AI and hiring: How physicians must balance tech, human connections to find new staff

Finding new employees for medical practices can be difficult. The nation overall needs more health care workers, and despite unprecedented access to information and new channels of communication, sometimes it seems impossible to make the right connections to find staff.

In 2026, physicians and their practice administrative leaders must consider at least two questions that could inspire changes to the talent acquisition (TA) process:

• How can artificial intelligence (AI) programs make it easier to advertise for candidates, sift through applicants, interview them and hire a new staffer?
• How can medical practices make it easier for job candidates to connect with them?

Those issues and more emerged from the new analysis, “2026 Hiring Insights Report — Healthcare,” part of the review of hiring across five sectors in the U.S. economy.

Report author Jake Link is director of brand and content at report publisher GoodTime, a company that specializes in complex interview scheduling automation. The son of a primary care physician, he also grew up working in his father’s medical practice. Link spoke with Medical Economics to look beyond the research and share some insights about how physicians can make the hiring process easier for applicants — and ultimately themselves if they find the right clinicians to complete a practice team.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Medical Economics: Can you talk about research for the Hiring Insights Report for especially health care? How did the report come about?

Jake Link: This is our fifth year doing the report. Every year we survey through Qualtrics, so it's an independent, third-party, legitimate study. We survey 500 talent acquisition leaders across five industries, one of them is health care. We have data from over 100 talent acquisition leaders at health care companies, and they're all in the U.S.

Medical Economics: With that five-year background, you've got some insights about pre-AI and post-AI, and what that means for hiring and human resources and interviewing. Can you talk about some trends that you've noticed over the last five years?

Jake Link: In terms of AI, it came out and there were the early adopters. And then people were like, oh, this is cool, I can use ChatGPT to generate a job description, and it was very emerging. And then the next year, it was ubiquitous. We went from, like, zero to 30% to 100% all in a two-year span. I think everyone knows that now AI is basically table stakes, and I think what's really evolved in the past year is how people are using it. It's getting more sophisticated than just, I'm using ChatGPT to generate this email or this job description, or these questions and more. I'm using a sophisticated AI agent that can actually do things without me asking to keep my process moving. That way, I can focus on the more human things.

I think that that first wave of AI was really like, OK, it is, whether we like it or not, replacing data entry and things like that. Now that we've kind of changed the landscape with AI and people have adopted it, it's like, OK, how do I create more space for the human stuff? For, in this case, being a clinician? Or on the hiring side, having conversations and nurturing talent, versus spending time playing calendar Tetris.

Medical Economics: In the survey, candidate-facing automation, including chatbots and automated communications, appears lower in use. You touched on that human element. Can you explain why that that human element, those issues of trust, are so important in health care hiring?

Jake Link: I mean, everyone is well aware of the clinician shortage and unsurprisingly the lack of qualified talent was the number one hiring challenge that health care TA leaders reported. And so in that environment, the candidate experience really does matter. If you put yourself in the shoes of a candidate — and, by the way, I encourage anyone, if you haven't been through your own candidate experience, do it. Pretend you're applying for a job at your own practice and go through the entire process. You'll probably see some stuff you don't like that you want to change, but that's how you see it. If you put yourself in their shoes and you're getting this AI chatbot that's answering your questions, and it feels really cold and automated to me, it's sending the signal like, OK, this company doesn't really care about me, this is probably what it will be like working there. I have options as a clinician, so I'm probably just going to go somewhere else. That's why it really matters to not just implement AI uniformly, but figure out, where are the areas I can implement it that I'm not taking away from the human experience? And then actually, strategically keeping humanity in elements like interviewing or, having lunch with a clinician, or making time for a human connection.

Medical Economics: In the report, one of the challenges that was mentioned was fake or fraudulent candidates and AI misuse. What do you see trending there?

Jake Link: There are a few levels of it. The top level, and luckily for now this is fairly rare, is completely fake candidates, somebody who's trying to basically get some of your employment materials and hack into your system and take money or whatever. That's a person that doesn't exist and those I think are generally fairly easy to spot right now.

The more common thing that people are dealing with is AI empowered fraudulence, so people who are inflating or exaggerating their experience or maybe using artificial intelligence to cheat on assessments, that sort of thing. The way that you combat that is, again, with those screening and knockout questions, you should be able to see real human experience at clinics that you can Google and make sure that they exist very, very easily. And then making sure that your assessments are AI-proof. So maybe that means, if you have an assessment as part of your hiring process, an in-person assessment, or a conversation over Zoom.

Medical Economics: Is there a way to use AI to make sure that candidates are not wrongly using AI?

Jake Link: The short answer is yes, there are platforms out there that screen for AI use. I'm trying to think of it realistically from a small practice perspective and maybe they don't have the time or the resources to implement one of these programs. It's first about defining for yourself what is inappropriate AI use. Maybe you don't care if they're using AI to tailor their resume to the job description. To me that that's not necessarily a bad thing. That's busy work that when you're applying for jobs, you make all these little adjustments to your resume to match the job description. That's sort of like a game anyway. What for me is meaningful is fraud or lying or saying that you have experience that you don't have.

Defining what your threshold is for appropriate versus inappropriate AI use is step one, and then finding human ways to validate it. If there are elements of their experience that they're talking about, make sure in that interview that you're asking them to tell you a story. Like, tell me a story about a time when you did this. If they can't do that, it lowers my confidence in their answer. So that's where I would start.

I think that the AI detectors that are out there, meaning the ones that can detect AI-generated text, are super unreliable. AI is evolving way faster than those detectors. If it looks like someone, AI generated their cover letter, A, decide if you care or not. And B, that AI detection score is not reliable, so you need to find other methods.

Medical Economics: The top challenge for hiring in 2025 was a lack of qualified candidates at the macro level or at the micro level. What needs to happen to get more qualified people into the health care workforce?

Jake Link: There's a part of this that I'm totally unqualified to answer, right? Like, how do we grow the overall clinic workforce in the United States? We need someone way smarter than me, who's an economist and a public health person to figure that out.

But from the perspective of, what can we do today? I think individuals or people who are owners of private practices can't magically increase the pool of qualified talent. But what you can do is increase your conversion rate, meaning the percentage of those people who enter the top of your hiring funnel and then end up actually working at your practice. That's where I would recommend focusing right now. You really can't afford to have a bad conversion rate. Any lead, or any prospective clinician that's coming to your practice, you need to close the deal. It's looking at a very basic level. I look at it as a funnel because I'm a marketer, but it's basically just a step-by-step process: Where is that drop off happening? You can look at basic analytics of your website to see, OK, let's say 100 people are looking at this job description, and then 20 are applying. That's an 80% drop off right there. What is it? What's up with my job description that's not enticing people? Or maybe they're applying and then they're ghosting you on the interview scheduling process. What's happening there? Identifying that and fixing that rate is probably the low-hanging fruit. I also think it's about focusing on those truly qualified people. Any way that you can automate knockout and screening, so you're putting all of your attention and focus on the clinicians you really want and making them feel special, I think that's what you can do in the short term. But the problem, as we know, is going to persist, unfortunately, of the workforce issues.