Priya Shetha spent a decade as a behaviorist, built and ran her own staffing company, then moved in-house. Cindy Deeble started at a front desk at 19, became the manager the same year, and has spent 25+ years recruiting clinicians, physicians, and executives across the country. Both now lead talent acquisition at Sutter Health.
Nick Livingston sat down with them to talk about the tension every healthcare TA team lives with: patients need care now, and the wrong hire makes that care worse.
What changes when you go in-house
Priya put it plainly. As an external recruiter, a filled req was finished. You moved to the next one, because that's where the paycheck came from. Internally, the person you place is still there in six months, shaping the team or straining it. She calls it clarity on impact, and in healthcare that impact reaches the floor.
Speed is real, but it doesn't decide
Both recruiters track aging. Neither lets it drive the submission. Cindy's framing for hiring leaders: we can fill this fast, or we can fill it once. Her practice is to build the relationship over multiple conversations, sometimes four or five before an offer, so the foundation exists on day one. Priya's version comes down to trust. Her leaders know she isn't forwarding someone just because the certifications line up.
Where automation helps, and where it doesn't
Priya is glad to hand off twenty administrative tasks. What worries her is automation at the top of the funnel, because that's where human judgment does the most work. Cindy uses knockout questions, but not yes-or-no ones. She writes questions that can't be answered by ChatGPT, reads every response, and pipelines the strong candidates who aren't right for this particular req. She estimates 40 to 50 people a year come back to her that way.
Cindy also made a distinction worth borrowing: a chatbot that answers a candidate's questions about benefits, the role, or next steps is giving something back. A tool that only makes candidates answer more questions is taking. Same technology, opposite experience.
The consistency gap
Ask most TA leaders what questions their recruiters ask nurses, what notes get captured on a screening call, or what a candidate submission actually contains, and the answer is that it depends on the recruiter. Priya's view is that standardization is the foundation for raising the talent bar, because inconsistent quality lands directly on the candidate experience and then on the employer brand.
This is the problem Honeit was built around. Structured call guides so every screen covers what matters, notes and soundbites captured automatically, and candidate presentations that look the same coming from any recruiter on the team.
Also in this episode
- Cindy's litmus test for leadership hires: is this someone you'd want to partner with on their own reqs next month?
- Why retention is the first measure of recruiting, not the last
- Virtual hiring events, and why nobody has quite solved them yet
- What agency recruiters can do to be treated as partners rather than one of a hundred vendors
Connect with Priya and Cindy
Priya Shethna, Talent Acquisition, Sutter Health
Cindy Deeble, RACR, STAP, Talent Acquisition Partner and Physician Recruitment, Sutter Health
See Honeit on your own reqs
Honeit helps recruiters conduct high-quality interviews and deliver data-driven candidate submissions with scorecards and interview soundbites. You do the talking. Honeit handles scheduling, call guides, note-taking, and candidate presentations.
