How Alchemy Saunas cut candidate screening from hours to seconds during rapid expansion

About the business

In just three years, Alchemy Saunas has grown from a single riverside sauna venue in Perth into one of the city’s fastest growing wellness businesses, now operating nine venues across the metro area.

With another five to six venues planned over the next 12 months, recruitment has become a critical part of sustaining that momentum.

Today, the business employs over 80 people, including 70 venue-based employees and 10 office staff, with every new location requiring supervisors, part-time staff and casual team members to launch successfully.

For Amanda Turner, who leads recruitment across the business, hiring at speed without compromising quality quickly became one of the biggest operational pressures of growth.

“We’re in a huge period of growth at the moment, so features like Employment Hero’s Recruitment Agent are really giving me a lot of time back.”

The challenge

Before using Employment Hero’s Recruitment Agent, recruitment was highly manual and increasingly difficult to manage as applicant volumes grew.

Applications were spread across multiple job boards, candidate communication happened separately inside each platform and shortlisting relied on spreadsheets, manual note-taking and constant follow-up.

“We had ads on four different job boards and they were all being managed individually. I was liaising with people across different platforms and spreadsheets.”

As the business expanded, that process became harder to sustain. For customer-facing roles, hundreds of applications often came through at once often creating a heavy administrative load before interviews had even begun.

“It was literal days of back-and-forth liaising, organising screening calls, spending hours on the phone trying to get through the top candidates.”

That meant recruitment was absorbing valuable time that was needed elsewhere in the business.

The solution

To simplify hiring, Alchemy Saunas adopted Employment Hero’s Recruitment Agent, creating one central place to manage job ads, applications and screening across Indeed and SEEK.

The biggest shift came through AI-supported video screening. Candidates now complete structured video responses early in the recruitment process, giving Amanda immediate visibility into communication style, energy and fit before committing time to interviews.

“With video screening, it’s much easier to get an early sense of a candidate and the qualities that really matter, like their communication style and that spark you’re looking for. It used to take us two to three hours to process each applicant, but now we can quickly identify who to progress and move them into the next stage of the recruitment process.”

For a hospitality-led customer experience business, that early insight has been especially valuable.

“It allows me to see the person and get a feel for their energy. We’ve got a really specific archetype of who we want in the venue interacting with our customers.”

Instead of manually screening every applicant, stronger-fit candidates can now be identified almost immediately and progressed faster.

The ROI

The most immediate impact has been time saved at scale.

• Candidate screening reduced from 2–3 hours per applicant to 10-15 minutes
• Hundreds of applicants managed through one central recruitment workflow
• Faster progression of quality candidates into interview and trial shifts

“The Recruitment Agent has given me so much time back, which has allowed me to not only focus on the recruitment side but also focus on other business projects.”

That includes improving onboarding, spending more time with shortlisted candidates and supporting broader operational priorities as the business continues to grow.

Why it matters

For a business preparing to hire another 30 employees over the next year, recruitment efficiency directly affects how quickly new venues can open and perform.

By reducing administrative load and making early-stage screening faster and more consistent, Recruitment Agent has helped Alchemy Saunas build a hiring process that scales with confidence.

Rather than spending hours filtering applicants manually, the team can focus more energy on selecting the right people and creating a stronger candidate experience.

“The timesaving element has just been priceless.”

For growing businesses, that means faster hiring, better decisions and more time to invest where growth matters most.