Locum tenens sourcing: finding physicians who aren't looking

On 31 October 2026 the national provider registry listed 422 physicians whose primary specialty is obstetrics and gynecology and whose practice address is in Maryland. If you are covering an OB/GYN locum shift in Baltimore, that is your in-state field.

Locum physicians are not looking

The physicians who would take your shift rarely browse job boards. A job board waits for a doctor to come to it, and a physician network sends you inquiries only after you post. So you post the shift and wait, then move the few inquiries that arrive into your own database.

The interest is there when someone asks. On a full-time search for a California medical group in October 2026, one specialist answered the first email by asking whether the role could be part time, or contracted case by case. That doctor was never going to reply to a posting.

The shift still has a start date. The OB/GYN who would take it works at a hospital forty minutes away and has never seen your post, because nothing in their week sends them looking.

Five tools for one shift

Between them, the locum firms we spoke to in October 2026 named physician job sites, a physician network, an NPI list tool that sends an AI-written first message, a list-blast tool, an engagement platform and a locum ATS. Add a contact-data vendor and a dialer, and one shift can pass through five or six tools. Each tool does its own step, and your recruiters carry the work from one to the next. They export a list from one, look up contacts in another, paste into a third, and log what happened in the ATS when they get to it.

Two things get lost in those handoffs. The first is time. Bullhorn's GRID 2025 survey of more than 1,500 recruiters put searching alone at 14.6 hours a week. The second is knowing what works. When sourcing, outreach and replies sit in different tools, nobody can say which source produced the doctor who signed. You don't know what you don't know, so you cannot tell which tool to renew.

Start from the full pool

Kandidate's Talent Graph holds 7,372,909 registered US clinicians, so a locum req starts from every physician in that specialty on the national provider registry, not from whoever answered a post. Before any outreach, Kandidate sizes the pool for your req: how many physicians in the specialty practise within your radius and where they work. It also shows what the market pays for the work. It searches the provider registry, outside profile databases, the job boards and your own ATS in one pass, and checks every physician against the OIG exclusion list during the search. If you have the same specialty open in a neighbouring state, you widen the radius on the same job instead of opening a second req.

For a shift nobody nearby has answered, Kandidate can also run a local Instagram campaign with a short intake form, and the people who fill in the form come into Kandidate as candidates.

You write a scorecard for the req: the state licence, board certification, DEA registration and setting you need. Every candidate is scored against it and nothing is rejected automatically. You can put a checkpoint between sourcing and outreach, so you approve the list before a single email goes out, or let the agent run once you trust it.

Outreach goes out in your name

Every first email leaves from your recruiter's own Gmail or Outlook inbox and opens with a line written for that physician. A short sequence of follow-ups comes after it. For an employed doctor the message can be about the shift itself: two shifts a month, twenty minutes from where they already work. That is a smaller ask than a full job description.

When a physician replies, Kandidate reads the reply and files it against the candidate. The sequence stops, and a no is recorded as a no.

Your recruiters call from the built-in dialer, which moves to the next number and can drop their own recorded voicemail where your agency allows it. AI voice calls go only to physicians already in your ATS who gave you their number, and a physician who says yes on that call can book the screen on the recruiter's calendar there and then. Doctors found through sourcing hear from you by email and from your recruiters.

Each inbox sends under a cap

Each recruiter's inbox sends at most 50 outreach emails a day by default, which keeps the volume from any one inbox low when thirty recruiters are reaching physicians at once. Replies are never throttled. Kandidate scores every sending inbox from its live DNS records (SPF, DKIM, DMARC and blocklists), so a misconfigured domain shows up before the first send. Anyone who asks not to be contacted goes on a do-not-contact list across your whole agency, and that list is checked before every email.

One record from req to booking

Kandidate keeps the req, the pool, the ranked candidates, every email and call, each reply and the booked screen in one record. It syncs jobs, candidates and submittals both ways with JobDiva. Your candidates never train AI models. Every job gets the same view: how many physicians were reached, how many replied, how many said yes, and an estimate of the hours the platform saved.

What physician outreach returned

Physician outreach run through Kandidate for a California medical group drew a reply from about 1 in 20 specialists emailed across five hard-to-fill roles, July to early October 2026. The interested replies came quickly. The median one arrived 3 days after the first email, and 80% arrived within a week. Of the specialists who said they were interested, 40% asked to meet and 20% had an interview booked. These were permanent roles, and a locum req runs on the same pool, ranking, inbox sending and reply filing.

What changes for your desk

Your desk gets back the hours that go to search and admin. Bullhorn estimates that automated search and matching saves a recruiter 4.5 hours a week, plus 3.6 hours of screening and admin. When sourcing, outreach, calling and reply-filing run in one place, your recruiters spend those hours talking to doctors and closing with the facility.

Territories matter less, too. When the search covers every registered physician within a radius, one recruiter can work a req across a state line instead of handing it to a colleague.

Kandidate's pilot runs five open reqs for three months. Put your hardest locum shifts in it and compare replies, screens booked and shifts filled with the rest of the desk.

Most of those 422 OB/GYNs in Maryland will never see your post. A desk that starts from the registry starts with all of them.