Healthcare recruiting has always been competitive. But somewhere along the way, it's become a race where the fastest team wins – not necessarily the one with the best comp package or the most polished employer brand. Candidates are applying to multiple roles at once, and accepting offers before many teams have even managed to connect for a screening call.

Mark Crane, Director of Recruiting at Eventus WholeHealth, saw this happening across his team and decided to do something about it. Eventus operates across 7 states and 1,100+ facilities – the kind of scale where recruiting inefficiencies compound fast. When Mark's team deployed Take2's AI recruiting agents, the results weren't just incremental. They changed how his whole team thinks about what a recruiting operation can look like.

Here's what we learned from our conversation with Mark during a recent webinar.

1. In healthcare recruiting, speed is a competitive moat

   Eventus went from 2+ days down to 37 minutes – for application to completed screen. That's not a process improvement. It's the difference between winning the candidate and losing them to whoever picked up the phone first. In a market where nurses and allied health professionals have options, response time is a differentiator that most teams are underestimating.

   
   

2. Your 9-5 screening window creates delays your competitors don’t have

   63% of Eventus's screens now happen outside business hours, thanks to Take2's AI Screening agents. Nurses and clinicians are on shift all day – they're not waiting by the phone between 9 and 5. Every scheduling back-and-forth your team has to manage is another hour a competitor can swoop in. If screening requires a recruiter on the line, you're adding friction at the worst possible moment.

   
   

3. Your best talent pool is already in your ATS

   Many healthcare orgs have CRMs full of thousands of past applicants who never made it through – not because they weren't qualified, but because timing was wrong or a req closed. Mark's team now uses Take2's AI Sourcing agent to re-engage those candidates before going back to Indeed or paying an agency. The talent is already there. It just needs a fast, personal outreach.

   
   

4. One avoided agency placement pays for the platform

   Mark's pitch to his C-suite was straightforward: "If [using Take2] avoids even one physician placement fee, it pays for itself." Physician placement fees can run well into five figures. The ROI case got easier to make every quarter, because the avoided costs kept compounding. For any team that relies on agency fills for hard-to-place roles, this is the number worth putting in front of leadership.

   
   

5. Recruiters aren’t scared of AI — they’re relieved

   Mark's team of 5 went from managing 30 to 35 open reqs each down to 20 to 25. Nobody lost their job. They just stopped chasing phone tag. The time they reclaimed went back into the work that actually requires human judgment – selling a role to a strong candidate, navigating a complex situation, building relationships with hiring managers. AI didn't replace the recruiter. It removed the part of the job that was burning them out.

   
   

6. Candidate experience scores go up — even for physicians

   One physician told Mark it felt like she was talking to a real person. "It was amazing," she said. And the broader feedback from candidates? They're just relieved someone reached out at all. In a world where applications disappear into the void, a fast and personal response stands out – even if the voice on the other end is AI. That's how low the bar is right now, and how big the opportunity is for teams willing to move first.

The through-line across all six of these lessons is the same: the old recruiting playbook has too much friction for today's highly competitive and fast-moving candidate market. Every hand-off, every scheduling delay, every business-hours limitation is a window for a faster competitor to close the deal.

If you're a healthcare TA leader wondering what this could look like for your team, we'd love to show you. Book a demo and see how Take2's AI agents can put speed back on your side.

WATCH: How Eventus WholeHealth Built an AI-Powered Talent Acquisition Team for Healthcare