GRID 2026 Industry Trends Report: Healthcare spotlight

Introduction

Even as the broader labor market faced uncertainty and stagnation through 2025, healthcare staffing remained one of the brighter spots in the market. Structural demand for clinicians is not going away: The Health Resources and Services Administration projects an ongoing national RN shortage through at least 2028, while more than 600,000 nurses are expected to leave the profession by 2027, keeping pressure on an already strained workforce. At the same time, the operating environment has evolved. Health systems have settled into more sustainable contingent labor strategies following the pandemic surge, travel nurse pay rates have fallen more than 40% from their peak, and the administrative burden of credentialing and compliance has continued to grow. Despite these pressures, healthcare staffing held its ground, with a greater share of firms reporting revenue growth than in the previous year.

The most successful firms leveraged technology to work smarter. AI has emerged as the primary catalyst, enabling these leaders to source and place qualified, credentialed clinicians with unprecedented speed. By automating administrative tasks, these top-performing firms have freed up their recruiters to focus on the high-value relational work that drives clinician loyalty and redeployment. For our 16th annual GRID Industry Trends Report, Bullhorn surveyed nearly 200 healthcare staffing leaders and recruiters across North America. Read on to learn how these insights can inform your strategic decisions in 2026.

Filter

Economic outlook: More healthcare firms reported revenue growth in 2025

36% of healthcare firms reported revenue growth in 2025

In a challenging market, healthcare staffing held its own. The share of healthcare staffing firms reporting revenue growth rose to 36% in 2025, up from 29% last year, further underscoring the sector’s resilience. Additionally, 8% of healthcare firms grew revenue by more than 25% year over year. Healthcare remains one of the few sectors where structural demand for talent continues to outpace supply, and the firms best positioned to capture that demand are those investing in the tools and strategies that make them faster and more accurate than their competitors.

AI is the top priority for 2026

While the overall staffing industry ranks integrating AI into daily office workflows as one of the top priorities, it ranks fifth for healthcare firms, which instead prioritize winning new clients and finding qualified talent. While this ranking reflects the unique pressure healthcare firms face due to fewer open job roles and a limited supply of clinicians, it may also point to a missed opportunity for firms to gain a competitive advantage. Incorporating AI into daily workflows is a critical step toward accelerating productivity and maximizing time savings, allowing firms to automate administrative tasks and free up sales and recruiters to focus on attracting new clients and talent, two of their other leading priorities.

Leaders are turning to technology to drive revenue

In 2026, healthcare staffing leaders are preserving financial performance by using technology to maximize recruiter productivity. While 32% of firms plan to diversify into niche specialties to drive growth, the broader industry is doubling down on recruiter efficiency. This focus on maximizing operational efficiency is consistent with the industry’s broader investment in AI and automation. By streamlining internal workflows, firms are doing more with less, while raising the bar for productivity and strategic focus.

Top challenges across all firms

Fewer job requisitions and tight talent pools remain the key challenges

Tight talent pools and falling requisition volumes remain the two dominant challenges for healthcare staffing firms, three years in a row. The underlying issue remains the same — too few roles and too few qualified clinicians to fill them. With these pressures unlikely to ease soon, amid the growing clinician shortage and persistently high wage expectations, the firms that invest effectively in AI will be best positioned to bridge the gap and achieve their financial goals and productivity benchmarks.

AI use is strongly tied to revenue growth

Revenue growth in 2025 was closely tied to AI adoption. Firms that successfully grew revenue were significantly more likely to use AI tools across multiple stages of the recruitment workflow. The most successful firms deployed technology throughout the entire workflow, rather than relying on point solutions at individual stages.

AI adoption is growing, but healthcare lags the overall market

While healthcare firms are catching up, they are still behind the broader staffing industry in AI adoption. Currently, 26% of healthcare firms report not using AI extensively, compared to 20% across the staffing industry as a whole. This lag likely reflects the unique challenges of healthcare, including complex credentialing, strict regulations, and fragmented data.

Healthcare firms using AI at any stage of the recruitment process are 1.5x more likely to have grown revenue

Revenue performance and AI adoption were closely associated in 2025, particularly in sourcing and prescreening. Healthcare firms using AI for candidate sourcing were 49% more likely to report revenue growth in 2025, while those using AI for prescreening were 47% more likely to do the same.

