How a California medical group
cut recruitment costs by 10×

A California medical group needed to recruit across several specialist roles, including chiropractor, physiatrist, nurse practitioner, neurologist and medical billing positions.

The conventional option was to divide the work among specialist agencies. The group estimated that filling the portfolio this way could have generated approximately $500,000 in agency commissions.

Instead, its existing talent acquisition team worked through Kandidate to map the market, source relevant professionals, run outreach and manage responses.

Based on the organisation's agency-cost comparison and our active-time model, the result was:

Several specialist searches were managed by the same internal team, with no added recruiters.

The real constraint was recruiter capacity

Healthcare sourcing becomes difficult when location, specialism, licensing and experience all matter at once.

Recruiters have to build searches, inspect profiles, check professional details, find contact information, personalise messages, follow up and maintain the pipeline. Multiply that work across five roles and the hiring desk becomes the bottleneck.

For a specialist search involving roughly 100 potential candidates, a conventional manual workflow can require around 61.5 hours of active recruiter time.

Across five searches, that represents more than 300 hours of recruiter work before interviews and hiring-manager feedback.

What changed with Kandidate

Kandidate reduces the hands-on work surrounding each search. The platform helps the team source candidates, review relevant professional and licensing details, organise the pipeline, run outreach and consolidate responses.

Stage by stage, the same workflow drops from around 61.5 hours of manual recruiter time to roughly 3.25 hours of hands-on team time:

Around 95% less active recruiter time per role

That is approximately 3.25 hours of active team time per role, compared with an estimated 61.5 hours through a fully manual workflow.

The 20-minute sourcing and outreach figures refer to hands-on setup. The platform continues processing the work after the recruiter launches each workflow.

The human team stayed in control

Kandidate did not replace the talent team. It gave the team more capacity.

Recruiters still decided who was suitable, spoke with interested candidates, understood motivation and advised hiring managers. The platform handled more of the repetitive market mapping, data checking, outreach administration and reporting around those decisions.

It also kept each stage of the funnel distinct. A sourced profile was not reported as an interview. A response was not reported as a hire. The immediate outcome was a stronger set of active and interview-ready conversations across several difficult searches.

1. Sourced

   Relevant professionals found across the market.

2. Contacted

   Moved into personalised email and voice outreach.

3. Responded

   Engaged and interested in the conversation.

4. Interview-ready

   Qualified, active conversations ready for the hiring manager.

The commercial result

The medical group estimated that the agency route could have cost approximately $500,000. Combining Kandidate with its internal team reduced the estimated equivalent recruitment cost to around $50,000.

Approximately $450,000 saved, a 90% reduction in cost

Actual savings vary by role, compensation, agency terms and hiring outcome. The operating advantage is clear: the same team can search more of the market, run more roles concurrently and progress candidates faster.