The Challenge

Health Connect America (HCA) is a community-based behavioral health provider delivering therapeutic foster care, mental health, substance use, and family preservation services across a 10-state footprint in the Southeast. Its clients are among the most vulnerable populations in healthcare — children and families in crisis, in a region where roughly 69,000 youth are in foster care.

For Chief People Officer Rachel Howard, a 25-year HR veteran, the stakes of recruiting are unlike any other industry. A vacancy here isn't a line on a dashboard — it's a child waiting for care.

That mission collided with a brutal labor market. Behavioral health turnover runs upwards of 68%, and HCA recruits against a national workforce shortage in some of the hardest clinical roles to fill — people who go into the community, into homes, to see the conditions youth are living in.

Before Take2, the math didn't work:

• A large share of recruiter time went to repetitive screening calls that, by Howard's own account, "didn't differentiate a great candidate from just an okay candidate" — not for lack of skill, but because the volume left no other way to work

• In a competitive market, the team couldn't respond to applicants as fast as the moment demanded. "We were too slow in responding to applicants in our market. We were losing candidates left and right."

• The judgment-heavy work that only humans can do — building relationships, advising hiring managers, advocating for the candidates HCA most wanted — was getting crowded out by the sheer throughput

So the question Howard set out to answer was never simply "can it move faster?" It was "can it move faster without compromising the quality and care of this population?"

"In our world, an unfilled therapist position isn't just a productivity problem. It's a child waiting for care. Every day a role sits open, there's a real person on the other end of that vacancy."

— Rachel Howard, Chief People Officer, Health Connect America

The Solution

After evaluating several vendors, HCA chose Take2 AI for a deliberate pilot. Most alternatives were generic AI tools being retrofitted to behavioral health. Take2 was different.

"Most were generic AI tools being retrofitted to [healthcare]. Take2 is the only platform built from the ground up for clinical hiring — and that mattered to me and our board," Howard said. The model understands licensure, certifications, and behavioral health terminology — distinctions that generic tools routinely get wrong.

"In our world, the difference between an LCSW and an LMSW matters — and a tool that conflates them creates more work, not less."

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 licenses and references — without a human in the loop. The agents are trained exclusively on healthcare roles, so they understand clinical vernacular, certifications, and the regulatory environment that shapes every hire.

Two design choices made the difference for HCA:

• The AI Interviewer gives every applicant the same structured screening, the moment they apply — pushing a scorecard, report, and recording straight into HCA's iCIMS ATS with no human in the loop. "It's consistency across our footprint that matters most from a compliance standpoint. Every state, every market, and every hiring manager is working from that same baseline."

• The AI Sourcer mines HCA's existing candidate database and listings before recruiters reach out to paid job boards, re-engaging qualified candidates already in the system.

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

The rollout was designed to learn, not to scale on faith. HCA launched in November 2025, with Take2 calibrating scorecards and role criteria alongside the team. The TA team co-led the change with recruiters and hiring managers — because, as Howard put it, the technology was the easy part. "Getting the humans to trust the AI screening tool was the challenge."

"We didn't expand on faith. We had to expand on evidence."

HCA measured every step on data quality, throughput, and candidate experience. Today, 37% of candidate volume is offered Take2 screening, with the team working toward 44% as it rolls out the remaining therapist roles — then expanding to additional roles based on each state's operational needs. It's a board-level metric, reported every month and every quarter.

The Results

"Higher quality. Hired faster. Staying longer."

Six months into production, the results moved in the same direction across the board:

Speed transformed first. "20x more applicants are processed. We have a 48-minute average from application to completed screen" — down from the days it took a recruiter to work through resumes by hand. Time-to-screen dropped by six days and time-to-hire fell by 12.

Quality followed. Take2-screened candidates surface signals resumes miss: 

"We have 10 more qualified candidates per 100 screened. It finds signals that our original screening was missing — key facts they might not have listed on their resume that would have made them qualified."

And the metric Howard expected to hurt became the one she's proudest of. "Our candidate experience rating is 4.7 out of 5. This is where I expected the metric would hurt us — but it's the one I'm most proud of. Candidates feel the screening is respectful, structured, and fair." More than half of screens — 51% — now take place outside business hours, meeting clinical staff where they are: at home, on the weekend, on their own schedule.

"Those who have completed the Take2 screening have a 79% retention rate, as opposed to those who did not complete the Take2 screening at 66%."

The economics close the loop. "Our cost per quality applicant dropped 13.8% while quality applicant volume went up 12.6%. We're spending less to get better candidates — and that's the equation that makes this a board-level and private equity-supported investment, not just a recruiting line item."

"In my 25 years in HR, Take2 has been the only partner that has really moved all [these metrics] in the same direction at the same time."

Why It Matters

For Health Connect America, the gains are not just a cost story — they're a care story.

Recruiters now spend 70% less time on repetitive screening and far more time on the work that requires human judgment: working strategically with hiring managers, partnering hand-in-hand with candidates, and actively building the relationships AI can't. They've gone from order-takers to strategic business owners of the states they recruit for.

"Recruiters are spending 70% less time screening and working strategically with our hiring managers, working hand-in-hand with candidates, actively sourcing and building those relationships that require human touch."

Take2 handles the rest, including the 51% of screens that happen when clinical staff are actually available — nights and weekends, not a recruiter's nine-to-five. The result is a TA team operating at the top of its license, and a hiring engine that reflects HCA's mission rather than competing with it.

"No decisions are made without a human touch" remains the principle throughout: AI is the hands, while recruiters keep the heart and the head. And when speed and quality move together, the people who feel it most are the ones on the other end of every open role.

"We're hiring people faster — and that means children and families get the care they're waiting for, 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.

WATCH: How AI Agents Transformed Health Connect America's Recruiting — Live at Leap HR 2026

In this session from Leap HR Healthcare, Rachel Howard and Take2 co-founder Yaniv Shimoni walk through what this looks like in practice — and what becomes possible when AI agents handle the manual grunt work and TAs focus on the uniquely human business of recruiting.