In this candid and energetic TalentTrack panel, four industry leaders—Rich Smith (Atlas MedStaff), Miles Bennett (Coast Medical Service), Brad Baumer (Thrive Staffing), and Mark Zabludovsky (ARMStaffing)—share their hard-earned insights on how agencies can adapt, grow, and thrive in today’s evolving healthcare staffing market.
From post-COVID recruiting challenges and the rise of automation to tech burnout and the need for better recruiter training, this session delivers real talk, honest advice, and a healthy dose of humor. Whether you’re a staffing leader, recruiter, or agency exec, you’ll walk away with a sharper lens on balancing tech with human connection, and why empathy, speed, and focus still win.
Catch the full recording or scroll through the transcript to get the goods.
TalentTrack Session 2 Transcript
Carly Miller
Alright, welcome back, everyone, or welcome if you’re just now joining us for TalentTrack. We just wrapped up session one, which was an awesome deep dive into the state of the industry and what’s ahead. It was packed with insights. And if you missed it, don’t worry, there will be a recording available later. Now, I’m super pumped to kick off our next session, which is titled, “The Agency’s Survival Guide to a Changing Market.”
We’ve got a fantastic lineup of speakers today who collectively bring a wealth of experience in this field. So joining us today are Rich, Miles, Mark, and Brad. They are no strangers to the challenges and opportunities that we all face as an industry, and I can’t wait to hear their perspectives. To get us started, I’m going to pick on Rich. Rich is actually an alumni webinar speaker of ours, and we’re thrilled to have him back today for TalentTrack. But because of that, I am going to make him introduce himself first. So Rich, can you kick us off with a brief introduction?
Rich Smith
I am honored to be here. Thank you so much. Carly. Rich Smith, Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Atlas MedStaff. Atlas has been around for approximately 13 years now, predominantly travel nursing and travel allied.
Carly Miller
Perfect. Miles, you’re next on my screen. Do you want to introduce yourself next?
Miles Bennett
Absolutely. Thanks Carly. So I’m Miles Bennett, Vice President of Operations at Coast Medical Service. I’ve been with the company for eight years now, but Coast has been around since 1979. So we have been here for a long time. I built out our travel division with our president, Kenny, who spoke, I believe, in the last session. And my job, just to sort of put this into context, is pretty simple. Make sure the machine runs on time, faster, and smoother, and focus on systems and making sure our team is doing what we can.
Carly Miller
Great, thank you, Miles. Brad, do you wanna go next?
Brad Baumer
Yeah, hey everybody. Thanks, Carly, Oliver, and everybody at the TrackFive team for putting this together. I am our Recruiting Director here at Thrive Staffing. I’ve been in the contingent staffing world just over a decade now and like a lot of us, we started out as recruiters. I started out with a small mom-and-pop shop out of Cincinnati, Ohio. Shout out, Cinci, Ohio! And we grew into a pretty big player. I moved into a training and development role and like what Kenny and Holly spoke about the merger and acquisition, we ended up getting acquired by a big private equity firm. And after a few months and actually a few years, I ended up moving into more of my passion, which was the training and development role where I worked for Moxie Mentoring for a few years and working with recruiters for some of the largest agencies in the industry. And then I had an opportunity to train and coach hundreds, if not thousands, of recruiters, both state-side and offshore recruiters, many on the call right now, and really through that experience, learned a lot about the industry and more importantly, what doesn’t work in this industry. So I’m super excited to be on this call and be a part of this conversation.
Carly Miller
Awesome, thank you, Brad. Mark, I know you’re gonna make a joke about me saving the best for last, but will you finish us off with the intros?
Mark Zabludovsky
Damn. I was actually going to make a joke about us all getting in trouble before this session started. That was pretty funny. So my name is Mark Zabludovsky. I am Director of Recruitment at ARMStaffing. I’ve been with this company for 10 years. It’s been around for 15. We do travel nursing and allied, and have dabbled in other areas as well. I was actually a travel nurse, CVICU senior travel nurse for the agency for about four or five years. Had a business background, and then I was brought in to help train and hire and do everything and, you know, be the whisperer and talk to nurses and just do everything that we do. And, you know, shoutout to Rich and Miles. Rich, I used to look at Atlas MedStaff when I was a travel nurse because, you know, we’d see you out there and your blogs, of course, and you know, Coast as well. And shoutout to Brad for actually training one of my managers here, you know, with what he was talking about. But that’s my story. That’s who I am.
