WATCH: Building an AI-Powered Talent Acquisition Team for Healthcare

In this session, Mark Crane and Take2 co-founder Kaushik Narasimhan walk through what it looks like when a TA leader takes the initiative on AI — and what becomes possible when AI agents handle the manual grunt work and recruiters focus on the uniquely human business of recruiting.

See why healthcare's leading talent acquisition teams recruit with Take2. Book a free demo →

The Challenge

Eventus WholeHealth, founded in 2014 and headquartered in eastern North Carolina, brings an integrated model of primary care and mental health — including psych-med management and psychotherapy — directly to residents in assisted living and skilled nursing facilities. It's a remote-first organization: clinicians live across seven states and partner with more than 1,200 local facilities to deliver care at the doorstep.

The company has grown relentlessly. Mark Crane, a recruiting leader who has been with Eventus for roughly eleven years, watched it scale from 50 employees to more than 1,100, through acquisition by two private equity firms in the last eighteen months. But for most of that run, talent acquisition was a skeleton crew — for years, just Mark and one other recruiter — trying to keep pace with explosive hiring demand.

The result was a team in permanent triage mode. "All you can do really when you've got one or two folks doing this is just put your finger in the holes in the dam," Mark said. Recruiters were stacking six to eight screening calls a day, leaving no time to source proactively for the rural, hard-to-fill locations that needed it most. It took roughly two days — sometimes longer — to go from an application received to a screening call.

And in healthcare's labor market, two days is an eternity:

• Candidates fell through the cracks. With volume outpacing capacity, qualified applicants simply never got a call. "A lot of times you're gonna have people that will fall through the cracks, period."

• Speed was costing them hires. A candidate who applied on a Friday might not hear back until Tuesday or Wednesday — by which point they'd already talked to one or two competing healthcare organizations. "All of a sudden we're behind the eight ball."

• The competitor experience was a warning sign. Mark kept hearing the same thing from applicants: "I applied at a competitor of yours and I never heard back from anybody. They didn't even give me the decency of a phone call."

• Burnout was real. Recruiters were "fried" by Friday afternoon. Stacked calls, redundant follow-up, and phone tag left no room for the judgment-heavy work only they could do.

The stakes weren't abstract.

"We all know in healthcare, there's very low unemployment and potentially high turnover. The stakes are very high. The quicker you get to someone that's actively looking, and you tell them a story and get them excited about a role, the quicker they are to go with you."

— Mark Crane, Director of Talent Acquisition, Eventus WholeHealth

The Solution

The push to find a better way came from the top. Eventus's CEO had challenged every business line to find a way to "invite AI into your world" — so Mark seized the opportunity to evaluate three vendors. Two of them, he said, "were busy trying to just regurgitate information to me and dictate to me." Take2 was different. "You took the time to say, okay, tell me about your business. Where are your pain points? Where do you struggle? Here's what we could do to improve upon that." That partnership approach put him at ease — and turned him into an internal advocate when it came time to pitch the C-suite.

Take2 deploys a network of fully autonomous AI agents that handle the manual, time-consuming work recruiters shouldn't have to do — sourcing candidates, conducting phone screens, scheduling interviews, and verifying references — without a human in the loop. Every agent is trained exclusively on healthcare roles, so it understands clinical vernacular, certifications, licensure requirements, and the regulatory environment that shapes every hire.

For Eventus, the deployment centered on a few deliberate design choices:

• A structured AI Interviewer — "Melissa." Every applicant gets the same screening the moment they apply (or whenever they chose to take the call). The call opens with a snippet about Eventus to set the stage, then eases in with simple questions before building toward behavioral prompts like "tell me about a difficult patient you encountered." Each completed screen pushes a score and recording straight to the recruiter, so they walk in each morning knowing exactly who to call and why.

• Integration with UKG. Take2 integrated directly with Eventus's ATS, so screening notes, scores, and recordings flow into the system recruiters already live in.

• Coverage across clinical and non-clinical roles. Take2 built five unique AI Interviewers spanning NP – Primary Care, NP – Psych Med, Clinician Support Specialist, Psychotherapist, and Behavioral Health Coordinator — and even physicians.

