Ryan Hickey works with Engage Locums, a growing locum tenens staffing agency focused on placing physicians and advanced practitioners across hospitals and healthcare systems. The company had built strong traction in a few core specialties but wanted to expand its reach and get recruiters focused on the highest-value activity: talking to interested candidates.
The challenge: recruiter time spent in the wrong places
In locum tenens staffing, speed matters. When a hospital releases a new staffing need, it typically sends the opportunity to multiple agencies simultaneously. Recruiters race to identify and present qualified physicians before competitors do.
But for most recruiting teams, the bottleneck is not effort. It is how that effort gets spent.
Recruiters were dividing their time between researching prospects, building contact lists, cold calling physicians who were not interested, and generating individual outreach — all before a single real conversation happened.
Job comes out, goes to five different agencies. It's a race to see who can get in touch with the right clinicians the fastest.
Those with the most accurate physician data have a clear advantage to contact physicians who match the opportunity. Ryan's team had a solid internal list for a few specialties, but their recruiting reach was limited in others.
The tipping point: expanding data accuracy overnight
The team's CEO challenged recruiters to expand their ability to staff new specialties and opportunities. To do that, they needed a way to rapidly identify and contact physicians beyond their existing candidate pools.
When Ryan tested Fetch, the impact was immediate. He ran a comparison: pull all emergency medicine physicians in Georgia using Fetch, then run the same search with their internal list.
The results were staggering.
We pulled about 3,000 physicians in Fetch… and when we ran that same search in our internal database, we had about half of that.
Through the use of highly personalized AI and SMS outreach at scale, their potential candidate pool essentially doubled.
The solution: AI-powered personalized outreach at scale
Ryan's team began using Fetch primarily for two purposes.
Connecting to interested candidates faster through AI-personalized outreach
Recruiting communication has evolved significantly over the past decade. Cold calls became less effective. Emails often went unanswered. Text messaging turned out to be the fastest channel, but only when the messages feel personal and relevant.
Fetch's AI tailors every outreach message to each provider's background, qualifications, and the specific job opportunity. This is not generic SMS blasting — it is personalized adaptive AI with context-aware communication at a scale that would be impossible for a human team to replicate manually.
Texting clinicians has become the easiest and fastest way to connect. It's doubled the response rates we previously had with email.
The combination of AI-personalized messaging and the SMS channel dramatically improved engagement. Response rates roughly doubled compared to email, because every message was relevant to the provider who received it, learning and growing in relevance with each communication.
Accurate data, delivered with maximum relevance
Fetch helped recruiters identify clinicians they had never previously connected with, matching them to the right opportunities using AI that understands specialties, certifications, licensing, and geography.
We were contacting clinicians by the dozens that we never had in our database and didn't know existed.
These physicians could then be added to the company's internal recruiting system for future placements with more accurate information about interests and availability.
The AI conversation functionality from Fetch saves recruiters time by improving the quality of outreach and allowing the ability to easily reach out at scale, amplifying the data accuracy.
The results: 50% of placements from Fetch
The increased candidate access translated directly into placements.
Around 50% of the agency's placements so far have come from physicians sourced through Fetch.
I would say probably 50% of the placements we've made so far have been through Fetch versus our initial database.
Fetch also enabled the team to recruit in entirely new specialties where they previously had a limited physician network.
We literally have physicians in the pipeline for probably eight different specialties that we never had one physician for in our database before Fetch.
What's it like to work with Fetch? "It's basically sorcery"
When asked how he describes Fetch to colleagues, Ryan joked: "Sorcery."
It is not sorcery. It is intelligent, personalized, content-aware AI. But when the right AI tools are applied to a problem that used to take months of manual effort, the results can feel that way.
Fetch's AI handles provider identification, matching, and personalized outreach at a speed and accuracy that would be impossible to replicate with human effort alone. What traditionally required years of database building and countless hours of recruiter time communicating with uninterested physicians now happens in days.
Speeding up the time to connect
Recruiting teams have always had access to provider data, but the real advantage comes from how quickly accurate, usable data becomes action. Fetch accelerates that process by using AI to turn data into personalized outreach, intelligent matching, and engaged candidates delivered directly to recruiters.
Our recruiters use Fetch exclusively.
For Ryan's team, Fetch accelerates competitiveness by expanding immediate access to accurate physician pools and identifying interested candidates faster, freeing Engage's recruiters to concentrate on high-value work: relationship building and successful placements.
Final takeaway
For Ryan's agency, Fetch has become a foundational recruiting tool. It allowed a growing staffing firm to rapidly expand its physician network, compete with larger agencies, and generate placements faster with AI doing the heavy lifting on sourcing and outreach so recruiters can focus on closing.
Fetch's personalized, context-specific AI enables recruiters to reach interested physicians faster, with personalized outreach that drives real engagement — so they can spend less time searching and more time building relationships.