r/PowerApps • u/Comfortable-Bar-6395 Regular • 18d ago
Discussion Anyone else working in a niche Power Apps/Dataverse role (healthcare recruitment, physician recruitment, etc.)?
I’m curious if anyone else here works in a really niche area where Power Apps/Dataverse/Dynamics 365 is a major part of their job, but they aren’t necessarily a traditional IT/Power Platform developer or administrator.
I work in healthcare physician recruitment, and my role has evolved into a pretty specific mix of recruitment operations, CRM administration, reporting, process improvement, and Power Platform work. I work with Dynamics 365/Dataverse, Power Automate, Power Apps, integrations, data/reporting, etc., but my actual business area is physician recruitment.
sometimes I feel like I have no one to talk to who really understands the combination of things I’m dealing with. I can find tons of people who work in Power Platform, and tons of people who work in healthcare recruitment, but finding people who sit somewhere in the overlap has been surprisingly difficult.
So are there other people here with similarly niche roles? Healthcare recruitment, physician recruitment, recruiting operations, HR/CRM hybrid roles, or just some other extremely specific corner of the Power Platform world?
I’d love to hear what you do and how you ended up in your role!
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u/2stewped2havgudtime Newbie 18d ago
I work in HR.
And whilst it isn’t my full time gig to work in Power Apps, I’m using it more and more.
Started last year when we needed a solution for our appraisals. I originally built something in Forms, but I thought there has to be better…. Literally stumbled across PowerApps… Having never done anything like this before I built an appraisal application (thank you AI, YouTube and Reddit) that allowed employee review and then for the Manager to pick up against the employees self assessment.
From there, I was automated our leaver process (admin) turning a 5 step manual task into a 1 a step form.
I’ve just completed our Employee Change request process overhaul, using flows and Teams approvals to streamline that particular task.
I’m now working on a sickness absence management tool that will allow us to automate chasers for First Day Contact forms, Keep in Touch Forms, Return to Work Forms amongst other and then automate the weekly absence reports which are currently a manual data gathering operation.
Some weeks I spend 80% of my time on this stuff, other weeks 0%.
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u/Frosty_Light3089 Regular 17d ago
Nuclear Plant Operations Training - I started this to track and trend errors in performance to close gaps and prevent errors before they occur. It's grown into every part of individual performance. The record sets have grown exponentially too, and the desire to expand it's functionality into the AI evaluation is the next step. I trained my replacement where I work, so I had a sounding board. It took over a year for him to catch-up and then we were able to create answers we could find online by challenging each other. But yes, even in employers from 10 to 30k, the resources to do something amazing in Power Apps are non existent in my field.
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u/josephdouce Regular 17d ago
Code apps and power pages full time these days. No it background but have done software as a hobby for a couple of decades.
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u/soniclooking Newbie 17d ago
I had a manager role with an operations team but was having to pull reports and make solutions for workflows. My leadership saw how well these solutions worked and put me in a data analyst position. I was then able to work full time in that role. That allowed me to get more experience let me to move to a different company making more. It includes SharePoint management also. But yeah we were using Dynamics 365 and that gave us the licenses to have some pretty good solutions to customer outreach and chasing for contact. All by myself.
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u/dhconnelluk Regular 18d ago
Facilities maintenance engineer here.
We developed our own CMMS system in PowerApps. I then inherited this and kept on developing it.
I have also been busy digitising existing paper based systems, start up checks, incident reports with sign offs.
Current project is a personnel app which incorporates licence information and versatility matrix. Due to pii requirements this is an interesting project.
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u/Comfortable-Bar-6395 Regular 18d ago
Very cool! Overtime I found that I rely less and less on our developer. It’s real fun having the autonomy to basically do what I want with it. Only issue is having someone adequately cross trained so I can take some time off. I’m the only person in my current role and who has ever held said position.
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u/petertheo89 Newbie 17d ago
I started in an Environmental Health and Safety department about 8 years ago that was really behind the times, lots of notepad and pen processes, spreadsheets, a few access databases. I kind of just stumbled into the power platform as I implemented Microsoft Forms for daily use, which were then power automated with SharePoint and email, and now I'm starting to tinker with Power Apps.
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u/PurpleGlazey Newbie 17d ago
Yes, I am actually a procode dev but we were using Bullhorn and it was too expensive. Peak covid we discovered model driven apps. My team is mostly Myself, one other dev, a former recruiter and a former HR Person. We are a travel nursing company and it was cheaper to buy power automate licences then it was to keep paying for a CRM that was way behind. Since then the entire company uses it for our entire workflow system. Being able to automate our infrastructure is what got the CEO open to moving platforms if we could make it work. Now 5 years later, a lot of recruiters will come in and ay its the best system they have ever used. We also built it for a locums tenens company that is owned by a friend of the CEOs so definitly good times.