Implementation was the opposite of the months-long healthcare horror stories Mark had braced for. "I kid you not — it was probably two weeks. It was as simple as we give you login information to UKG, and you guys did the rest. I was shocked." Within a week, the team had a rhythm.

See why healthcare's leading talent acquisition teams recruit with Take2. Book a free demo →

Once the screening engine was proven, Eventus expanded fast — adding AI-powered reference checks and physician sourcing campaigns. The reference-check rollout replaced a previous vendor whose integration had been, in Mark's words, "an absolute nightmare" — three months of frustration. Take2 was live in weeks. Now a single button in UKG triggers the entire reference workflow automatically.

The Results

"It's been night and day."

— Mark Crane, Director of Talent Acquisition, Eventus WholeHealth

Across screening, reference checks, and sourcing, the results moved in the same direction:

Recruiters got ~8 hours back every week. With the AI Interviewer cutting time spent screening applicants by 40%, Eventus recruiters now save an average of ~8 hours each week on screening alone. That bandwidth converted reactive days into proactive ones. "Now I can actually go out and hunt for applicants I didn't have time for before."

Speed transformed alongside it. The median time from application to a completed interview dropped to 37 minutes — more than 100x faster than manual review — eliminating the multi-day gap that had been costing Eventus candidates to faster competitors.

"When we come in and see that three, four, five, six applicants per recruiter have completed the Take2 screen — with the scoring associated with that — it directs their activity for the day. We avoid the back and forth trying to call somebody and wait for a return phone call."

— Mark Crane, Director of Talent Acquisition, Eventus WholeHealth

The candidate experience held up — even for physicians. Candidate satisfaction landed at 4.76 out of 5. "The first physician who went through the Take2 experience said, "I thought I was talking to a live person. I couldn't believe the clarity, the flow of the call.' For Mark, that was an "aha moment" when he knew they we're doing the right thing. Candidates consistently described the screening as fast, inclusive, and seamless.

The economics close the loop. Locums and permanent-placement physicians get expensive fast. "If I have one physician that I don't have to go through a permanent placement agency for, the Take2 platform pays for itself." The number of open physician and APC roles has come down sharply, and recruiters' open-req caseloads have fallen from 30–35 each to 20–25.

"It just gives us another avenue to source our existing candidates, so I'm not relying on a permanent placement company or a locums company to fill that void. How do we squeeze that orange to get all the juice out before having to beg, borrow, and plead?"

— Mark Crane, Director of Talent Acquisition, Eventus WholeHealth

Why It Matters

For Eventus WholeHealth, the gains aren't just an efficiency story — they're a care story.

Eventus serves some of the most vulnerable patients in healthcare, in rural and remote facilities where every open clinical role means care delayed. Speed to hire isn't a vanity metric; it's the difference between a facility that's staffed and one that isn't. With Take2 handling the screens, references, and re-sourcing, recruiters now spend their time where human judgment matters most — building relationships, advising clinical leaders, and getting excited candidates across the line.

Take2 also meets candidates where they actually are. 59% of screens now happen outside business hours — exactly when a day-shift nurse or clinician is free to talk. Candidates who would once have fallen through the cracks now get a voice, a structured conversation, and a fast, respectful experience that doubles as a branding moment for Eventus as an innovative, tech-forward employer.

And the team that once feared AI now leans on it. Mark's five recruiters are all intact, no longer worried about their jobs, and equipped with a partner that absorbs spikes when Eventus enters a new state. "From a recruiter standpoint, it makes your life so much easier and gives you so much more structure to your day. From a leader standpoint, it's given me a lot of flexibility."

"I can't tell you how much it's changed my life, our recruiters' lives, our company. Reduced turn times, more candidate satisfaction, better retention. I'm thankful we took that leap of faith."

— Mark Crane, Director of Talent Acquisition, Eventus WholeHealth

When speed and quality move together, the people who feel it most are the patients waiting on the other end of every open role — getting the care they need, sooner.

See how Take2's AI agents can transform your recruiting operation. Book a 30-minute call. We'll walk through projected impact based on your role types, requisition volume, and recruiter capacity.