Growing Fast, Staying Compliant: How Infinite Care Scaled Aged Care Hiring with Checkmate

‍The Customer

Infinite Care is a trusted Australian residential aged care provider with more than 30 years’ experience supporting older Australians to live with dignity, comfort and connection. In recent years the business has expanded its portfolio, now operating 23 homes with more than 2,500 beds across Queensland, New South Wales, South Australia and Victoria, across the full spectrum of care, from independent living through to palliative care. 

Aged care is one of Australia's most heavily regulated sectors, and every hire impacts the daily lives of vulnerable residents. For Infinite Care, getting the right person into each role isn't just an operational box to tick, it's about making sure everyone who joins the team genuinely has their residents' best interests at heart.

The Challenge: Outgrowing a Manual Compliance Process

Infinite Care's expansion has taken its workforce from around 1,000 to over 3,000. Hiring for the full portfolio of homes sits with just seven recruiters, managing more than 1,500 hires a year across clinical, nursing, hospitality, maintenance, admin and operational roles.

Growing that fast, in one of the country's most heavily regulated sectors, leaves no room for a hiring process that can't keep up. Every check needs to be accurate, defensible, and fast enough to match the volume coming through. 

Katie Le Page, Talent Acquisition Manager, explains that Infinite Care’s manual screening process was never built for that scale. 

"Compliance checks were done manually in our team, and in the early days, when we only had five or ten homes and five or six recruiters, that was fine. But last year alone we did over 1,500 hires, and doing it that way just wasn't sustainable anymore."

Nowhere was that more obvious than with one of the industry's most critical checks: Australia's Register of Banning Orders, the ACQSC's public list of individuals banned from aged care over safety risks, unsuitability or Aged Care Code of Conduct breaches. Katie's team downloaded this list as an Excel file every time, running a manual name search against it to filter out banned individuals.

"It's basically an industry do-not-hire list, and we were doing manual lookup’s that were time consuming and admin heavy" Katie explains. "Speed to roster is a key operational delivery from our talent acquisition team, we needed to identify the bottlenecks, quickly remove without comprising our commitment to industry compliance and regulatory obligations."

That manual load created four consistent pain points for the internal talent team:

• Accuracy suffered – Candidates use legal names, nicknames and different naming conventions, and cross-checking them all by hand simply was time consuming and a time bottleneck at the checks phase. 
• Visa knowledge gaps – Visa and work rights checks needed specialist knowledge due to the rapidly changing department advice, so interpretation was taking longer leading to more time bottlenecks. 
• Documentation stacked up – Every new hire needed a compliant personnel file built to a specific standard, another manual, time-consuming task sitting on top of the checks themselves.
• Losing quality candidates – Strong candidates were dropping out at the background check stage simply because it was taking too long and the manual nature of providing checks wasn’t easy. 

"Recruiters would spend so much time and energy finding really great talent and promoting why they should come work for us, then when it got down to the background checking, that's where the wheels came off. It was chunky and manual, and we had people drop out of our process because it was taking way too long. We weren’t making the candidate experience as positive and streamlined as we would’ve liked”, says Katie. 

The Solution: One Platform, Every Check Automated

With the workforce scaling past 3,000 employees in less than 18 months, the business needed a single and trusted vendor that didn't just handle volume. It needed to directly fix the specific breakdowns the team had been experiencing whilst understanding their commitment to meeting the aged care regulatory obligations and auditing standards. Checkmate was the standout solution. 

• No more manual matching – Checks that used to mean downloading a spreadsheet and running a Ctrl+F search now happen automatically, removing the manual process and the naming-error risk that came with it.
• Checks configured per job family – Rather than leaving check requirements to individual judgement, in Checkmate the team can build role-based bundles so the right combination of checks trigger automatically for every hire, every time. Just three bundles now cover all 23 homes. Roles with AHPRA (all clinical roles), roles without AHPRA and returning employees. 
• Compliant documentation, done for them – Completed checks come back in a consistent, audit-ready format the team can drop straight into a new employee's personnel file, cutting out another manual admin step.
• A faster, branded candidate experience – Built-in messaging tells candidates exactly what to prepare next, whether that's a passport or a birth certificate.
• Seamlessly connected to their ATS – Checkmate sits inside HumanForce Talent, Infinite Care's recruitment system, and triggers automatically as candidates move through each stage, so nothing depends on someone remembering to manually kick off a check. A bespoke communication template is triggered with a status change to seamlessly instruct the candidate on what needs to be actioned.  

The Results: From Compliance Bottleneck to Board-Level Win

Since moving to Checkmate, the transformation has been a significant step in building their talent acquisition maturity. Checks that used to involve downloading a spreadsheet and manually cross-checking names now turn around in 24 to 48 hours in most cases, and every check comes back consistent.

That consistency shows up at the highest level of the business. Compliance checks for new employees are now reported as green across the board, and results are included and presented each month to Infinite Care's executive leadership team which adds to operational KPI’s. 

In a recent internal showcase, Katie asked her recruiters what had made the biggest difference to their role over the last six months, and the majority named Checkmate.

"Three years ago, background checks were a real bottleneck for us, and they'd been patchy for years," Katie says. "In the last six months, we've been able to take that from being a high-risk part of our recruitment process to a very, very low-risk one whilst freeing up each recruiter to have more meaningful candidate conversations."

The impact has rippled well beyond recruitment, too. With documentation now flowing straight into compliant, audit-ready files instead of being pieced together manually, Infinite Care has seen a cleaner record-keeping across the board, and no flagged risks from an auditing or regulatory perspective, including aged care strict re-registration obligations. Other parts of the business are now exploring Checkmate for additional check types of their own.

For Katie, the win goes beyond the process itself. 

"I've been in talent acquisition for 20-odd years, and I've always struggled with the narrative that background checks are hard and complicated. If you take the time to understand the real issue, it's about partnering with the right vendor that will support you to deliver best in class talent acquisition by keeping the candidate experience that must be simple to complete at the heart of all tech adoption and talent ecosystem design principles.” 

It’s this approach that has seen Infinite Care and Checkmate named as a finalist for “Best Vendor Solution”  at the Internal Talent Awards 2026, the most recognised industry event of the year. 

The Future with Checkmate

With three new homes commissioning in Melbourne over the next 12 to 18 months, each one resourced from the ground up, Infinite Care is heading into its busiest growth period yet — this time with a hiring process built to scale alongside it, rather than buckle under the pressure.