Reen Eiswert

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. She still credits that friend. "I still thank her every single day for introducing me into this avenue," she says. 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.

The Leaders Who Built the Leader

Eiswert is generous and specific about who shaped her, and she still speaks with most of them week to week. Terry Weller, a registered nurse and one of the founders of Chesapeake Medical Staffing, taught her that a company can be run like a family without going soft on growth. "She always made you feel like family," Eiswert says of the woman she calls one of the most genuine people she has ever met, and who she believes still consults for the business, now American Medical Staffing.

Dave Meyers interviewed and hired her, and the two hour conversation that resulted became her template for what an interview should feel like: conversational, human, not rudimentary. About a year in, when Weller and her partner Jeff sold the company to private equity, a new president arrived. Missy Blankenship met a young, resistant, still forming leader and told her the truth. "You're a leader of this team, and you're not acting like a leader of this team." Eiswert was frustrated first and accountable second, and she has thanked Blankenship for that conversation ever since. It also earned her her first real leadership opportunity.

What she took from Blankenship, now a CEO in home health, was a style she consciously copies. "She would lead with empathy," Eiswert says. "She would never sugarcoat it, but she would empathize with me." Eiswert, who freely admits she has no poker face and wears her feelings on her sleeve, watched her closely because she had decided this was the woman she wanted to become. Blankenship then brought in Brandon Waner, who took Eiswert under his wing and helped her grow. Between the two of them, she says, her leadership career was shaped.

There is one more name on the list. Through a newborn, a full time degree, and a brand new career happening simultaneously, her husband was the support that made it possible. "That man got me through everything," she says. "He was my support, my rock system."

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.