Bupa than a single job ad could. Employer brand helped candidates understand Bupa earlier and decide whether the organization felt right for them before they applied.
Your brand is the fastest way to hire.”
Meagan Michaels
Head of Employer Brand and Experience, Bupa
Two-Step Candidate Journey: Apply Now or Join The Talent Community
That shift also changed how Bupa thought about conversion. Not every candidate needed to apply immediately. Some were ready to move, while others needed a way to stay connected until the right opportunity appeared. Bupa therefore built around two clear next steps:
- Apply for a role
- Join the talent community and continue engaging over time
Within Avature CRM, Bupa turned that second path into a more structured engagement model. Candidates coming from direct marketing, events and other employer brand touchpoints did not need to disappear after a single interaction. They could join the talent community, be segmented into more relevant audiences and receive different types of follow-up over time.
That included:
- Nurture email campaigns designed to build familiarity
- More targeted reach-out emails when hiring needs became more immediate
This was especially valuable for future-fit candidates who were not yet ready to apply, and for silver medalists who could be kept warm rather than lost at the end of a process.
For some audiences, Bupa used nurture content to stay in touch with updates on how work was evolving, helping candidates build a clearer picture of Bupa before a role was actively promoted. This helped Bupa build trust and stay connected with candidates over time.
The team also runs regular talent community check-ups to cleanse data and keep the audience current. The goal was not database growth for its own sake, but a more responsive, opted-in talent audience that could support stronger pipelines and more relevant engagement over time.
We’re actually really active about making sure that everyone in that talent community wants to be there … We don’t want to harass you. We don’t want to spam you. It’s not actually about volume.”
Meagan Michaels
Head of Employer Brand and Experience, Bupa
Turning Direct Sourcing Into Faster Hiring
When candidates were ready to move, the direct sourcing journey did not stop at engagement. The apply-now path led more directly into active recruitment, while recruiters could also return to warmer talent pools that had already engaged with Bupa when hiring needs became more immediate.
Avature ATS helped Bupa carry that context into the next stages of the process rather than treating application as a reset point. This made direct sourcing more practical for recruiters. Instead of waiting for broad-reach campaigns to close and working through large volumes of applications, the team could move faster with candidates who were already more informed, more engaged and more likely to be a strong fit.
The Result: A More Efficient Hiring Model With Stronger Conversion
The clearest result of Bupa’s direct sourcing strategy was not more volume, but fewer applications from better-matched candidates. By shifting more of the work up front, the team brought in candidates with stronger intent from the start.
- Hires from broad-reach channels typically required 50 to 60 applications. Direct sourcing brought that number down to between two and eight
- Since 2023, Bupa has reduced its spend on job boards by 73 percent, redirecting that investment toward brand-building and direct sourcing activity
One 2025 recruiter example shows how targeted that model could be. After sending fewer than 4,000 email campaigns and reaching only a small share of the wider talent community, the recruiter achieved:
- 93 percent open rate
- 23 percent click-through rate
- 40 percent of hires sourced directly
We’re not going for volume. It comes back to that idea of being really targeted.”
Meagan Michaels
Head of Employer Brand and Experience, Bupa
Those gains were supported by an engaged talent audience that remained responsive over time.
- More than 270K relevant members in the talent community
- Typical open rates between 50 and 70 percent
- 70 percent open rate within 24 hours in a recent outreach to 1,500 doctors
The team also reported a much stronger candidate experience for direct hires.
- Direct-hire Net Promoter Score between 50 and 80
- Less than 10 for non-direct hires
Rather than functioning as a passive database, the community became an engaged audience Bupa could keep in touch with beyond a single campaign or vacancy.