While the broader global staffing industry sees its strongest revenue gains from AI in sales and business development, healthcare firms see the greatest impact in sourcing. In a labor market constrained by a continued talent shortage and disrupted clinician pipelines, the critical bottleneck for healthcare leaders is not business development, but the ability to identify and place the right credentialed clinician quickly. By addressing the sourcing challenge, AI helps remove the core constraint facing the healthcare staffing industry today.

AI is yielding significant operational benefits when deployed strategically

Identifying better candidates faster and increasing the volume of screened candidates are tied as the leading benefits of AI. These capabilities are especially critical when candidate matching requires complex credentialing and compliance reviews. Firms capturing the greatest value from AI have moved beyond simple generative AI tools, weaving the technology deeply into their recruitment processes to reduce administrative friction and accelerate hiring.

Identifying better candidates faster is the #1 benefit of AI

Forty-five percent of healthcare leaders reported that identifying better candidates faster is the top benefit of AI, tied with screening a higher volume of candidates. Beyond speed, 41% of leaders said AI enables them to reclaim valuable time for direct engagement with clients and clinicians. In a sector where long-term loyalty is built through strong professional relationships, this reclaimed time has real practical value. This ranked higher than both administrative savings and recruiter onboarding efficiency as a perceived benefit of AI.

77% of healthcare recruiters spend at least one hour daily on manual tasks

Credentialing is far more than an administrative background task; it is the primary bottleneck shaping a recruiter’s daily reality. Seventy-seven percent of healthcare recruiters spend at least one hour daily on manual credentialing tasks, with 37% spending three or more hours each day on the process. As these tasks consume a significant portion of a workday, automation has become a strategic necessity. By automating verification, specialty matching, and compliance reviews, firms can shift their recruiters’ focus from manual processing to talent engagement.

Highest growth firms are seeing multiple AI benefits

The revenue gains achieved by top-performing healthcare firms stem from deploying AI in targeted, strategic areas throughout the recruitment workflow. These firms are extracting measurable value from their technology stack by using AI to solve specific, high-impact operational challenges. For instance, firms using AI to eliminate the need for backfilling were 52% more likely to report revenue growth than those not using AI for this purpose.

AI delivers its biggest time savings in searching and screening

Healthcare recruiters using AI to screen candidates are outperforming the rest of the staffing industry, with 64% reporting that AI cuts screening time by at least half (compared to 51% globally). Given that more than three quarters of healthcare recruiters spend at least one hour daily on credentialing, these gains are transformative. By reclaiming this time, recruiters can shift their focus from rote tasks to candidate engagement activities that directly drive placement success and redeployment.

The benefits grow when AI is used throughout the workflow, not just in one place

The value of AI in healthcare compounds when applied across multiple stages of the recruitment workflow. Firms integrating AI into three or more use cases are more than twice as likely to report improvements in candidate screening quality and are 1.6x more likely to reclaim time for direct client and candidate engagement. Screening delivers the largest gains of any benefit in healthcare, with a 2.3x lift compared to 1.4x for the rest of the staffing industry, reinforcing the idea that credential complexity makes screening the highest value use case in the sector.

There are still significant gaps in adoption of automation and AI

Despite the significant time savings and revenue benefits, many firms have a long way to go before fully embracing automation and AI across their platforms. Currently, only 7% of healthcare firms have embedded AI throughout their entire workflow, while over a quarter have yet to adopt it to any significant degree. This lags behind the rest of the staffing industry, where 10% of firms are in advanced stages of implementation. The healthcare sector’s unique regulatory and compliance requirements create a steeper barrier to entry than those in other staffing verticals. However, the firms that can successfully navigate this complexity will be positioned to build a lasting competitive advantage.

Just over half of healthcare firms have automated candidate search

While 57% of healthcare firms have successfully automated candidate search, adoption remains uneven. Even so, healthcare continues to outpace the broader industry’s 54% automation rate. Submitting candidates to clients saw the most significant growth from last year, rising from 35% to 44%, a shift likely driven by greater adoption of VMS integration tools. However, middle office operations still have major gaps in automation adoption. Healthcare firms are currently prioritizing VMS workflows to accelerate placement speed in a tight talent environment.

