Reen Eiswert
ATC Healthcare Services
“When I'm succeeding, I want everybody else around me to succeed as well.”
Reen Eiswert has been named to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, the annual award recognizing up to 100 of the most exceptional leaders and practitioners in each category of talent acquisition. Honorees are selected by the Talent 100 committee from thousands of nominations and candidates across the industry, chosen for the impact of their work, the depth of their craft, and their influence on the future of recruiting. This is Reen's story.
Reen Eiswert was four weeks postpartum when she sat down for a two hour job interview at a small Baltimore area staffing agency called Chesapeake Medical Staffing. She had a newborn at home, a full time college course load, and a hunch about an industry she had only heard about through a friend of her husband's. That conversation, more discussion than interrogation, launched a career that has taken her into senior leadership in one of the most competitive corners of recruiting: healthcare staffing.
Today, as Director of Recruiting at ATC Healthcare Services, after a stint leading staffing at RightPro Staffing, Eiswert leads the function that puts clinicians into hospitals, and she is unusually clear about why that matters. "We're taking care of nurses and people that take care of people at the end of the day," she says. It is a sentence that explains almost everything about how she runs a recruiting organization.
From Patient Sitter to Recruiter
Her introduction to healthcare came early. At 17, just out of high school and looking for work to carry her through college, Eiswert took a job in a hospital as a patient sitter, spending one on one time at the bedside. She soon added a second function, working in insurance and billing, essentially holding a dual role inside the same institution. She stepped away to focus on school and came back to the workforce in her mid twenties, at a moment when she was going back to college, working full time, and pregnant, all at once.
It was during that stretch that a friend of her husband's mentioned healthcare staffing. Eiswert was 24, intrigued, and willing to take an interview. The hospital background turned out to be a far better bridge than anyone expected. Chasing insurance companies for payment and chasing candidates for a start date, she discovered, run on the same engine. "Recruiting is all about follow up work at the end of the day."
She started as a recruiter and moved fast. What she remembers most is not the promotions but the feeling: the genuine spike of adrenaline every time a contract closed and a clinician got booked on a job. Where some recruiters manage a polite cheer, Eiswert was fully invested, in the candidate and in the win. She fell for the clinicians, she says, and she fell for the chase.
Multiplying, Not Just Producing
The pivot from top producer to leader happened almost by accident, and it happened because of an instinct she has carried since. Not long into her first recruiting job, Eiswert got the chance to bring someone in and train and develop them, and she found her passion in the process. She had not set out to take a step up. Looking back, she calls it a refreshing bump in her career that she did not realize she was taking at the time.
That instinct now defines how she operates at scale. Her stated mentality is simple: when she is succeeding, she wants everyone around her succeeding too. In an industry where individual production is easy to measure and easy to hoard, that is a deliberate choice.
AI as Accelerator, Never as Recruiter
Eiswert reads constantly and makes a point of staying current with every new technology coming on board, and she has thought carefully about where automation belongs in a business built on trust. At ATC Healthcare Services, she is bringing on new AI powered technology, with clear boundaries. AI cleans up databases and ensures complete candidate records. It builds profiles faster. It matches candidates to jobs faster. In healthcare staffing, where the work is fast paced and fiercely competitive in a way permanent placement recruiting simply is not, speed is the whole game, and she views AI as the most credible source of it.
What AI does not get is the phone call. "It can't hear any hesitation on the phone," she says, and it cannot pick up the quiet concern a clinician lets slip before accepting an assignment. Her position is that the two must be partnered, with automation deployed strategically so that it never displaces the recruiter. Her recruiters will still be the ones placing candidates, building relationships, and getting to know the people they place. As she frames it, this remains a people business first and foremost, because the people being placed are walking into hospitals to care for patients.
Eiswert is also refreshingly candid about the pace of change. At 35, she says, she never expected to be the one marveling at new technology the way a child watches a grandparent puzzle over a phone. Her comfort comes from a simple observation: it is new to everyone. "We're kind of at the same boat," she says. That combination, urgency about the tools and clarity about what they can never replace, is why the clinicians ATC places still get a human voice on the other end of the line.
The Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than Reen. We are honored to welcome Reen Eiswert to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, Reen. Welcome to the Talent 100.
About the Talent 100
The Talent 100 is an annual list spotlighting the leaders who push HR and talent acquisition forward, organized by Noon AI. Honorees are selected through peer nominations and independent selection committees. Selection is entirely merit-based, with no fees or pay-to-play requirements.
