Director, Talent Acquisition
BrightHire Screen interviews completed in three months
net savings forecasted
in projected recruiter savings
recruiter screening hours returned
candidate experience rating
of Screen interviews completed outside of working hours
San Francisco, California
2011
~2,000 employees
Hospitals and healthcare
At Included Health, demand for Member Care talent can change quickly.
The Member Care organization supports people using Included Health to navigate their healthcare. Hiring demand increases significantly around periods such as open enrollment, and the recruiting team needs to support anywhere from 30 to 90 new hires in a month, with forecasts that can change quickly.
Historically, responding to those swings meant solving a recruiting capacity problem alongside the hiring challenge. The team had to add recruiters, shift resources from elsewhere in the organization, or rely on outside support.
Now, Included Health is building a different model.
With BrightHire Screen, the team can absorb more of those fluctuations through the hiring process itself. Rather than recruiter capacity rising and falling with hiring demand, Included Health can absorb those swings by adjusting how many candidates are invited to an AI interview.
In only a few months, the team has returned 174 hours of screening time to recruiters, maintained a 4.6–4.7/5 candidate experience, and built a much more predictable way to respond to hiring surges.
The economics are meaningful, too. Included Health forecasts more than $1 million in net savings from bringing the work in-house compared with its previous outsourced/agency model. For its modeled MCA surge-hiring volume, the team also projects ~$400,000 in avoided recruiter costs through reduced manual screening.
And the impact extends beyond cost and capacity. The model is changing how TA plans for hiring demand, how recruiters spend their time, and how the team thinks about scaling high-volume hiring across the organization.
Included Health’s journey with BrightHire began in November 2024 with engineering hiring.
The team had a structured interview process designed to reduce bias, improve calibration, and develop strong interviewers. That included having two interviewers in each panel.
The rigor was intentional, but it required significant engineering capacity. During one period, Included Health conducted nearly 1000 interviews to make 32 engineering hires, with each candidate requiring roughly five hours and 15 minutes of engineering interview time before accounting for scorecards, debriefs, and other work outside the interview itself.
The team also wanted stronger evidence coming out of those conversations. After investing hours in a candidate, interviewers could occasionally reach the debrief without enough signal to make a confident decision.
As Mary “MP” Pierce Bullock, Director, Talent Acquisition, put it, “a lack of signal isn’t a bad signal.” It can mean the interview simply didn’t go deep enough to get the information needed.
BrightHire gave Included Health a way to preserve the rigor of its process while making better use of interviewer time.
Recorded interviews gave hiring managers the ability to go back to the conversation, review the evidence, and dig deeper when feedback was unclear. The team also used BrightHire to rethink interviewer training, creating playlists of strong interviews so newer interviewers could see what good looked like without requiring experienced engineers to join every training interview.
What began as an engineering pilot expanded from there.
Since November 2024, Included Health has captured more than 13,500 interviews across 9,500+ candidates, supported more than 1,100 hires, and reached an 89% interview capture rate across teams including engineering, sales, Member Care, cybersecurity, marketing, clinical, and client success.
That experience also gave the TA team a strong foundation for exploring where AI could play a larger role in the hiring process.
“I can’t imagine life before BrightHire now. We brought it in to solve a very real interviewing problem, and it’s become a cornerstone of the TA ecosystem we’re continuing to build.”
— Mary “MP” Pierce Bullock, Director, Talent Acquisition, Included Health
By 2026, Included Health saw an opportunity to apply what it had learned with BrightHire to Member Care.
The recruiting team had already spent roughly six months working closely with the business to strengthen its hiring process. They had clarified the competencies they needed to evaluate, the questions that produced useful signal, and what success in the role looked like.
The initial Member Care screen included criteria that could be evaluated consistently, including basic role requirements, schedule, and compensation. More nuanced areas such as empathy and coaching were assessed later through deeper conversations and scenarios with recruiters and hiring managers.
That gave Included Health a clear division between what could move into Screen and where team members would continue to play an important role.
And the timing mattered. Included Health was preparing for another Member Care surge, and its capacity model showed that the expected screening volume could require approximately five additional recruiters.
BrightHire Screen gave the team an opportunity to test a different approach.
With a clear view of where an AI interview could fit into the process, the next step was making sure it worked against the standards the team had already established.
During the initial rollout, two recruiters reviewed Screen interviews and checked how candidates were being evaluated against the team’s established criteria. The team set a qualification threshold and then tracked candidates into the next stage to understand whether the signal from Screen aligned with what they were seeing later in the process.
Hiring manager pass-through remained consistent with the previous recruiter-led screen.
That was important because Included Health wasn’t measuring success based on screening efficiency alone. The team continued watching candidates as they moved through the funnel and into onboarding, including pre-onboarding and training attrition.
For MP, that combination of a clearly defined interview process and ongoing measurement is an important part of introducing AI responsibly.
