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DHU Healthcare faced rising hiring costs, long time-to-start delays, and retention issues across clinical and non-clinical roles. Partnering with Gaia transformed its recruitment model. By switching to an always-on, audience-first, AI programmatic social strategy powered by GaiaComplete, DHU cut time to start from 98.23 to 59.63 days, doubled 12-month retention, and reduced agency and job-board spend by more than £200k. The wider £2.5m cost benefit from August 2024 to October 2025 was calculated by DHU’s finance and workforce analytics teams, combining these direct savings with indirect efficiencies from faster starts and improved retention.
DHU Healthcare, the NHS 111 and urgent care provider for the East Midlands, was struggling with the scale and complexity of its hiring. Roles stayed open for months. Agency reliance had become a cost and control risk. Recruitment timelines stretched beyond 90 days, while 12-month retention had dropped to just 36%.
The recruitment team needed a better way to attract and convert candidates, especially for specialist clinical and high-volume contact centre roles. And they needed this without adding workload or cost.
Gaia worked with DHU to build an always-on recruitment model designed around reach, relevance and retention. The strategy was built to attract talent that fits across clinical and non-clinical pathways, prioritising role fit and long-term value over volume alone.
Using GaiaComplete, the team launched targeted campaigns across priority roles and regions. Each campaign was powered by AI-led audience targeting, creative designed for conversion, and live optimisation across multiple platforms.
Underpinning every campaign was Gaia’s AI engine, trained on over 1 billion recruitment data points. It continuously analysed audience behaviour, optimised bidding in real time, and redistributed spend toward the highest-performing channels and creative variants...all automatically. This meant DHU’s campaigns improved daily without extra manual work.
The campaigns were designed to:
The combination of human insight and machine-led optimisation gave DHU an always-learning recruitment engine that got smarter every week.
This gave DHU the practical equivalent of a recruitment marketing team in their pocket, combining automation, creative operations and actionable insight in one place.
The outcomes reflect a model designed to attract right-fit talent while converting efficiency into clinical capacity.
These results weren’t just about smarter ads, but smarter learning. Gaia’s AI engine continuously tested thousands of data combinations (audience, creative, timing and placement) to uncover what worked best for each role type. Every iteration refined targeting and reduced wasted spend, directly contributing to the cost efficiencies DHU achieved.
Over the course of the partnership, DHUHealthcare achieved measurable, verified impact:
The £2.5m figure came directly from DHU’s internal financial analysis, combining the verified £205k external spend reduction with additional efficiencies from reduced reliance on temporary cover, lower turnover, and shorter onboarding cycles. This was calculated over 14months, from August 2024 through to October 2025.
These internal calculations demonstrate the wider financial and operational value of Gaia’s always-on recruitment approach.
The measurable gains in speed, quality and retention show how AI-led optimisation can directly improve both recruitment performance and business outcomes.
For DHU, this wasn’t just a campaign success. It was a transformation. Thepartnership with Gaia created predictable candidate flow, allowing internalteams to focus on candidate experience, onboarding, and retention.
Time-to-start reductions unlocked fasterclinical cover, while better-fit candidates improved workforce stability. Thesavings freed budget for future hiring initiatives, proving thatperformance-led recruitment marketing delivers both immediate and long-termvalue.
It’s proof of Gaia’s mission to help employers attract talent that fits – efficiently, predictably and at scale, while sustaining performance over time.
Quite simply to focus on attracting the right talent, not just more applicants, because quality upstream compounds into retention and speed downstream.
Following this success, DHU and Gaia are extending their partnership to develop talent pipelines across clinical pathways and non-clinical operations. The partnership will continue to put a recruitment marketing team in DHU’s pocket through GaiaComplete, by keeping audience, creative and optimisation tightly aligned.
Future campaigns will integrate CRM data, landing pages, and audience segmentation to keep quality and speed high as hiring needs scale.
By shifting to an always-on strategy with AI-powered targeting and continuous optimisation, Gaia delivered a steady stream of qualified applicants, reducing bottlenecks in assessment and compliance.
Cutting reliance on agency placements and job-board spend delivered more than£200k in annual savings, plus a cost benefit of around £2.5 million.
Better audience targeting meant more role-fit candidates, leading to higher satisfaction and longer tenure, increasing 12-month retention from 36% to 74%.