MP Bullock leads recruiting at Included Health, a personalized healthcare company. Oliver Stephenson runs special projects at BrightHire and helped bring its AI interviewer to market. Together they walked through how Included Health went from pilot to program in 90 days.
The problem: surge hiring. When one forecast jumped, MP’s capacity model showed a gap of 5 recruiters, with the hiring window already open. The recruiter screen was the pinch point, and one recruiter’s calendar was back-to-back calls from sunup to sundown. Historically, the fix was expensive contractors who had to be let go once the surge ended.
The results. 320 recruiter hours returned in the first 90 days, an estimated $300K to $400K saved by not hiring those 5 recruiters, steady pre-start attrition and a 4.7 out of 5 candidate rating. About a third of candidates took the 15-minute interview outside working hours.
Clean up the process first. Included Health had spent 6 months documenting every interview step, question and rubric. As MP put it, AI on a messy process just delivers the mess at scale.
Hand off the black-and-white parts. Hard knockouts went into application questions. The AI interviewer took schedule, pay, training and experience. Empathy and coachability stayed with humans. Legal’s 2 asks: a human makes the final decision, and the vendor has tested for bias.
Build trust step by step. Recruiters reviewed early interviews to confirm the AI scored the way they would, volume grew 5x in month 2, and hiring leaders took the interview themselves. One recruiter went from back-to-back calls to running the whole program, advising the business and picking up a second line of business.
Their advice: baseline your conversion data before you start, pilot on 1 high-volume role and tell candidates why you’re using AI.