“This doesn’t replace having good interview practices. What this does is replace the capacity required to deliver them.”
— Mary “MP” Pierce Bullock, Director, Talent Acquisition, Included Health
She also advises teams to establish a baseline before introducing AI, capturing trends like hiring manager pass-through and downstream attrition, and then using the data to understand whether outcomes continue moving in the direction they expect.
That approach gave Included Health the confidence to move beyond the initial pilot and expand Screen across Member Care hiring.
Candidate experience was another measure Included Health watched closely.
The team knew an AI interview would be new for many candidates, so they were intentional about setting expectations. Candidates were told what the interview involved, how long it would take, what to expect, and how to reach a recruiter if they had questions or needed support.
Included Health also added a video introduction from a recruiter so candidates could hear directly from the team before beginning the interview.
Candidate adoption moved faster than MP initially expected. After only a couple of cohorts, participation was consistent enough for the team to expand its use of Screen.
Today, candidates rate the experience 4.7 out of 5, and roughly one-third of Screen interviews are completed outside normal working hours.
For Member Care candidates, many of whom are already working full time in jobs where stepping away during the day can be difficult, that flexibility matters. Candidates can complete the roughly 15-minute interview when it works for them rather than trying to find an opening on a recruiter’s calendar.
“The candidate response has been overwhelmingly positive. They liked the flexibility and being able to complete the interview on their own time.”
— Mary “MP” Pierce Bullock, Director, Talent Acquisition, Included Health
As Included Health moved through its first few hiring cohorts, the team began to see another benefit: a more predictable funnel.
They could see how many Screen invitations translated into completed interviews, how many candidates met the qualification threshold, and how those candidates progressed into the next stage.
MP described reaching the point where the team could send 300 Screen invitations, expect roughly 150 candidates to complete them, and expect approximately 75 candidates to qualify for the next stage.
For a team operating in an environment where hiring forecasts can move quickly, that changes the capacity-planning conversation.
If the business needs to add another class, the team can work backward from the hiring goal using what it knows about its funnel and determine the volume required at the top.
MP still regularly plans for recruiter capacity, but she says the process now feels significantly more manageable and increasingly like a math problem the team can solve.
That predictability gives TA greater control over how it responds when the business changes. Rather than having recruiter capacity rise and fall alongside hiring demand, the team can adjust the volume moving through the process based on what the business needs.
“This has allowed us to have so much more predictability and control over the process in terms of knowing exactly what we need to do to get to the outcome we want.”
— Mary “MP” Pierce Bullock, Director, Talent Acquisition, Included Health
The impact extends beyond how Included Health plans for hiring volume. It is also changing the scope of the recruiter role.
In high-volume recruiting, the demands of moving large numbers of candidates through the process can leave less room for recruiters to develop experience beyond day-to-day execution. With Screen taking on more of the initial interview volume, MP is seeing more room for recruiters to grow their skills and take on broader responsibilities.
The recruiter leading Member Care now has greater ownership of the hiring program as a whole. He’s working across the funnel and its data, partnering more deeply with the business, and thinking ahead about workforce needs. MP describes the role as becoming a form of “mini program management with AI and with data.”
That creates room for recruiters to build skills in analytics, workforce planning, program management, and stakeholder leadership, while taking greater ownership of an entire line of business. MP has already seen that shift within Member Care. After only a few months operating this way, the recruiter leading the program was ready to take on another line of business.
Included Health is now building on that model. MP is shaping her team around clearer areas of business ownership and opening a Senior Program Manager, Talent Acquisition Innovation, to help apply what they’ve learned in Member Care elsewhere in the organization.
For MP, that creates an opportunity to rethink not only how high-volume recruiting operates, but where recruiter roles can evolve in the future.
“It creates this whole new job profile for recruiters and how they operate and how they work. You can elevate the recruiter in high volume and give them the capacity to be so much more strategic.”
— Mary “MP” Pierce Bullock, Director, Talent Acquisition, Included Health
Included Health is already looking at where this model can be applied next.
The team is piloting BrightHire Screen for urgent care nurse practitioner hiring, another high-inbound area with different requirements, including state licensure.
Again, the team is starting with the hiring process itself. They’re mapping where an AI interview could fit, where human interaction should remain, and what historical pipeline data can tell them about the outcomes they should expect.
The goal isn’t to copy the Member Care process into a different part of the organization. It’s to take the operating principles that have worked and adapt them to a new hiring challenge.
That approach has been consistent throughout Included Health’s journey with BrightHire.
It started with using Interview Intelligence to make engineering hiring more efficient and evidence-based. That foundation gave TA experience using AI thoughtfully and measuring its impact. Screen gave the team an opportunity to apply those lessons to an entirely different challenge in high-volume hiring.
Now, Included Health has a model that can respond more flexibly as hiring demand changes, produce meaningful savings for the business, give candidates greater flexibility, and create more room for recruiters to operate at a higher level.
