Tracee Thomson

A Career That Started in the Clinical Trenches

Thomson did not arrive at talent through an HR department. She started in her twenties working directly with physicians in radiology and radiation oncology at a national practice management company, learning the specialties, the economics and the temperament of clinical practice from the inside. That grounding shaped everything that followed. She understood physicians as professionals with particular pressures long before she was ever asked to persuade one to change jobs.

This April marks 10 years at Catholic Health. She was hired originally to build the health system's IPA network, work that put her out in the field rather than behind a requisition queue. Almost five years ago, leadership asked her to take on direct hire and acquisitions with a specific mandate: bring more quality providers into Catholic Health. The result is a career with unusual range, combining field-facing alignment work with hands-on recruiting to fill positions across the system's ambulatory network.

Physicians as Partners in Recruitment

Asked to name the recruiting leaders who shaped her, Thomson offered a candid answer that says a good deal about how her corner of the profession actually works. She has not spent her career shoulder to shoulder with talent recruiters. Her collaborators have been clinicians.

At Catholic Health, physicians are active participants in recruitment rather than passive interviewers. It is a model that reflects the reality of the specialty: a physician evaluating another physician's clinical background brings a form of judgment no scorecard replicates, and a candidate weighing a move is more persuaded by a future colleague than by a pitch. Thomson's role is to build the process that lets both sides see each other clearly.

The Machine-Written CV Problem

The most immediate way artificial intelligence has landed on Thomson's desk is not a tool. It is a document. Her team has reached the stage where they can recognize CVs that have been crafted by AI, and she is clear-eyed about the complication that introduces.

In physician hiring, the stakes of that shift are different than in most sectors. Thomson's team is not only vetting clinical experience, it is vetting clinical appropriateness, the question of whether this particular physician fits this particular need. A polished, machine-smoothed CV makes that harder to assess, and she expects it to keep getting harder. Her response has been to scale the review process accordingly, so that the background her team assembles and presents to clinical leadership remains trustworthy.

On the technology itself, Thomson is pragmatic about where she sits. Catholic Health has AI plans for growth and development, driven at the CIO level in a system of considerable size and complexity. "It hasn't reached my level yet," she says. "It certainly will at some point." She is not first in line, and she does not pretend otherwise. What she is doing in the meantime is protecting the quality of the human judgment that still determines who gets hired.

The Case for Treating Every Candidate Well

Ask Thomson what advice she would give talent leaders heading into 2026 and she does not reach for a technology answer. She reaches for the candidate.

Her single biggest piece of counsel is to be cognizant of the candidate's experience while they are in the process, and to keep communicating with physicians even when they are not the right fit at that moment. That practice is not sentiment. It is strategy, and she has the data to defend it: the 20 percent return rate she has observed over the past two years among candidates who declined Catholic Health or were declined by it. Those relationships matter, she says, because a physician who cannot make a transition today may well be ready later. Recruiting at this level is a timing play, for the candidate and for the health system alike.

The standard she sets is simple and unusually demanding. A candidate should leave the process feeling the best possible way they can about Catholic Health, and should be able to call the experience a positive one even if it produced no immediate job. In an era when hiring is increasingly mediated by software, Thomson's argument is that the durable advantage still belongs to the institution people remember warmly.