Carly Miller
Awesome. Thank you, everybody, for the introductions. We’ve got a great group here, and I think we’re ready to dive right into the questions for this session. We’re going to discuss some really pressing topics tailored to help agencies not just survive but thrive in today’s fast-changing market. So first up, we’ll start off with a foundational topic. We all know that COVID was a really interesting and, truthfully, unprecedented time for this industry, and navigating the aftermath of it has been really tricky for a lot of agencies.
I’m curious what advice would you give agencies still struggling to evolve their processes post-COVID? Whoever wants to start.
Brad Baumer
Yeah, I can start, guys. You know, what I would tell you is, if you’re still trying to get back to normal, you know, you’re already behind, right? Too many agencies are trying to recreate how things worked pre-pandemic or during the pandemic. And that’s just not the mindset that I would have. Our candidates have changed. Their expectations have changed. The industry has really moved forward. And we’re running into a little bit of a risk here, is what I’m seeing. Some agencies are now leaning too hard onto the automation side, and that just can’t alone fix everything. You know, there’s a time and place for it, of course, but at the heart of this business, we’re still people helping people at the end of the day. So you know, rather than building out endless automations, let’s start investing a bit more into our people. right? Invest in training your recruiters, you know, teach them how to build real relationships, how to listen, how to lead with empathy, how to deal with the inevitable conflict that our candidates are going to face while they’re on contract. Automations can speed up the process for sure, but it can’t replace the trust that these candidates have with us agencies. If your team isn’t equipped to build trust with our candidates, no tool is going to save you in doing that. The agencies that are going to win long term are the ones that are developing great recruiters, great advocates, not just great tech stacks. So really, if you can focus on rebuilding trust and training your people and really delivering that.
Miles Bennett
I love the sense of, you really need to reevaluate what is going on in your tech stack right now. And there’s two categories. There’s the front office stuff that you use and there’s the back office stuff. Back office stuff – that’s not going to impact the traveler experience quite as much. You put that into your stack because that’s going to impact your internal team and hopefully make their processes simpler. The front office stuff, you need to ask yourself, are you putting this into your tech stack because it’s streamlining your internal ops or because it’s improving the traveler experience? And if it isn’t improving the traveler experience, it probably shouldn’t be there. And so I think a lot of folks are throwing stuff out there because it makes it easier for them to talk to additional candidates, or they think it does. And that’s really not a good enough reason. It needs to improve the traveler experience.
Rich Smith
Yeah, sure. And mine’s easy. There was a question today in the comments to find normal. Normal is right now. Like the world that we’re living in right now is our normal. Maybe challenge yourself to replace, we have to get back to normal – we’re not getting back to normal – with back to basics. And like Brad had talked about, it’s that one-on-one communication where you can look through your tech stack, you can use AI agents. All these things are available to you, but none of it replaces the one-on-one contact and relationship that a recruiter has with a traveler. And it’ll make it easier, but in the end, nothing will replace that.
Mark Zabludovsky
Yeah, I’m going to touch on flexibility and speed on this one. I think that’s a huge thing. I think that things have changed with regard to – you need to build that relationship. Of course, you need to spend time getting to know that person. I was there. But I also need to know that as a traveler going to work at your agency, your recruiter is going to work their butt off to make sure that I’m getting submitted to that position and I’m getting the opportunity to get that job that I really want. And if there are tech stacks, or platforms that can help with the speed without sacrificing the relationship, those are the things that you want to be looking for. It’s massive. And I think we kind of went outside the scope of this question, but I will mention that recruiters need to know how to, I feel like it’s a taboo word, but recruiters need to know how to sell. It’s sales, what we do. Every conversation that we’re having is sales. Everything that you’re doing in your personal life, it’s sales. Talking to a significant other about what you’re going to have for dinner, it’s sales.
Right? So they may not realize it, but they need to read books, educate themselves, learn how to deal with negative situations. And if companies can assist in helping their recruiters get those skills, that’s going to go a long way in helping them evolve post-COVID. Because if you came in during COVID, you’re just taking orders. It was easy. So if you’re a recruiter right now and you didn’t have any experience in this industry prior to COVID, you’re probably wondering what the hell is going on. So you need to educate, you need to educate your teams, you need to educate yourself, and grow in your craft.
