How physicians and AI can work smarter, not harder, to find and hire the best talent

In health care, the time it takes to hire a new clinician went in the wrong direction last year.

That means in 2025, physicians, practice administrators and human resources specialists spent more time than the year before on the process to find new candidates, interview them, and get them on the job.

It doesn’t have to be that way if physicians and practice hiring leaders refine and combine two elements: artificial intelligence (AI) to automate steps when possible, and human connections that engage potential new hires.

Jake Link is director of brand and content at report publisher GoodTime, a company that specializes in complex interview scheduling automation. GoodTime published its “2026 Hiring Insights Report — Healthcare,” part of the review of macro hiring trends across five sectors in the U.S. economy. Link also is son of a primary care physician, he also grew up working in his father’s medical practice. He spoke with Medical Economics to explain the steps physicians need this year to find their new support staff.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Medical Economics: Within the report, there were a number of findings from 2025, potential challenges in 2026. What would you like to highlight from that?

Jake Link: I do think about the time spent scheduling interviews a lot, because I work at a company — transparently — that automates all of that. But again, this is a third-party study, we had no influence over the respondent pool or anything, and what we found is that the hiring team spends about 38% of their time on that interview coordination piece. And that's that seems like a lot, right? Like almost 40%, that's crazy. And we've had a lot of people be like, well, how? And the reason is, it's identifying the interviewer, finding interviewer availability, making adjustments when things change if a clinician cancels or reschedules an interview, being able to accommodate that. I say all of that to say, that is your low-hanging fruit, or that's a great example of the type of task you should be automating. There are all levels of scheduling automation. GoodTime is for companies with 500 more people with high hiring volumes. If you're a small practice, even using Google's scheduling links, that is a good example to get you started and then get your brain thinking about, OK, what are these other administrative tasks that I don't really think about? Like drafting my email, scheduling an interview. Those will add up, I promise. If you did a time study, you would be shocked at how many hours you could shave out of your week by automating those little things. Just knowing that's worth your time, and I know your time is precious, this is about that time. This is about giving you more of that back. It's worth investing in automating the stuff that is automatable. You're a clinician, you don't need to spend time doing calendar Tetris. That's not what you went to medical school for.

Medical Economics: Can you talk about timing? For physicians and other clinicians who are in charge of hiring or their HR and administrative staff, what's the best way to approach timing and keeping contact with applicants?

Jake Link: That's a great question. And, by the way, that time to hire went up markedly year over year for the health care industry, this year versus last year. So, how long it takes from the time a posting goes up till the time the position is filled? That problem is getting worse, and that's most pronounced in health care, far more than other sectors. The time to hire really does matter. It matters, obviously, because you need someone in that position so that you can care for clients and see more clients and keep your practice going. But it also matters on the talent side: If you are not moving fast to hire somebody, the chances are they're either going to be scooped up by somebody else who can move a little bit faster, including these really big hospital systems that have these automated systems and bigger staff. But also, the message again that the candidate gets is like, OK, wow, they're so overwhelmed, they couldn't even look at my application for three or four weeks. It's a red flag. I think the number one, lowest, lowest hanging fruit is, you need to have an automated message as soon as they send their application that acknowledges, we got it, we're looking forward to reviewing it. That's just table stakes. You (applicants) need a peace of mind that your application was received.

Then for qualified candidates, reaching out to them as soon as possible. And that probably means having some type of automation in your screening process. And if that sounds sophisticated and intimidating, the lowest level is, you can put knockout questions in your job application. Start there. You shouldn't need to scan through a bunch of applications to see what their licensure is, or do they have the core experience that you need. You should just build those in your form and then automatically filter out everybody who doesn't have those basics, because you can't afford that time, and it's slowing down your ability to connect with those qualified people. So basically, get rid of as much noise as you can, and prioritize moving as quickly as possible with qualified candidates.

Medical Economics: Sometimes taking long in that process, from the applicant’s or candidate’s perspective, adds a sense of uncertainty to life.

Jake Link: I love that you're bringing up the emotional or mental state of someone who's job-seeking. It's like, you have that first interview, you don't hear back for a while, your brain starts going to, oh, are they keeping me on the back burner because they didn't love me as a fit? And they maybe are talking to other people? With every day that passes by, you're losing a little bit of that connection and enthusiasm from the candidate for the role. It leaves room for doubt to enter. And in my opinion, that's justified.