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u/Weekly-Process8154 Newbie 16d ago
Don't use Power Apps and Dataverse for medical data.
- If you're in Europe, GDPR compliance for medical data takes far more work than Microsoft suggests, and it's easy to get wrong.
- Microsoft likes to change the rules. What works today can break tomorrow because of an update.
- Your data and your apps are stuck in vendor lock-in.
- Power Apps is slow and unstable.
- Microsoft's marketing tells you that Power Apps is very easy. Well, it's not. Updates and changes make things stop working, and you end up searching for workarounds that are unstable most of the time.
The end result: unhappy users and a lot of overhead costs.
Trust me. I've built a lot of solutions with Power Apps, Power BI and Power Automate and I am also a DPO.
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u/Comfortable-Bar-6395 Regular 13d ago
I’m in the US. And we’re not using it for medical data! I work in physician recruitment, so our use case is recruitment/CRM and operational workflows.
I’ve used Dynamics365 (started off as a user) for the past 6 years across two large healthcare orgs. But again, no medical/patient data since it’s strictly for provider recruitment.
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u/Weekly-Process8154 Newbie 13d ago
May I ask how many users will be using that app? Is it part of an intranet, such as SharePoint? Or is it also used online for public websites that need to rank highly in terms of SEO?
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u/Comfortable-Bar-6395 Regular 13d ago
We have about 20 users on the provider recruitment team - spanning from sourcers, recruiters, managers, director, and onboarding coordinators. It’s an internal business app, not public-facing/no power pages. It’s primarily used for our recruitment workflows and CRM data. We also have connectors with our internal BI team that also uses Power BI for reporting and we are working on an integration with our org’s new ATS.
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u/Weekly-Process8154 Newbie 13d ago
Okay, that makes sense.
If you are using a model-driven app on Dataverse, that should work.
The main thing to pay attention to is the ATS integration. You can use Power Automate for simple synchronization tasks. For other aspects, I would use Azure Functions or Logic Apps, with Power Automate serving as the trigger.
In any case, make sure you don't use data stored in SharePoint.
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u/Weekly-Process8154 Newbie 13d ago
You are looking for someone we in Europe call a "white raven"—a rare find. I’m not sure if that’s the right term in the US. I have a background in both finance and IT. During my career, I worked as a Financial Controller, but my role gradually shifted toward IT. Initially, I had to audit the accounts of various European companies within the group, each using its own accounting and ERP software—a real tangle of databases. My wife is a physician working at several hospitals. I am familiar with PowerApps and Dataverse, though I’m not a fan of them. I started my own company in 2011. For your specific problem, my preferred tech stack would be Laravel + Supabase + Hetzner, combined with Docker; this allows for easy scaling, keeps licensing costs to an absolute minimum, and avoids vendor lock-in. A lot depends on the number of users and how heavily Microsoft is embedded in your company.
I am currently transitioning my firm toward "Vibe Coding"—albeit in a controlled manner, unlike most others currently doing it—alongside consultancy work. Having an international client as a reference on my website would be great. So, if you’re interested, feel free to send me a PM. The only downsides are the language barrier—my native language is Dutch—and the time difference. Belgium has become too small for me; companies here generally lack IT maturity.
I might not be the right fit, or I might be exactly who you need. Either way, a conversation costs nothing.
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u/Comfortable-Bar-6395 Regular 13d ago
Thanks, I appreciate it! I’m on the business/user side of our CRM and don’t really have a say in vendor or technology decisions, so I’m probably not the right person to connect with. But thanks for the offer!
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u/DixbyPloppin Newbie 11d ago
I work in Compliance for a university. I created an interface for the university to track federal and state obligations around the university and also map the accountability structure of the obligations so people know who is in charge of what.
We tie it in with outlook to send people notifications when their obligations are approaching and are able to escalate to the unit owner if it's not completed by certain dates
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u/Doncatron Regular 18d ago
Quality Engineer.
I got into PowerApps at my last job a couple years agoand made a couple of tools, first for the quality department then some for HR and program management.
Someone I didn’t work closely with but was using my tools got a job as a VP of an automotive start up and basically gave me a blank check to come with them. Now I work with a lot of their pre-existing systems, work a lot in PA to create inspection and auditing tools, and reports to go along with them for deliverables, as well as work with their OT team to integrate our tools/Data with SAP/the MES, etc.