Carly Miller
Yeah, I love all of that. We talk a lot about the idea of that “COVID recruiter” and the order taker. So I like that you touched on that, getting back to kind of the basics of recruiting. So that leads into our next question, talking more about the changes in the industry. It’s no secret that this industry is always evolving, always changing. And it seems like agencies are tackling new challenges every day when it comes to adapting and bracing these changes head-on.
So I’m curious how each of you would say the rules of recruiting have evolved in the past few years? And what are the most significant drivers of these changes in healthcare staffing?
Miles Bennett
I can jump in on this one first. I think first and foremost, we need to understand the travelers and what they want, and the math that they have to do. When we were staffing five, four years ago, they were saying, should I leave my home and my family and my kid or my dog and go make three times what I can make out my staff job? It’s a lot easier to say yes to that than it is – should I leave my home and my family to make 10% more? Maybe. It’s a different question. And so I think what we’re seeing today is there’s an uptick in local. There’s a lot of folks that want to travel, but they don’t want to leave their home state. And so we need to know what clients will accept that type of nurse. They’re local. Live close to the hospital. Do you still want them? And those are clients that we tend to lean into. But I would also say that we need to know what they’re looking for beyond money. Maybe that person wants to move back to Boston because their mom’s getting surgery next month. And if we don’t know that, and we’re just looking at brass tacks, it’s hard for us to really help that person. So it starts with – we need to know the math that they’re actually doing. And we need to appreciate that. And then, second, we need to know why, beyond the money, they would like to find a new job. And if we can do those two things, and we know who they are, I think we have a better chance of actually placing them.
Carly Miller
Anyone else want to hop in there?
Brad Baumer
Yeah, I would just say, I don’t think the rules have changed. I think our role has changed as well. You know, I don’t think travelers need just another recruiter or just an order taker. I think again, like I said previously, they just need more advocates, right? It’s no longer just filling a job anymore. You know, like Miles said, you know, we’re helping people navigate their personal or professional life-changing decisions.
And a lot of these clinicians have been through some of the most incredible, difficult experiences over the last few years, my wife included, you know, as a healthcare professional. And they’re more aware now, they’re more selective now. And honestly, you know, they’re more cautious now, and they should be because you know, of what they’ve been through. So being an advocate for these candidates, you know, there are some tech agencies out there that, a couple of years ago, they said, we don’t have recruiters. And it’s like, yeah, you do. You just call them advocates. You just call them something differently.
And you know, and I love that. I thought that was such a good idea, you know, it’s being an advocate. It really means showing up when you don’t have something to sell, right, or a job to pitch. You know, here at Thrive, we coach on reciprocity, meaning how can you offer something of value to our candidates without asking for anything in return, right? It’s really, you know, that relationship doesn’t stop when a candidate gets booked somewhere else. It could be as simple as reaching out and asking them how their orientation is going, or how are they feeling about that assignment, or, hey Rich, check out that brewery in Seattle that I’ve been to before. They’ve got a great IPA, or, hey Mark, check out that barbecue joint in Austin. I took my kids there a few years back, and we got the turkey tips, or hey Miles, check out this hike in Phoenix that I’ve been on a couple of times when you get a weekend off. That’s how you build trust. Finding commonalities with them in the shared experiences that you have. Because at the heart of this, that’s how you evolve these relationships.
Rich Smith
Yeah, Brad stole my answer right there. I mean, the pandemic fundamentally changed healthcare and in turn, fundamentally changed healthcare workers across the board. Like it affected them in ways that I don’t think we still fully understand. And it affected us too as agencies as well. So leading with empathy, understanding what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, the reasons behind it. Every one of them has a different reason why and understanding those.
As much as I love technology, AI is never going to be able to tell you the real reason why that traveler is doing what they’re doing. You’re only going to get that from that one-on-one communication and understanding. Just like Brad said, that guy’s an IPA fan. He wants to go to these places. That guy’s a hiking fan. He wants to go to these places. And it would never be able to give them those. It might eventually. But right now, it’s not going to be able to give them those recommendations, like a real person with it understands who they are.
