How Aspen Dental is Finding Top Talent Faster with X+ Source

Recruiters often face a puzzling paradox: the more advanced their search tools become, the harder those tools can be to use. Traditional talent databases pack in hundreds of filters and Boolean search options, yet many recruitment teams find themselves either drowning in choices or missing qualified candidates completely.

Healthcare Services provider The Aspen Group (TAG) encountered these same challenges firsthand when hiring for roles across their network of 1,100+ Aspen Dental offices and multiple healthcare brands. 

Reece White, TAG’s Senior Recruitment Marketing Manager, recently shared how their trial of Phenom’s X+ Source solution had a profoundly positive impact on their team and on the business as a whole — cutting sourcing time in half and helping them bring on 865 additional teammates they would have otherwise missed. 

Watch the entire session here, or read on for the highlights!

Why Healthcare Recruiting Gets Complicated Fast

TAG operates as a comprehensive healthcare network encompassing multiple specialized brands: Aspen Dental with 1,100 offices, WellNow urgent care centers, Lovett veterinary clinics, Clear Choice dental implant centers, and Chapter aesthetic studios. This diverse portfolio requires recruiting for a wide range of healthcare professionals, from general dentists and hygienists to highly specialized endodontists and veterinarians.

Especially relevant to this story? The organization's mission to provide healthcare access in underserved dental desert communities creates unique sourcing challenges. With over 15,000 employees across a decentralized, remote-first talent acquisition team, they had to efficiently source candidates for locations that may not be immediately attractive to healthcare professionals seeking urban opportunities.

Their main objectives weren’t different from most in the healthcare field: Faster, easier hiring and the ability to surface hard-to-find candidates. “We are always trying to be faster than the competition,” admitted White. “So it's incredibly important for us to remove barriers for our recruiters to find quality candidates.” It’s no surprise, then, that they turned to AI and automation for sourcing help.

Aspen Group's Three Key Sourcing Challenges 

1. Complex Filter Navigation 

TAG’s talent CRM had evolved to include numerous specialized filters that, while powerful, sometimes made searches more complex for recruiters. “Some of them are starting their searches too narrow, when they should begin broadly and refine from there,” White explained. New team members struggled to figure out which filters to use, while even seasoned recruiters often ended up with talent pools that were far too limited for their hiring needs.

2. Inconsistent Training and Adoption Across Teams

With a decentralized recruitment structure spanning multiple healthcare verticals, TAG faced significant training challenges. "We've been on the Phenom platform since late 2021, and I joined in April 2022. We had some incredibly heavy users and others who barely used it. I was brought on specifically to increase the adoption and overall performance of Phenom. We didn't have someone who owned the product completely, and that became my role,” White noted.

The organization needed a solution that could bring new recruiters up to the proficiency level of their most experienced users without extensive training periods.

3. Limited Candidate Discovery 

Traditional search methods focused primarily on job titles and basic qualifications, missing candidates with relevant skills listed differently on their resumes. This limitation was challenging when sourcing for specialized roles where candidates might have transferable skills or use varying terminology to describe their expertise.

Related: Aspen Dental’s Early Talent Advantage

The X+ Source Solution: Features That Delivered Results

Phenom X+ represents the combined power of AI, generative AI, and agentic AI solutions that are designed intentionally for HR use cases. X+ automatically enhances content creation, workflows, and processes for talent acquisition and management teams. For TAG, the solution filled three key gaps in their sourcing process: 

Simplified Search with Natural Language Processing

Phenom X+ Source introduced Natural Language processing (NLP) capabilities that transformed how TAG's recruiters interact with their talent database. "What we found is that X+ Source required very little training to get someone up and running. A sourcer or recruiter who might be in their first few weeks can generate a list of filters that's just as good as someone who's been in the system for three full years," White explained.

The AI processes over 120 different attributes, automatically interpreting variations in company names, job titles, and skills without requiring recruiters to manually build complex Boolean searches. "The natural language search capability helps recruiters cut through that noise and focus on what matters and how they can get to the group of candidates they want to reach," he said.

Advanced Skill-Based Candidate Discovery

X+ Source enabled recruiters to move beyond traditional job title searches and discover candidates through their actual skills and experience. "When we have recruiters who are using filters ineffectively or searching ineffectively, we found that Phenom X+ Source was able to find candidates that we weren't thinking about. Simply by typing the name of a procedure that we needed rather than the actual candidate title, those types of use cases ended up being powerful," White noted. "The ability to type something like 'show me a dental hygienist in Orlando, Florida, with three years of experience,' hit enter, and have Phenom instantly generate that search for you — that was a real game changer for us. That didn't exist in the CRM before," he said. This approach proved particularly valuable for specialized healthcare roles, where qualified candidates might describe their expertise using different terminology or have relevant skills buried within broader job descriptions that traditional keyword searches would miss.

Comprehensive Database Integration 

The solution leveraged TAG's talent pools within their talent CRM with Phenom Intelligent Sourcing, an extensive external database. This combination provides seamless access to both TAG-sourced candidate pools and external talent sources within a single interface, eliminating the need for recruiters to switch between multiple sourcing tools.

Automated Workflows

TAG developed sophisticated automations to ensure critical candidates were immediately flagged for their specialized recruiting teams. For example, "We started building automations that would trigger whenever a periodontist enters the CRM, notifying three key users. Anytime a dentist with a specific skill set enters the talent CRM, we notify the dentist recruiting team. We built a suite of these automations, and as we brought our various brands into the system, we started building those automations for their hardest-to-fill roles," White described. These automations ensured that high-value candidates for specialized positions received immediate attention from the appropriate recruiting specialists.

Results: What X+ Source Can Do for You

TAG trialed X+ Source to see if natural language search could solve their recruitment bottlenecks — and the pilot revealed the kind of results organizations dream about. "We are always trying to free up time for our recruiters to get them on the phones. Our dentist recruiters, endodontist recruiters, and periodontist recruiters are most effective when they are talking to candidates on the phone and providing a white-glove experience," White explained. With these intuitive expanded search capabilities, now they can.

"Our recruiters say, 'I found these three hygienists in my difficult location that didn't show up in other searches, and they're perfect,'" White shared. "Especially for dentists, where we have our finger on the pulse of who these candidates are, finding even one or two within the talent CRM or outside the talent CRM using the cloud-based tools is a win every single time."

What Organizations Using X+ Source Can Expect:

• 50% reduction in sourcing time - cutting specialized candidate identification from 14 days to 7 days

• 4 additional hires per recruiter - increased individual recruiter capacity

• Expanded hiring reach - access to talent that traditional searches miss

• Faster time to fill - up to 7 days saved per specialized position

• 750 million external profiles - comprehensive database with 80% email availability

• 120+ attributes processed automatically - AI interprets variations in company names, job titles, and skills without manual searches

For organizations struggling with inefficient sourcing and search processes, TAG's experience offers a clear lesson: Natural language search eliminates training bottlenecks while surfacing candidates that traditional keyword searches miss — getting recruiters back to having the kind of conversations that actually close candidates.

What if your recruiters could search for talent the same way they think about talent? Watch our on-demand X+Source demonstration to find out how.