The Hiring Automation Gap No One Is Talking About

Featuring Mike DeMarco, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Phenom

Healthcare is ranked #2 out of eight industries for overall hiring automation maturity. Healthcare was among the first to deploy voice screening agents. So why are nurses still taking 64 days to fill and internal positions taking 57?

Bo and Luke welcome Mike DeMarco — the self-described "Bruce Springsteen of Product Marketing" — to unpack Phenom's 2026 State of Hiring Automation Report, which audited over 200 companies across eight industries and surfaced a gap that explains almost everything.

📊 The Gap: You're Good at Getting Candidates In. You're Not Qualifying Them.
Across all eight industries, organizations scored above 50% maturity on attraction, engagement, and conversion — getting candidates to click apply. Hiring automation scores — what happens at the moment of application — dropped to sub-28%. The candidates are there. The qualification infrastructure is not. And for the first time in the survey's history, quality of hire (54%) outranked speed and cost as HR leaders' top hiring priority.

🤖 What Good Looks Like
Baylor Scott & White completes 1,000 voice screens in a single day when a job is posted. Allara Caring reduced time to offer by 32% and found that 40% of screens happen after hours — candidates engaging on their own schedule, not waiting for a recruiter callback. Seven-minute apply-to-interview-scheduled flows exist in retail today. Healthcare is next.

🔎 Where to Start — This Week, Almost Free
Luke's practical framework: record conversations with your best and worst performers in each TA role. Ask what they actually do — not what they're supposed to do. Then run everything through Claude: compare top and bottom performers, identify automation opportunities, and generate a business process map. Total cost: roughly $100/month. Mike's team is also offering a complimentary two-role hiring automation audit for listeners.

📋 Resources
Phenom 2026 State of Hiring Automation Report + free audit.

AI isn't replacing recruiters. People who know how to use AI will replace people who don't. Start today.

Enjoying the show? Subscribe to The ASHHRA Podcast on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

This episode is brought to you by AP3 — the ASHHRA Preferred Partner Program.

Healthcare HR leaders are navigating rising costs, workforce shortages, and an overwhelming vendor landscape. AP3 cuts through the noise.

Managed in collaboration with Lockton and backed by ASHHRA, AP3 is a governed ecosystem of vetted, healthcare-aligned solution providers across talent acquisition, benefits administration, workforce compliance, financial wellness, and employee engagement. Every partner is rigorously vetted. Every relationship is governed. Every solution is built for healthcare.

No directories. No bidding wars. Just trusted partners proven to perform.

Visit AP3.info to learn more and get connected with a partner.

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What It Actually Looks Like to Move Beyond Traditional HR

Featuring Nakesha Lopez, Chief People & Culture Officer, Advocate Health

Recorded live at Advocate Health's The Pearl innovation quarter in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Advocate Health is one of the three largest nonprofit health systems in the country — 175,000 teammates across six states. Nakesha Lopez leads the people and culture function for all of it. She started in HR because someone mentioned a job posting at Memorial Sloan Kettering. She didn't know what HR was. Twenty-five years later, she's redefining what it can be.

📍 HR's Seat at the Table Isn't Given — It's Earned Through Business Fluency Nakesha's definition of non-traditional HR starts here: the people and culture strategy cannot be separate from the organizational strategy. HR leaders must speak CFO, speak operations, speak clinical — and translate across all of it. The interpreter who removes barriers and co-creates with operational leaders before rolling anything out. Her biggest early-career mistake taught her that lesson permanently.

🤖 People-Led, AI-Enabled — Not the Other Way Around Advocate Health's AI strategy is co-led by Nakesha and the Chief AI Officer. The frame is workforce transformation, not AI transformation — because the goal is improved teammate experience, not technology deployment for its own sake. Advocate is rolling out AI literacy organization-wide: helping 175,000 teammates assess where they are in their AI maturity and build from there. If your organization is not building AI literacy now, the new grad you hire in 2027 will notice.

⚡ Work Forward: Advocate's Workforce Transformation Strategy Work Forward is Advocate's structured approach to redesigning work alongside the teammates who do it — cross-functional teams identifying workflows to improve, enabled by AI, with clear accountability for what happens to the work that goes away and the new skills required to replace it. It is not a project. It is a culture being built over multiple years.

🔎 The Takeaway for Every Healthcare HR Leader Embrace the future — but do it together. Your peers, your vendors, your frontline teammates are your co-designers. The best outcomes come from bringing different minds into the same room and letting the debate happen.

Connect with Nakesha: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nakesha-lopez-b817821

Enjoying the show? Subscribe to The ASHHRA Podcast on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

This episode is brought to you by AP3 — the ASHHRA Preferred Partner Program.

Healthcare HR leaders are navigating rising costs, workforce shortages, and an overwhelming vendor landscape. AP3 cuts through the noise.

Managed in collaboration with Lockton and backed by ASHHRA, AP3 is a governed ecosystem of vetted, healthcare-aligned solution providers across talent acquisition, benefits administration, workforce compliance, financial wellness, and employee engagement. Every partner is rigorously vetted. Every relationship is governed. Every solution is built for healthcare.

No directories. No bidding wars. Just trusted partners proven to perform.

Visit AP3.info to learn more and get connected with a partner.

Support the show

Pay Transparency Hits July 1, Two-Thirds of HR Leaders Don't Know What AI Can Do & 84% of Healthcare Workers Feel Taken for Granted

June 22nd, 2026. Luke Carignan is flying solo — Bo and Jeremy are out — and he is not slowing down. Three stories: compliance, technology, and the most human challenge in healthcare right now.