Miles Bennett
Yeah, It’s never been easier to build a very transactional relationship. There’s the chatbots and the AI and the this and the that. So the second you apply to a job, that nurse is getting 20 text messages from everybody. And that’s transactional. To your point, it’s the people that can actually connect with them, engage with them, remember previous conversations, call upon that the next time. Those are actual relationships.That’s who travelers would like to work with. Not the person who can get a text message to them right away as soon as they actually apply, and then keep this transactional relationship throughout the entire process. That’s not who they want to work with.
Mark Zabludovsky
Yeah, good that you touched on the platforms because that’s one of the major rises in how things are evolving is the different kinds of platforms, the different companies running those platforms. And everybody here touched on everything that I would say with the transactional versus engagement style of recruiting. I mean, you need to have that speed like I touched on before, but you’ve also got to build that relationship while you’re working your butt off to get them in there quickly. So, I think you guys all covered pretty much everything on this one.
I mean, things are changing, but things are the same as well. It’s funny. I’ll tell you, I popped some of these questions into AI just to get some ideas so I could prep for this thing. And on this one specifically, it talks about what has evolved over the past few years. And here’s the five things that it came out with. Clinician control has surged, speed and personalization, burnout and mental health awareness, social proof matters more. And I’m sitting there reading these things, and I’m like, it’s always mattered.
That has always mattered. We have always had an issue with the mental health awareness with the nurses. Social proof has always been a thing. Atlas knows that. Speed and personalization always matter. And then clinician control. Maybe that has surged a bit because of these platforms, but they’ve always had the control. They may not have known it. They may not have had a recruiter that should let them know that, but I think things have evolved, but they haven’t changed. They’re just going back to what they were before. And again, touching on the things we mentioned before for the recruiters like you might just not have been here during that. So it’s a shift back with the speed of the technology and things of that nature. So that’s what I got.
Carly Miller
Thank you. I love all of those answers. Brad, I especially love that quote. “Our rules have not changed, but our roles have changed.” I think that ties it all up in a bow. I mean, you have to remember that your candidate is a person. And like you said, you’re finding them a job. Moving to a new career is a big deal for anybody, and you’re on the other end of that. So, and like Rich said, leading with that empathy is super important. I’m actually going to hop around on our questions a little bit here to our speakers, because I think that this leads into the next question, because we brought up AI and tech. And yes, innovation is awesome. And we have access to so many tech platforms, but sometimes the newest, shiniest strategies aren’t the right fit for every agency. And they can actually hinder your practices. It’s easy to get caught up in the trends and all of the new tech and lose sight of the practices that have consistently delivered results over time. So my next question for you guys is, how can healthcare staffing agencies balance that need for innovation with sticking to foundational practices that still work?
Mark Zabludovsky
Don’t go all in on every single platform that you see the moment you see it. I think all of us – I would imagine all of us on this session right now are potentially guilty of taking five demos at a time. We’re literally in the middle of it right now. And we’ve had to kind of take a step back and say, well, which one is going to be the most important, or which two are going to be the most important for both helping the nurse but also helping our recruiter focus on the nurse that needs the most help or can be helped the most. And I think that is where we are with that right now. I’ll let somebody else jump in.
Rich Smith
Mine’s easy. Like, don’t be, like Mark said, taking those demos is fine. I’m not, I’m not scared to take those demos when they come up, but turn your bullshit meter way up on that. Right? And really understand not only what they’re selling, but how they’re selling it. Like it’s just that easy. There are lots of shiny objects. I was just at Engage in Boston and there was, there were rows of vendors there. A lot of them are my friends, but then a lot of them too are selling products that just overlap.
And they’re just, some of them aren’t necessary right now. Some of them just, they just aren’t. Take those calls, but like I said, turn it up and really understand what you’re getting out of that product.
Miles Bennett
Yeah, I completely agree with that. I think very similar to what we saw during COVID. There were a lot of cash grab COVID companies that popped up and they’re like, we’re in healthcare staffing now. It’s like, you’re not, you’re gonna do this for a couple of years, you’re gonna burn out and you’re gonna lose and they’re losing now. And in the machine learning tech space right now, we’re seeing that as well. All these cash grab, we built a chatbot no, no you didn’t. You just put ChatGPT in a new brand and called it a chatbot. And if one person, if one more person tries to pitch me, this is the best new chatbot, my head is going to explode. If I do not take chatbot calls at this point. I’m like, if you’re trying to sell me a chatbot, I do not want to hear from you at all. It’s just not where our time, I believe, should be focused. Tech should multiply your team, not replace the humanity that your team has. And it needs to enable them to build stronger relationships. It is not meant to replace the relationship building process. And so many of these chat bots are trying to do that and it’s just not going to work for them. My favorite one is the voice ones that you can, they will call the nurse for you. Here’s, here’s what I say. Somebody told me this eight years ago when I started, think about a nurse. They have 12 hours a day. They’re working.
