How Novant Health Saved 427 Recruiter Hours in 30 Days With AI Screening

Healthcare recruiting teams don’t necessarily have an applicant problem. They have a capacity problem.

As candidate volume grows, recruiter time stays fixed. Every resume review, phone screen, follow-up, and note takes time—and when hundreds or thousands of applicants enter the funnel, screening can quickly become the bottleneck.

That was the challenge facing Novant Health.

With high-volume clinical and non-clinical hiring across the organization, the talent acquisition team needed a way to engage more candidates without adding more manual work for recruiters. The goal wasn’t to remove recruiters from the process. It was to give them more time to focus on the parts of hiring where human judgment matters most.

The Challenge: Applicant Volume Was Outpacing Recruiter Capacity

Traditional screening requires a series of repetitive steps.

A recruiter reviews the application. They reach out to the candidate. They coordinate schedules. They conduct the phone screen. Then they document what happened before moving on to the next applicant.

Even conservatively, a meaningful screen can require 30–55 minutes of recruiter time per applicant.

Multiply that across high-volume requisitions and the impact becomes significant.

The issue wasn’t that Novant Health recruiters weren’t working fast enough. The underlying model simply didn’t scale at the same rate as applicant volume.

That created a difficult tradeoff: spend more recruiter hours completing initial screens, or accept that some qualified candidates may wait longer to be heard.

Novant Health wanted another option.

The Shift: Let Candidates Interview on Their Schedule

Novant Health introduced Humanly’s structured, on-demand AI interview experience to help expand screening capacity.

Instead of requiring every candidate to coordinate a live phone screen with a recruiter, candidates could complete an interview when it worked for them—including evenings, weekends, or between shifts.

The experience was designed to maintain consistency while giving candidates more flexibility. Every applicant could receive structured questions and evaluation, while recruiters remained in control of who advanced.

The distinction matters:

AI supports the screening process. People make the hiring decision.

Recruiters weren’t removed from hiring. They were removed as the scheduling bottleneck.

What Changed for Candidates

For candidates, the biggest change was simple: they no longer had to wait for two calendars to line up.

A candidate could receive an invitation, complete the interview on their own time, and have structured insights ready for a recruiter to review later.

That meant interviews could happen outside normal recruiting hours while the recruiting team continued working its regular schedule. Novant’s webinar materials specifically highlighted interviews completing early in the morning and late at night, with recruiters reviewing the results afterward.

For healthcare candidates—many of whom may already be working shifts or managing demanding schedules—that flexibility can make a meaningful difference.

What Changed for Recruiters

The benefit wasn’t simply faster screening.

It was reclaimed capacity.

By automating repetitive first-round interview work, Novant Health saved 427 recruiter hours in just 30 days.

Instead of spending those hours coordinating and conducting repetitive screens, recruiters could redirect their time toward higher-value work:

• Building relationships with qualified candidates
• Partnering more closely with hiring managers
• Sourcing harder-to-find talent
• Reviewing structured interview insights
• Focusing on candidates who needed more personal attention

That aligns with the way Novant Health evaluated the initiative. The team looked beyond a single metric and considered workload, candidate response, adaptability across requisition types, and downstream hiring outcomes.

The Results: More Screening Capacity Without More Recruiter Hours

As Novant Health expanded its use of AI-supported interviewing, the organization was able to create significantly more screening capacity.

Three results stand out:

427 recruiter hours saved in 30 days
Automating repetitive screening work gave recruiters hundreds of hours back to spend on higher-value recruiting activities.

34-hour average interview turnaround
Candidates could move through the initial interview process without waiting for recruiter availability.

1,000+ AI interviews per month
Novant Health was able to support screening volume at a scale that would be difficult to manage through live phone screens alone.

Together, those numbers point to a larger shift: screening capacity no longer had to be directly tied to the number of hours recruiters had available in a day.

From Screening Bottleneck to Scalable Workflow

The value of AI interviewing isn’t simply that it automates a task.

It changes the economics of screening.

When every additional interview requires another block of recruiter time, applicant volume eventually runs into a ceiling. Recruiters can only conduct so many screens in a day.

On-demand interviews create a different model.

Candidate participation can scale independently of recruiter calendars. Recruiters can review structured information when they’re available, rather than being required to attend every first conversation live.

That gives hiring teams a way to increase candidate coverage without creating an equivalent increase in recruiter workload.

Measuring What Matters

For organizations considering a similar approach, Novant Health’s experience also highlights the importance of measuring more than time-to-fill.

A useful framework includes four areas:

Coverage
What percentage of applicants actually receive a meaningful screening opportunity?

Speed
How quickly does a candidate move from application to meaningful engagement?

Efficiency
How much recruiter time is required to move a qualified candidate forward?

Experience
Are candidates actually completing the interview and engaging with the process?

These were the core dimensions highlighted in the Novant Health discussion around scaled screening.

Looking at those metrics together provides a clearer picture than simply asking whether hiring became faster.

The Bigger Lesson for Healthcare Recruiting Teams

High applicant volume isn’t automatically an advantage.

If every applicant enters the same manual screening process, adding more candidates can actually make the bottleneck worse.

The question is whether your hiring process has the capacity to meaningfully engage the people already applying.

Novant Health’s approach demonstrates what can change when screening is no longer constrained by recruiter calendars.

Candidates gain more flexibility.

Recruiters regain time.

Hiring teams can evaluate more applicants consistently.

And human involvement becomes more focused—not less important.

That may be the most important takeaway.

The goal of AI in recruiting shouldn’t be to remove the human element from hiring. It should be to give recruiters more time to use it where it matters most.

See how Humanly helps high-volume hiring teams scale screening, reduce recruiter workload, and move qualified candidates forward faster.