Two hundred new starters and one inbox
An employer on your books is opening a new distribution centre and hiring seasonal staff. The pre-placement questionnaires start arriving: scanned forms, phone photos of paper, PDFs filled in with a mix of typing and handwriting. Each one needs opening, reading, checking for anything declared, and an outcome sent to the recruiter.
The recruiter needs outcomes before start dates, and chases daily. Your nurses are also running clinics and writing referral reports. The questionnaires wait, and the employer starts to wonder whether you can handle their volume.
What really slows the questionnaires down
It is not the clinical judgement on the forms with declarations. It is the handling of everything around them, and reading every form in full to find out which ones need judgement at all.
- Forms arrive in several formats, some barely readable.
- Candidates leave questions blank, so the form bounces back.
- Every form joins one queue, whether it declares anything or not.
- Role-specific questions, such as for night work or driving, are on a separate sheet that goes missing.
- Outcomes are typed into emails to recruiters one at a time.
The cost to you and the employer
Start dates slip, or employers start people before the outcome arrives. Nurses spend skilled time on administration. When the questionnaire arrives incomplete, the delay doubles. And the employer, who sees only the waiting, judges the whole service by this one visible step.
| Stage | Paper or PDF process | Online process |
|---|---|---|
| Completion | Blanks discovered when read | Required answers checked on submission |
| Role questions | Separate sheet, often missing | Shown automatically for that role |
| Sorting | Everything read in full | Declarations routed to a clinician queue first |
| Outcome | Typed email per candidate | Outcome sent from the queue in one step |
| Health detail | Risk of it appearing in emails | Stays in the clinical record |
The questionnaire service we build
- An online questionnaire per employer, with role-based sections, such as night work, driving or food handling, shown only when the role needs them.
- Candidates receive the link from the recruiter or from your system, and complete it on a phone. Required questions must be answered before submission.
- Returns are sorted by rules your clinical lead writes. Forms with declarations, or answers that your rules say need review, go to a clinician queue. Forms with nothing declared go to a separate queue for the review your service decides is appropriate.
- Clinicians see the answers laid out clearly, can request a telephone assessment in one click, and record the outcome.
- The employer receives a fitness outcome and any recommended adjustments in the form your service agrees with them, without health detail.
- Everything is stored against the employee's record in your clinical system, ready for later referrals or surveillance.
- A dashboard shows each employer's questionnaires by status, so recruiters stop phoning for updates.
We do not make clinical decisions or set the sorting rules. Those are your clinicians' to write, and they can change them at any time.
After the backlog
It also changes the conversation with the employer. Instead of an inbox of chasing emails, their recruiter has a live view of which candidates have not yet completed the form, which is usually where the real delay was all along.
Complete questionnaires arrive in a readable format. Clinicians spend their time on the forms that need a clinician. Recruiters see progress without asking, and a bulk hiring drive becomes a planning exercise rather than a crisis.
Is this your pre-placement process?
- Questionnaires arrive as scans, photos and PDFs.
- Forms regularly come back incomplete.
- Every form is read in full before anyone knows if it needs attention.
- Recruiters chase outcomes by phone and email.
- Bulk hiring by one employer delays work for everyone else.