This AI Sourcing Agent Gives The Aspen Group More Time With Candidates. Here's How.

Dentists don't browse job boards. Endodontists don't fill out applications. So how does a nationwide dental support organization find the specialized professionals its hundreds of locations depend on? For The Aspen Group (TAG), which oversees Aspen Dental, WellNow Urgent Care, Lovett Veterinary, ClearChoice, and more, active sourcing isn't a strategy. It's survival.

That's why when Phenom Sourcing Agent became available in beta, they didn't wait. At IAMPHENOM 2026, TAG’s Reece White, Senior Manager, Recruitment Marketing Technology, shared how the agent is already reshaping recruiter workflows — and what the team is still learning as rollout continues.

Watch the full session here, or explore the highlights below!

What Made Sourcing Specialized Healthcare Roles So Time-Intensive?

The Aspen Group’s Phenom Talent CRM is a mature environment built over four years that includes extensive tags, custom spotlights, and complex filter configurations developed by power users over time. For an experienced recruiter who knows the system, that depth is an asset. For someone new to the platform, it’s a steep learning curve before a confident search can even be built.

Manual outreach added another layer. A standard 10-day dental candidate workflow involves email on day one, SMS on day three, follow-up SMS on day five, another email after that. Getting through that sequence meant setting Outlook calendar reminders, manually tracking tasks in Phenom, and going back to re-trigger each touchpoint. The mechanics of the outreach were eating recruiter time that should have been going into conversations.

“We want them to be talking to candidates. We don’t want them building these lists and spending time in the CRM,” White said.

How Does Phenom Sourcing Agent Replace Boolean Search and Manual Outreach?

Sourcing Agent replaces Boolean filter-building with natural-language search. Instead of stringing together operators, quoted title variants, and a stack of CRM filters, a recruiter just types something like, "Find me a dental hygienist in Orlando with five years of experience," and the agent builds the search.

“I type that sentence in and boom, the search is run,” White said.

It pulls from the existing Talent CRM first (warmer leads who’ve already engaged with the brand) and then surfaces passive candidates from external talent pools, synthesizing their profiles and providing reasoning for why each person might be a fit.

After surfacing candidates, the agent builds the entire outreach sequence. It segments automatically by candidate type: prior applicants get different messaging than passive external candidates who have never heard of Aspen Dental. For each segment, the agent generates a multi-touch email and SMS sequence — 15 days in the demo, with persona-specific copy that can be edited before sending. Once the recruiter approves and sends, the sequence runs on its own. When a candidate responds, it routes back to the recruiter’s inbox.

Just one session in the Talent CRM, and the 10-day outreach is live and self-managing.

For new recruiters, the natural language interface is particularly valuable: They can describe the candidate they’re looking for without knowing how to construct the filters. For experienced recruiters with pre-built spotlights, the bigger value comes from the passive candidate discovery and outreach automation. Both use cases collapse the distance between opening a rec and getting candidates into conversation.

How Much Time Did Phenom Sourcing Agent Save Recruiters?

Although the project is still in its early phase, the data already suggests efficiency gains:

Approximately 20% of The Aspen Group's recruiting team is using the AI sourcing agent daily, with about 10% fully adopted and preferring it over traditional methods
3–5 minutes saved per candidate on personalized outreach, translating to several hours saved per 50-candidate project
Phenom interview scheduling links are driving an uptick in booked interviews, freeing recruiters to spend more time in live conversations

The outreach automation is where White sees the clearest impact. Building a multi-touch sequence manually — email, SMS, follow-up, repeat — for 50 candidates used to mean hours of calendar management and task tracking. Now it’s a single session.

"We are seeing through Phenom scheduling links that recruiters are getting extra interviews scheduled. We believe we're starting to get that extra time on the phones," White said. Recruiter-to-candidate conversation time is the metric The Aspen Group is ultimately tracking, and the early indicators point in the right direction.

Where Is The Aspen Group Taking the Sourcing Agent Next?

The capability White is most excited about is job-level AI integration. When a req comes through from Workday into Phenom, Sourcing Agent will automatically identify 100 to 200 candidate matches based on the job description, before a recruiter has searched at all. They can review, approve, and launch outreach without ever building a search from scratch. For a recruiter opening a new req, that's a completely different place to begin.

“Every single endodontist matters, right?” White said. “We want to embed that logic into the agent. We want the agent to think the same way that our sources do, that our recruiters do. So we're working with the Phenom team to actively add that information and those sources into the candidate source database that the sourcing agent is pulling from.”

Dental support organizations exist so clinicians don't have to think about the business side of dentistry. The Aspen Group is applying that same logic to recruiting: remove the friction, handle the mechanics, and give talented people the space to do what they do best.