How Dental Care Alliance Tripled Recruiting Capacity and Cut Its Recruiting Budget by 30%

WATCH: How Dental Care Alliance Transformed Recruiting With AI Agents

The Challenge

With 400+ practices across 24 states, Dental Care Alliance (DCA) is always hiring. The volume was more than any recruiting team could keep up with by hand.

High requisition volumes, limited recruiter bandwidth, and the difficulty of reaching clinical providers during business hours were creating real strain. The work that actually required recruiters’ judgment – building relationships, evaluating fit, advising hiring managers – kept getting buried.

Jeff Battinus, a 20-year veteran of healthcare recruiting who led talent acquisition at DCA when the rollout began, put it plainly: his team wasn’t able to “operate at the top of their license.” He set a goal of automating 75% of the recruiting process so his team could focus on the work only they could do. And he knew that to get there, he needed something fundamentally different from the tools already on the market.

Chad Venters, DCA’s Vice President of Talent Acquisition, was part of that decision from the start. “Before, our recruiters spent all day inundated with resumes, scheduling, reminders and routine screens,” he says.

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

The Solution

After evaluating several AI recruiting vendors, DCA selected Take2 AI for a trial deployment. For Battinus, the decision came down to one thing: most competitors were horizontal solutions – built for generic hiring, not the unique complexity of healthcare.

Take2 is built differently. Where other platforms offer AI-assisted workflows, Take2 deploys fully autonomous AI Agents that handle the manual, time-consuming work recruiters shouldn’t have to do – sourcing candidates, conducting phone screens, running reference checks, verifying licensure, and scheduling interviews. DCA’s recruiters set the questions and scoring rubrics, and every hiring decision stays with them. Every agent is trained exclusively on healthcare roles, so they understand the nuances that generic platforms miss: clinical vernacular and certifications, licensure requirements, and the regulatory environment that shapes every hire.

That depth of specialization was what set Take2 apart. Just as important for Battinus: whenever DCA needed something the platform didn’t yet do, the answer was always yes. That willingness to build alongside a partner who understood their business was, he said, as important as the agents themselves.

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

DCA integrated Take2 directly with their ATS – a decision that enabled richer analytics, tighter workflow alignment, and a faster path to scale. DCA also deployed Take2’s AI sourcing agent, which searches DCA’s ATS and Take2’s clinician databases before recruiters turn to job boards – automatically reaching back out to candidates already in the system and reducing dependence on paid channels like Indeed. The deployment started with a trial of 8 open positions in a single region. Within three weeks, it had expanded to 235 openings. Today, DCA’s recruiters carry 450+ open requisitions with Take2’s agents working alongside them, conducting thousands of candidate interviews every month.

The Results

“You have one recruiter with three times the power. I can now scale. I don’t have to worry about headcount – I’m comfortable with whatever that number is.”

– Chad Venters, Vice President of Talent Acquisition, Dental Care Alliance

That capacity shows up in the workload. DCA’s recruiting team normally carries around 300 open reqs. It’s now running 450 to 460 with the same 10 recruiters. Provider recruiters who would usually hold about 20 reqs each now carry 35 to 40 – and reqs are still getting filled faster.

It shows up in the budget, too. DCA cut its 2026 recruiting budget by more than 30% and expects to match its 2025 results.

Indeed is a big part of that. The month before Chad joined DCA, the team spent $87,000 on Indeed. DCA has cut that spend roughly in half every year since. With Take2’s AI Sourcer searching DCA’s ATS and Take2’s clinician databases first, DCA relies far less on sponsored jobs and paid Indeed contacts, and recruiters now work to a monthly budget by job type.

And candidate satisfaction has held at 4.8 out of 5 stars. Fewer than 2% of candidates opt out of the AI interview, and the “I applied and never heard back” complaint has stopped coming in.

"No decisions are made without a human touch. AI is the hands, not the heart and the head. This is just a virtual Iron Man suit for my recruiters."

– Jeff Battinus, former Head of Talent Acquisition, Dental Care Alliance

“How many times do you hear, ‘I applied, but I never heard back’? Do we get that feedback anymore? No. Because they get a text message in a matter of seconds.”

– Chad Venters, Vice President of Talent Acquisition, Dental Care Alliance

Why It Matters

For DCA, faster hiring is about patients as much as cost.

Recruiters now spend their time on the work that requires human judgment: building relationships, advising hiring managers, evaluating candidates who’ve already been screened. Take2 handles the rest – including the ~60% of interviews that happen outside business hours, when clinical staff are available on their own schedule, not a recruiter’s.

The recruiter role itself has changed. DCA rewrote its recruiter job description as “talent navigator”: someone who understands the technology, sets its guardrails, leads the change, and spends more time with hiring leaders and candidates. Chad’s advice to other TA leaders: “Don’t replace your recruiters. Give them superpowers. Automate the repeatable. Preserve their judgment.”

DCA is also taking the AI interview beyond applicants. Every student who comes to a DCA campus recruiting event will get a screen, so their details are already in the system when the right role opens.

The result is a TA team that’s genuinely operating at the top of its license. And as Battinus put it: “We’re hiring people faster. Speed equals quality – and that means patients get in the door faster.”

WATCH: How AI Agents are Reshaping Healthcare Talent Acquisition – Live at Transform 2026

In this session from Transform, Jeff and Take2 co-founder Yaniv Shimoni walk through what that 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.