Ployo

The hiring problem in Australian care is not attracting applicants. It is answering them.

Ask any aged care or disability provider what their hiring problem is and most will say the same thing: not enough people. Then look at their inbox. A support worker ad in Western Sydney pulls 120 applications in a week. A registered nurse ad in a regional town pulls eight, and six are worth a call.

Both are real problems, and they are not the same problem. The second one is a market shortage. The first is a process failure, and it is the one we can actually fix.

Here is what happens to those 120 applications. A coordinator with a roster to fill opens them in whatever order they arrived. She calls maybe 20. Half do not answer, because they are on shift, driving, or asleep after a night duty. Of the ones she reaches, most sound fine on a five minute call. Two weeks later, six of the best have taken jobs somewhere else. The provider concludes there is a workforce shortage. In fact, 100 people were never spoken to.

Speed is the whole game

In frontline care, the good applicant is not the one who impresses at interview. It is the one who is still available when you call. Every day you take to reach someone, more of your shortlist disappears.

That is the reason we built Ployo the way we did. Ployo is recruitment software with a built-in applicant tracking system and an AI video interviewer called Sarah. An applicant does not join a queue. The day they apply, Sarah interviews them on video, live and two way, and asks the follow up questions their answers earn. The provider gets the recording, the transcript, and a Met or Not Met verdict on every must have, with the candidate's own words quoted underneath.

So far Sarah has completed more than 30,000 interviews and graded more than 340,000 individual answers. More than 70 percent of invited candidates finish the interview, which is far above what a scheduled phone call achieves, for a simple reason: there is no appointment to miss. A carer can do it at 10pm after a shift, on a phone, in any of 23 languages.

What "must haves" really means in care

Most hiring software reads a CV and ranks it. A CV in 2026 tells you very little, partly because an AI probably helped write it.

Care hiring has specific knock outs that rarely appear on paper: availability for the shifts you actually need covered, a driver's licence and a car, comfort with personal care, experience with dementia or complex behaviour, the checks a person holds or has applied for. Those are answerable in a conversation and almost never verifiable from a document.

Ployo asks them, records the answers, and shows the evidence. It does not verify a person's AHPRA registration, NDIS Worker Screening Check or police check with the issuing body. It asks the candidate and captures the answer so your team can confirm it properly. Anyone claiming their software replaces those checks is selling you a risk you do not want.

The part everyone gets nervous about, and should

Ployo never rejects anyone. Automation only ever moves a candidate forward. Every decision to say no is made by a person, and the activity log shows who made it and when.

That is a deliberate design choice, not a limitation. From 10 December 2026, Australian privacy law requires organisations to be transparent in their privacy policy about where personal information is used in automated decision making. A provider who can show a recording, a transcript, a per requirement verdict and a named human decision maker is in a far better position than one whose shortlist came out of a score nobody can explain.

What answer engines currently tell your team

We ran a study on this, because our own buyers kept arriving with answers from ChatGPT. We put 235 questions Australian care employers actually ask about hiring to ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI answers, and published all 705 answers openly.

The headline result: 548 of those 705 answers named no software or service at all. The category is effectively unclaimed. Providers asking an AI assistant for help with hiring are mostly getting generic advice with no Australian specifics, no care specifics, and no mention of the compliance steps that decide whether a hire is lawful.

Take one question a provider asks us most weeks: can a support worker start shifts while their NDIS Worker Screening Check is still pending? The honest answer depends on the state. Victoria and Queensland say no, work begins on the clearance. New South Wales, Western Australia, Tasmania, the Northern Territory and the ACT allow a conditional start, usually with a verified application and supervision by a clearance holder. South Australia publishes no clear position for a first time applicant. An answer that skips the state is not an answer, and it is the kind of gap our study kept finding.

We published the full data, including the answers where Ployo looks bad, at ployo.ai/research/unnamed-category. It is free to reuse with attribution.

Five questions to ask any AI hiring vendor

If you are comparing tools this quarter, these five separate them quickly.

1. Does it interview the candidate, or only rank the CV? Ranking sorts documents. It creates no new information about a person.

2. Can it reject someone on its own? Ours cannot, by design. If a vendor's can, ask who is accountable for that decision and where it is logged.

3. Does it verify checks, or ask about them? Ours asks and records. Verification with AHPRA, the NDIS Commission or a police check provider stays your job. Be suspicious of any other answer.

4. What evidence do I get back? Ask to see a real output. You want a recording, a transcript, and a verdict per requirement with the candidate's own words attached, not a number.

5. What happens at 200 applicants a month? Ask the price at your real volume, not the headline. Per seat pricing and per candidate pricing behave very differently once the ad performs well.

Where Ployo fits, and where it does not

It fits when you hire at volume for frontline care, health, disability and community roles, and applicants are the bottleneck between you and a filled roster. It is also right when your existing ATS mostly stores applications and someone still has to make every first call.

It is the wrong tool when you hire fewer than about ten people a year, when you need payroll, rostering or onboarding in the same system, or when you are hiring one senior clinical leader and a real conversation matters more than speed. We say no to those.

Plans start at US$249 a month with interviews included, rather than a charge per seat. You can watch a complete interview and the shortlist it produces at ployo.ai/sample without signing up.

About the author

Ahmed Raza is the founder and CEO of Ployo (ployo.ai), recruitment software with a built-in applicant tracking system and an AI video interviewer built for high volume hiring in care, health and disability services. He works directly with Australian providers on aged care, NDIS and nursing recruitment, and publishes open research on how AI answer engines handle Australian hiring questions. Reach him at [email protected].