Eight hours a day they’re asleep and you’re trying to contact them during the four hours in their day that they have to manage and run and enjoy the rest of their life. If an AI bot calls them, how do you think they’re going to feel? Like they’re valued? Like, you know that those are the four hours that they get in their day or that they’re just another number, probably like a number, right? So to us, the voice stuff that there is, that’s a non-starter for us.
On the chatbot stuff, I mean, it would need to be really good. And I just haven’t seen one.
Brad Baumer
Yeah, I just want to piggyback off of what Oliver had put in the comments here. He had said the CEO told him platforms breed lazy recruiters. And that’s a lot of demos that I’ve seen was just creating bad habits for these young recruiters coming into the industry. Like get a notification when your candidate matches to a job. It’s like, shouldn’t you be talking to your candidates and looking in your system all day? Like that’s my job. And it just creates a lot of bad habits that I’ve seen with young recruiters in the industry, even experienced recruiters that I’ve seen.
Mark Zabludovsky
I’m going to buck the trend on this one on that a little bit though and say, if you’ve got 50 to 100 candidates sitting in your pending list or in your whichever terminology you guys use, having something that could potentially show them, it all depends on the ATS or whatever system you’ve got going as well, right? I mean, so not to completely shit on the stacks that are out there, but if there are ones that can bring the important people, every nurse is important, but you know guys, what I’m talking about there. If there are platforms out there that can help the recruiters focus on the people that are ready to go, maybe bring those jobs front and center versus having to go into each different profile. If we can cut an hour and a half of time off of a recruiter’s desk each day and just put things in front of their face, I think those situations – you will never replace the empathy. You will never replace the engagement. You will never replace the need to train recruiters, the need for them to learn and to hone their skills, but you can help make them more efficient. And I think that’s the key there is there’s a difference in that.
Rich Smith
There’s a balance. There’s a balance to it.
Mark Zabludovsky
Balance is the key word.
Rich Smith
Yeah, absolutely. This is fun and this may have nothing to do with anything here, but as you’re taking those demos, especially with the voice agents, because there’s a ton of them out there right now, see if you can get them to go sideways. If they can’t understand the difference between an ICU nurse and an ER nurse or a lab tech and an X-ray tech, if they can’t understand that, that’s your first red flag. The second red flag is as you’re going through that demo and you’re talking to that AI agent, see if you can order a pizza. Get it off track. And there has been one before. There was one, and I won’t name names, but as I was talking to it, I was the nurse, right? As if I was filling out that application. I said, well, I want to go to Seattle. Great. What do you like about Seattle? I love pizza. Okay, that’s great. I’m like, could you order me a pizza from the best place in Seattle? And it paused for a second and it said, yeah, there’s these three pizza places. Which one would you like to choose from? And it just instantly went sideways. That’s not built for our industry. That’s not built for what we want to do. So just be selective and find that balance that works for you.
Miles Bennett
And I don’t want to get overly technical here, but I think one of the issues right now with all the chatbots that are out there is their AI is relying on, at best, structured fields. It does not do a very good job in terms of generative AI from a large language model that can read and interpret unstructured fields. So what I mean by that is if you talk to somebody via text message and they say, hey, you know, I’m not looking right now. My mom’s having surgery in two months, but reach back out to me in November. Okay. Sounds good. So for starters, hopefully we’re all acknowledging that this person is a future pending candidate. This is somebody that we don’t want the team to text blast a lot. We want to manage that relationship until November. So they sort of sit in this future pending list where we’re going to want to engage them throughout the next four or five months and hopefully place them down the line. Great. If you engage chatbots that are out there right now to re-engage with that person, it’s going to look and it’s going to see they’re available in November. They’re an ICU nurse and it’s going to reach back out and say, I see you’re available in November. Have you thought about starting a contract now? Like, no, that’s terrible. They should reach out and say, how’s your mom’s surgery? That’s the reach out. So until the chatbot can do that, it’s useless.