I got really good advice from a colleague once who is a talent acquisition leader of over 20 years, and she said, when you're hiring, you're never comparing one candidate to another. That's the biggest mistake that people make. You shouldn't compare this candidate to this candidate. You're comparing the candidate in front of you to the job description. And your job description should know exactly who you're looking for, and if that's the right person, you hire them. But it is not about waiting and seeing like, OK, who's the best possible person that we get out of all of these people? If they fit, they're a fit, and hire them. And if you don't know if, you can't confidently say whether someone is the right fit or not, that's OK, but that means that there's an issue in your intake process, in your job description. So think about that: What are those qualities? Look at your favorite clinicians — what did they have or signal early on that you can look for to replicate that in your future hires?

Medical Economics: In a medical practice where the doctor is the boss and has the final say over hiring, what other advice would you offer about getting candidates in, making them feel comfortable, explaining what the expectations are, and then closing the deal?

Jake Link: Another core challenge with hiring for clinics is, like you said, the interview has to happen, or the final interview, the final decision is made by the head clinician, and their availability is not good, right? Like, they’re swamped, that's the whole thing. It's this flywheel of, the clinician is swamped, so they don't have time to interview other clinicians, to hire clinicians, because they're swamped — it's a mess. That is the first step, figuring out, how do you carve out purposeful time in a sustainable way? And maybe that means you have a block the second half of every Friday, that's like this is where we schedule all the interviews, or this is when I'm doing talent acquisition stuff. Or offloading responsibilities that you as the head clinician don't necessarily have to do yourself. Is there somebody on your staff that can help you? Is there software that can help you carve out that time? I know that's a really hard thing, that's much easier said than done to find time in an impossibly busy calendar.

The other thing that you can do is, if you have a clinician under you that you really trust, or a colleague, empower them to also help with those interviews and hiring decisions. You're doubling your interviewer pool from one to two already. That makes a giant difference. Hopefully, depending on the size of your practice, you can go to even more.

Then this is the other challenge with busy calendars. You get to the interview, the prospective clinician sitting in front of you, and you just got out of all of these patient visits, and then you're charting, and you have to do something right after this meeting, so you're not fully present. Really being present and allowing yourself that space to focus 100% on the person in front of you is going to make a huge difference. I promise you, they can sense that, they can really sense if your mind is elsewhere. And also, you're sending them the message, like, hey, being here is stressful and overwhelming, and everyone's head is kind of all over the place, and the clinicians here are like, well, that is sort of how it is. But I think that that's not the first touch that you want to have in a workspace, right? You want to build a rapport, then you're in the trenches together and you can handle all of that chaos. But nobody wants that at their interview.

Medical Economics: Even a relatively small medical practice may have a fairly sophisticated program for managing patient appointments online. Do you think that can be good practice for automating a hiring process?

Jake Link: That's a great question and something we run into a lot with our customers, because everybody pretty much is using online patient scheduling software, and then, ironically, when you're hiring, it's all these manual back-and-forth emails. I do think there are learnings that can be shared. If you have an operations person who is managing the patient scheduling side, talking to them, sharing best practices. I think also clinicians and these operations people will tell you, you can't just turn on your patient scheduling software for interview scheduling, right? It's built for handling private health information, so those are super-specialized scheduling tools. And then candidate information for employment is also sensitive, highly regulated by a different set of regulations. So often those people do have two separate systems. You couldn't use a Google Calendar link to schedule a patient visit. That wouldn't be HIPAA compliant (HIPAA is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.)

Medical Economics: Our main audience is primary care physicians. What would you like to say to them? Or what would you like them to know?

Jake Link: As a human I just want to say to them, thank you, I appreciate you, the work that you do is important and really, really matters, and it's tough, and I know that. So, thank you.

What I want them to know is, it's tough right now being a clinician, it is tough operating your own private practice, and it can feel overwhelming. It can feel like there's never really time to think about upgrading technology or automation, and I get that. Knowing that I want to help you, I'm saying to you, take the leap of faith. Take a Saturday and just make yourself a project of identifying things that could be automated. If you're not playing with AI yet, you really should be. You should really be playing with ChatGPT as a starter, getting your brain thinking about what the possibilities are with AI and automation, and then investing time there. Because you can't really afford to keep spinning your wheels, honestly. You can't afford to not embrace the technology that is now available to you. It will make you happier. It will make you feel less overwhelmed in your role, and it will make you a better clinician. It will let you to put your focus on the things that you came into this career to do.