Helping Ada Health change the healthcare industry

ACELR8 onsite: Ada Health

• Time on the project: since December 2018
• Average time to hire: 2 months
• Fastest hire: 3 weeks
• Total hires: 31 people

If you live in Berlin and your commute includes taking the U-Bahn (German for an underground train), you likely noticed Ada Health’s eye-catching advertisements. The company’s main product is an app that makes it extremely easy to understand symptoms and actively manage user's health. We are pleased to work with the company in growing and boosting their efforts to reshape the healthcare industry. We talked with our Talent Partners who work with Ada Health, Miriam Sara Suleiman and Niels van der Heijden, about hiring for the scale up.

Ada Health — changing the healthcare industry with AI

There is more to Ada than just the popular health companion app — a key aim of the company is to make healthcare more accessible to everyone. In the USA, around 30 million citizens have access to a smartphone, but no access to healthcare. The same goes for low and lower-middle-income countries, where basic healthcare is even more scarce. Ada is on a mission to create new possibilities for health, helping all people to actively manage their health and supporting the delivery of effective care.

Ada has taken strides against their ambition in a few different ways. First, they’ve developed an AI-powered app featuring a personalised interactive chat, making it easy for users to understand their health and get guidance on the next steps. Ada supports the health ecosystem, collaborating with health professionals, systems and organisations to support more effective care delivery. Most recently, Ada launched a Global Health Initiative, directly focused on improving the availability and delivery of primary care in underserved populations worldwide, with a specific focus on family, community and mental health.

The concept is transforming the health industry and getting attention from investors — securing a €40 mln in A-series funding round at the end of 2018. Now, they’re on the path to more than doubling their team by the end of 2019 and expanding their global market presence.

ACELR8 at Ada Health

Since ACELR8 started the partnership with Ada Health, they’ve been in a hyper-growth stage, which meant that they were looking to quickly fill a variety of roles in business, medical, tech, people, marketing, and design, at a variety of seniority levels.

When Miriam and Niels started working on the project, their first focus was on setting up the recruitment processes and hiring for the most pressing jobs. One of their first actions was going through Ada’s Applicant Tracking System (ATS), cleaning it up, and launching a completely new one. Deploying a new tool in the company also meant educating hiring managers and integrating them into the new workflows.

The rapid growth of the company meant that multiple positions had to be filled very quickly. Niels and Miriam closely collaborated with Ada’s Director of People, Larissa-Patricia Naue, and company’s own recruitment team. Our team held weekly catch-ups with Ada Health’s Hiring Manager, which allowed us to get a clear picture of each position’s requirements, find out the characteristics that would make the best cultural fit, and adjust hiring processes to get the best results. As Ada’s in-house recruiters, our team helped the company set up the processes and make the necessary changes to make the hiring as effective and efficient as possible.

Since Ada has a strong reputation, we had a lot of relevant and high-quality candidates applying. In addition to the inbound applications, we also proactively reached out to people with great profiles, to maintain a solid pipeline of people with the right backgrounds for the roles.

Ada Health is an excellent example of how ACELR8’s in-house model works. Our recruiters work onsite, which means they get to know the company, mission, and culture from the inside, which makes it much easier to find the right people for all of the roles. This is vital in finding a candidate that is a good cultural fit, especially within a scale-up. It’s also easier to build relationships with the stakeholders and truly understand the companies’ needs regarding hiring and growing the company.

What did we learn from the partnership with Ada Health

Once again, the speed of working on Ada was something that made working on the project intense, but it also allowed us to learn a lot. When everything is going that fast, sometimes it’s easy to miss spots in the recruitment process that could be rethought and adjusted. Our Talent Partners had to take a step back multiple times in order to tweak our strategy based on things we learned during screenings, interviews, and onsites. We also had a chance to advise on different topics, like the interview process, building a diverse team, and maintaining the high standards the of candidate experience.

Being at Ada was a great way to learn more about the healthcare industry and the complexities involved in developing products for this space. Ada Health definitely understands these nuances and develops tools and resources that could drastically support and positively transform it. We are excited to see the impact they’ll have on healthcare in the future.

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