Cell Staff is a nationwide healthcare staffing firm that primarily serves government entities, focusing on state and local agencies for corrections, behavioral health, and individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities, supplemented by traditional travel allied and nursing placements for private-sector clients. They’ve won multiple Best of Staffing awards from ClearlyRated and been named a Best Staffing Firm to Work For.
VP of Technology Operations and Risk Management Grant Hargis has been with the company since its inception in 2014 and now oversees the technology stack and risk management functions across the organization. Among his top recent priorities: replacing a phone system that no longer met the needs of the business.
The challenge: when the phone system became the bottleneck
Cell Staff had used its previous phone provider, a large publicly traded communications company, for many years. Call quality itself wasn’t the issue. The problems were everything surrounding the calling experience, specifically outsourced offshore customer support with long escalation times and a lack of integrations with major staffing software providers.
The breaking point came in March 2023, when Cell Staff migrated to Bullhorn. The incumbent phone provider had no native Bullhorn integration on its roadmap and instead pointed Cell Staff to a third-party connector. That connector’s API platform was unreliable and required constant reconnection at both the company and individual user level. “It quickly became a big pain point for the entire team,” Hargis said. “That’s when we decided we had to switch.”
The decision: a Bullhorn partner shortlist
Since Bullhorn integration was a must-have, Cell Staff focused its search on Bullhorn Marketplace vendors, reviewing several options alongside Ringover.
One larger, general-purpose provider was ruled out early. Staffing wasn’t its core focus, and Hargis felt they would be a “small fish in a very, very big international pond.” Another established player in the staffing industry was the closest competitor. But that provider had recently gone through a major platform overhaul and, at the time, lacked a dashboard and other features Ringover offered out of the box.
Ringover won on both product and partnership. Hargis described the interface as having “kind of a TurboTax iOS feel. It’s big, it’s bright, it’s easy to navigate and use,” with a shorter learning curve for recruiters and easier administration than the previous system. Ringover’s native analytics dashboard displayed data Cell Staff had previously had to assemble manually through pivot tables and custom-built reports. As a more agile U.S.-based company, Ringover was also willing to take Cell Staff’s feedback directly into its product roadmap and offered dedicated domestic customer support.
“We didn’t pick the cheapest option or the biggest brand,” Hargis said. “We picked the platform that spoke the language of staffing on day one. Others promised power dialing and advanced analytics on a roadmap. Ringover delivered them fully functional from go-live.”
“Ringover is the phone company for staffing services.”
~Grant Hargis, VP of Technology Operations and Risk Management, Cell Staff
Implementation: a vendor that showed up
The Ringover onboarding process went smoothly up until number porting. A date-change order from the regulatory agency handling the port caused it to execute a week early, on a Friday, while Hargis was on a camping trip with limited cell coverage. Only half the numbers ported successfully.
Ringover’s team took ownership of the process, coordinated directly with the former provider as well as Cell Staff’s department leads, and worked through the weekend to get every ported number fully configured by Monday. “They stepped up big time to ensure we could continue business as usual,” Hargis said. “It has been a very smooth sail ever since.”
The results: less busywork, more relationship-building
Measurable gains in recruiter productivity
The previous phone system used physical SIP desk phones, whereas Ringover is a software application. “We didn’t just change vendors. We changed architecture,” Hargis noted. “We were candid with the team that moving from hardwired to a web-based softphone meant a slight give on call stability (a well-known industry-wide factor), but what we would gain in return is a far more robust and productive toolset for daily use. Two years later, we would make that trade-off again after experiencing the dramatic improvements to overall functionality and productivity for our recruitment team.”
Ultimately, those functionality and productivity gains free up more time for recruiters to focus on the relationship-building work that is central to Cell Staff’s model. Before Ringover, Cell Staff’s recruiters worked through weekly call counts by hand. With Ringover’s native Bullhorn integration, click-to-call and automatic call logging removed that administrative layer. Recruiters now rely on:
- Click-to-call for direct dialing from Bullhorn
- The power dialer, which Hargis called “a big game changer”
- Logging notes directly to a candidate’s Bullhorn profile from the web dialer
“Just the click-to-dial and autologging feature in Bullhorn was a huge step forward for us,” Hargis said.
That step forward is measurable. The shift to click-to-call and auto-logging has driven a meaningful lift in outbound productivity, along with near-total capture of call data in Bullhorn. The power dialer alone has significantly increased the number of calls recruiters can make per hour, while voicemail drop has reclaimed a substantial amount of active selling time per recruiter per day, translating to a noticeably higher number of candidate and client touches daily.
“Making outbound communication easier gives our team more time to actually talk to candidates and do the job at hand, instead of getting buried in administrative work,” Hargis said. “Our recruiters can now focus on being responsive, building relationships, and creating a great experience for everyone we work with.”
AI powering coaching and visibility
Cell Staff is also piloting EMPOWER, Ringover’s AI layer. The recruitment operations managers have started using EMPOWER’s call summaries and aggregated data to coach at both the team and individual levels. Managers can review call quality and volume trends without manually pulling reports, and combine call transcripts with Bullhorn-logged notes for a fuller picture of recruiter performance.
“It’s a good way to provide productive feedback and show people where they’re excelling against the curve and where some improvements could be made,” Hargis said.
A culture fit, not just a technical one
In moving to Ringover, Cell Staff didn’t just get a new phone system. It got a new way of working that’s more in line with the company’s values and the needs of the staffing industry as a whole: less administrivia, more conversations, more focus on relationships.
As Hargis put it: “If I had to choose one thing about Ringover that sets them apart from most other VoIP providers, it’s the fact that they are focused on staffing as an industry. Every feature, every function, and their future roadmap are geared toward making staffing companies successful. You’re just not going to find that anywhere else.”