Most firms are not yet using AI throughout the full workflow

Sourcing and talent communication lead AI use cases in healthcare, but adoption drops for business development and client communication, and only 40% of firms are using AI to prescreen and recommend top candidates. With just 7% having AI across the full workflow, most healthcare firms are realizing only partial value from AI, rather than the growing returns that come from using it consistently throughout the recruitment process.

Healthcare firms want AI where it hurts most: clinical qualification and credentialing

Healthcare staffing firms want AI applications that directly target their most acute operational pain points. Three quarters of firms seek AI to screen for specialty, skills, and licensure, while 56% want automated verification of credential readiness against job requirements. Compliance-heavy verification continues to be the main obstacle in healthcare placement and reflects the daily reality of recruiters spending at least one hour daily on manual credentialing. Because this burden is so pervasive, the ROI for automation is immediate and measurable.

Successful AI integration requires clean data, committed leadership, and a clear implementation strategy

AI-ready leadership is already the norm at successful firms. Nearly two thirds (62%) of leaders at firms that grew revenue in 2025 say they feel prepared to lead their organization through AI transformation. However, when we look at what is holding back full adoption, data quality and strategic clarity emerge as the biggest obstacles.

Data quality and ROI skepticism are the biggest obstacles to AI adoption

Healthcare staffing firms aren’t rejecting AI; they’re stuck at the on-ramp. The barriers they identify are foundational. Firms that have not yet seen the results firsthand are understandably cautious, but this hesitation is not an indication of cultural resistance. For an industry betting on AI for credentialing and screening, the firms that can show a direct line from AI use to fill rate improvement, recruiter efficiency, or redeployment rates will unlock investment and win people over.

AI-ready leadership is one of the strongest predictors of revenue growth

Confidence and strategy at the top may be one of the strongest predictors of successful AI adoption and revenue performance. Among healthcare staffing leaders who feel ready to guide their firms through the AI transformation, 62% reported revenue growth in 2025, 3.4x the rate of those who don’t feel ready. And leaders who feel unprepared were three times more likely to report declining revenue. Within healthcare staffing, hesitation at the top and stagnation in the business often go hand in hand.

What do the top-performing firms have in common?

The healthcare staffing firms that grew revenue last year are not waiting for market conditions to improve. Instead, the top-performing healthcare staffing firms share common characteristics: they move faster, redeploy talent more effectively, and align their talent pools more precisely with market demand.

Firms with tailored talent strategies saw revenue growth

Healthcare firms that have the right jobs for their talent pool led the pack with 41% reporting revenue growth, followed closely by firms with a redeployment plan in place. For healthcare staffing, growth comes from moving beyond the standard playbook and working efficiently with your database to align job orders with the providers you actually have, while maintaining a plan to keep redeploying them.

What healthcare recruiters need: AI that handles the complexity so they can focus on the relationship

In healthcare staffing, AI is having its biggest impact on the most time-consuming tasks like screening candidates for specialty, credentials, and fit. But the benefit recruiters value most isn’t the time saved on these processes, but the additional time those hours create. Today, 40% of healthcare recruiters say AI is giving them more time to connect with clients and candidates.

Screening and sourcing: where the time goes, and where AI delivers

Forty-three percent of healthcare staffing firms say AI helps them identify better candidates faster and 42% say they’re screening more candidates overall. Just as important is where that saved time goes, with 40% reporting that they spend more time connecting with clients and candidates, the human work that actually closes placements. AI is amplifying recruiters, clearing the screening bottleneck and giving those hours back to relationships.

For healthcare talent, the biggest AI benefit is a process that moves

For talent working with AI-powered healthcare firms, the biggest advantage is speed. Thirty percent of healthcare firms say the biggest impact of AI on the talent experience is moving candidates through the process more quickly, almost twice as high as any other benefit. Another 18% say AI is ensuring candidates get a response to every application, eliminating the frustrating issue of candidates feeling like their applications disappear into a “black hole.” The firms winning with AI are the ones using it to shorten time to place and ensure no candidate is left waiting in silence.

Conclusion

Forty-two percent of healthcare staffing firms expect the economy to improve in 2026, while 41% expect conditions to stay roughly the same. In healthcare, AI is not a future investment, but an operational foundation that is increasingly setting market leaders apart from the rest of the industry. In 2026, the firms that succeed will be those that move beyond experimentation and deploy AI strategically to solve healthcare staffing’s defining challenge: identifying, qualifying, and placing the right clinician faster than anyone else.