⚖️ Pay Transparency Laws Hit Virginia and Maine July 1
Every job posting in Virginia and Maine must include an actual salary range beginning July 1st. No "competitive compensation." No DOE. Virginia's law has no employer size threshold — a 20-person clinic and a 50,000-employee health system face the same requirement. A salary history ban is also in effect. 16 states now have pay transparency laws. Penalties start at $1,000 per violation, with a 15-day correction window that protects you from a lawsuit on that specific posting.
Action: Audit your postings today. Then stop treating this as compliance and start treating it as competitive advantage. Candidates are three times more likely to apply when a salary range is included. In a market with 1.3 million open healthcare jobs, that is not a small number.

🤖 SHRM 2026: The AI Gap Is Awareness, Not Budget
SHRM surveyed 1,700+ HR professionals and found the number one barrier to AI adoption is not cost or security — it is a lack of awareness. 67% of HR leaders don't fully understand what AI can do in hiring. Meanwhile, 92% of CHROs expect greater AI integration in 2026. And 57% of HR professionals in states with AI hiring laws don't know those laws exist. 19 of the most populous states have enacted them.
Action: Schedule a real AI literacy session for your HR team — not a vendor demo. Find out what AI hiring laws apply in your state. If your legal team doesn't know, that is also useful information.

🧠 84% of Healthcare Workers Feel Taken for Granted
ProLink's 2026 Pulse of Travel Healthcare and a Harris Poll align on the same finding: burnout (29%), declining morale (21%), and turnover (20%) are the top three workforce threats — all people problems. 80% say well-being programs don't work. Workers are short-staffed 43% of the time. No mindfulness app fixes that.
Action: Stop solving a retention problem with a benefits solution. Flexibility — shift autonomy, compressed schedules, hybrid models for admin roles — is what the data points to. Go ask someone on your team today how they are actually doing. Really ask.

Enjoying the show? Subscribe to The ASHHRA Podcast on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

This episode is brought to you by AP3 — the ASHHRA Preferred Partner Program.

Healthcare HR leaders are navigating rising costs, workforce shortages, and an overwhelming vendor landscape. AP3 cuts through the noise.

Managed in collaboration with Lockton and backed by ASHHRA, AP3 is a governed ecosystem of vetted, healthcare-aligned solution providers across talent acquisition, benefits administration, workforce compliance, financial wellness, and employee engagement. Every partner is rigorously vetted. Every relationship is governed. Every solution is built for healthcare.

No directories. No bidding wars. Just trusted partners proven to perform.

Visit AP3.info to learn more and get connected with a partner.

Support the show

Greenwood LaFleur Is Still Fighting, Medicaid Work Requirements Land July 31 & the Layoff Tracker Is Telling You Where the Work Is

June 15th, 2026. Bo and Luke open with a Mississippi hospital that was supposed to close today — and is still open. Then a Medicaid rule taking effect without a real comment window. Then a layoff tracker that, read correctly, is actually a roadmap for HR.

🏥 Greenwood LaFleur: Still Open, Still Fighting
The 25-bed public hospital in Greenwood, Mississippi extended its WARN Act closure date from June 15th to July 31st as negotiations with UMMC continue. UMMC submitted a formal acquisition proposal last week. LaFleur County has a 13% uninsured rate and very few alternatives. The City Council president is cautiously optimistic. Whether this hospital is open August 1st depends entirely on whether this deal gets done.
HR Action: Review your WARN Act procedures, severance frameworks, and workforce communication templates this week. Not because you expect to need them — because preparation is what makes great HR leadership possible in any environment.

📋 Medicaid Work Requirements: 80 Hours, Effective July 31
CMS published its interim final rule on Medicaid work requirements June 1st — effective July 31st, the same day public comments are due. No meaningful comment window. Starting January 1, 2027, states must require Medicaid enrollees to document 80 hours per month of work, education, or community service to maintain eligibility. Nebraska is live now. Fifty different state implementation processes are coming.
HR Action: Model what a 5% and 10% increase in self-pay volume does to your workforce budget in 2027 by service line. Get that in front of your CFO before June ends.

📉 The Layoff Tracker Is a Workforce Transformation Map
Central Health, Optim, PacificSource, and UnityPoint Health all added to the tracker this week — but the pattern has shifted. IT, revenue cycle, and back-office functions are now absorbing a larger share of cuts through outsourcing and automation. This is not just reduction. It is redesign.
HR Action: Find out this week whether your organization has active outsourcing or automation initiatives in motion. If yes, make sure HR is embedded in the planning from the start — not notified when WARN notices need to go out. Change management, reskilling, and culture continuity are yours to lead.

Enjoying the show? Subscribe to The ASHHRA Podcast on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

This episode is brought to you by AP3 — the ASHHRA Preferred Partner Program.

Healthcare HR leaders are navigating rising costs, workforce shortages, and an overwhelming vendor landscape. AP3 cuts through the noise.

Managed in collaboration with Lockton and backed by ASHHRA, AP3 is a governed ecosystem of vetted, healthcare-aligned solution providers across talent acquisition, benefits administration, workforce compliance, financial wellness, and employee engagement. Every partner is rigorously vetted. Every relationship is governed. Every solution is built for healthcare.

No directories. No bidding wars. Just trusted partners proven to perform.

Visit AP3.info to learn more and get connected with a partner.

Support the show