How Incredible Health built a two-sided marketplace for healthcare hiring

Executive overview

Healthcare has a massive hiring problem: workers apply to ten jobs and hear nothing back, while hospital recruiters struggle to fill hundreds of nursing roles with outdated job boards. Iman Abuzeid flipped the model — employers apply to candidates, not the other way around.

Incredible Health pairs vertical focus, automated matching, and geographic discipline to create a marketplace that now serves over 1 million nurses and 1,500 hospitals.

The core insight: in a shortage market, making talent passive and employers active transforms the experience for both sides.

From failed startup to market opportunity

• First company, Lift League, helped small healthcare businesses retain clients — but owners cared more about acquisition than retention
• Pivoted after one year using a structured ideation framework: market size, competition, unique insight — all three must clear the bar before going deep
• Healthcare is the largest US labor industry (1 in 8 Americans); demand keeps growing while supply lags, making job boards — technology from 20+ years ago — dangerously inadequate
• Nurses reported applying to ten places and rarely hearing back; hospital recruiters had one person trying to fill a hundred nursing roles simultaneously
• Two distinct 10x improvements identified: flip the application direction, and automate screening and matching at scale

Building the two-sided marketplace

• Stayed geographically constrained to Bay Area and LA for the first two years — essential for balancing supply and demand with a sub-10-person team
• First employer (HCA) landed via cold calling; first contact was a recruiter named Gloria who escalated to her manager
• Early health systems treated as development partners — end users shaped workflow; executives shaped reporting and ROI framing
• Raised a $2M seed before expanding; Series A of $15M triggered by strong metrics, not investor pressure
• Expansion beyond California was pulled by existing customers asking when their other markets would be covered

Business model and competitive moat

• Employers pay; healthcare workers get the platform free — including continuing education, salary estimators, career coaching, and a peer community
• Average time-to-hire: 20 days; each hospital saves at least $5M per year by reducing temporary labor and overtime costs
• Vertical focus beats horizontal platforms (LinkedIn, ZipRecruiter) because healthcare requires license and certification tracking that generic tools don't support
• Healthcare workers describe it as the best job search experience of their career; thousands of five-star reviews across Google, Facebook, and the App Store

Scaling and what comes next

• Now: 1 million+ nurses, 1,500+ hospitals including HCA, Ascension, Trinity, NYU, and Cedars-Sinai
• Expanding into more healthcare worker categories (technicians, technologists) and more employer types
• Addressing the nursing shortage requires fixing two bottlenecks: nursing school wait lists (tens of thousands turned away) and lack of post-graduation training programs
• Already providing continuing education in-app; AI-powered training (e.g., Stepful model) seen as a key lever
• CEO still listens to customer call recordings regularly; customer obsession is the company's stated top value and required of every team, not just product

Hiring best practices

• Move candidates through the process fast — ghosting and unclear next steps kill pipelines
• Define must-haves versus nice-to-haves explicitly; over-specified criteria choke funnels
• Set clear internal timelines: phone screen, hiring manager interview, offer — days not weeks