Carly Miller
Yeah, I love that. Somebody wrote in the chat, nurses work with people, they work to help people. So they respond best to people. And I think that that is just something we should always remember. And we don’t like to talk to chatbots. Like when I get a phone call and it’s an AI, I get so frustrated. So we have to know that the nurses feel the same. But I like what we brought up about balance, because while tech can never replace the human side of the recruiter, it certainly can help with certain tasks. So my next question for you is how can agencies identify when tech solutions are helping and really working versus when they’re hindering their efforts? It’s easy to fall into the trap of using tech for the sake of it, like we mentioned, but how do you evaluate if it’s actually solving problems for your recruitment teams?
Rich Smith
When someone repeats it back to you. When one of your travelers repeats it back to you for something that they maybe wouldn’t know otherwise. And I’ll give Adam Conrad a lot of credit here. Great Recruiters is a great piece that we have as part of our tech stack right now. We’ve had multiple calls come in. I saw that recruiter on Great Recruiters. I want to talk to Christie. I want to talk to Adam. When they repeat that back to you, something that only generally we should know, they’re utilizing that technology, that piece, without getting in touch with us first, finding out what they need to know, and then making that first call. That’s a very warm lead when it gets to them right there. So if they’re repeating that back to you, you know you found something that works.
Mark Zabludovsky
I’ll shout out Staffing Referrals. I’ll even shout them out when we’re not working with them right now. But it is one of the demos that we have been looking at again. We used to work with them, I think, three or four years ago. We took a little time away from them. But it was great because from the nurse’s perspective, they had their own dashboard. They had a place to go and see anybody that they referred and see how far along they were in that process, and see when am I going to get my placement, when am I going to get my bonus. To touch on what Rich said, something that’s working for the candidate, something that is working for the nurse or the allied professional, if they can appreciate it and it helps them out, if it helps them help us, I think that brings high value.
Carly Miller
Yeah, love it. We talked a lot about recruiter training, so I’m also going to throw in another question that I didn’t send to you guys earlier, but I think that you all are very well-versed to speak on it. We know the importance of having strong recruiters, so I’d like to know from your perspective, how can agencies better support their recruitment teams so that they have the skills and tools that they need to successfully recruit candidates and build those relationships?
Miles Bennett
Number one, and I think this is a little different than the question that you asked, but I think where a lot of teams struggled, especially coming out of COVID is transparency. What are the numbers we need them to hit and when? And if you can’t ask any recruiter on your team what that is and where they stand and they can’t give you an answer, that’s a huge problem. And so it starts with that, and you’re going to support them so they can achieve those things, and they can reach every benchmark as it comes up. But until there’s a very transparent program where they should be and when, it’s very, very difficult to measure anything else.
Brad Baumer
Yeah, tell me how I’m evaluated. I’m going to tell you how I’m going to perform. Right. That’s one of my favorite quotes. When I talk to recruiters, it’s, you know, why did you leave this agency? Well, I didn’t know how I was evaluated, you know, or I didn’t feel valued. Those are usually the two that I hear the most. And then when I’m in training recruiters, it’s like, why do I have to make 500 calls a week? Or why do I have to make 200 calls a week? And it’s like, well, this is what people before you did. And this is why they were successful in doing it. So you truly have a blueprint to success. So I think Miles is on point, just really pushing, you know, the why behind what you’re training and the rubric to the test, right? I loved that in school because it told me what the questions were going to be, and it helped me prepare. So it’s the same thing in our roles as recruiters or agencies.
Rich Smith
Yeah, just listen to them and eliminate the roadblocks that are in front of them, right? Make it as easy as possible for them to connect with that clinician, the end user in the hospital. Eliminate any of those roadblocks they have in front of them.
Mark Zabludovksy
If you’re training any recruiters, whether you’ve been doing this a long time or not, training isn’t two or six weeks or eight weeks or 12 weeks. Training is ongoing. It’s nonstop. It’s mentoring. It’s backing them up. It’s letting them know that they can come to you and ask you a question anytime they have one, regardless of the face that you might make because you’re having a bad day. It’s being transparent with them with that and letting them know that this is not a three, six, nine months you’re successful. This is a one, two, five-year, and then beyond career and having them understand. And I even, I had this conversation during interviews as well. This is not a job. This is a career. You’re not gonna get into this. Patrick Bette David has a video on why 75% of salespeople fail within the first year. If you’re going into something as a recruiter to try it out, don’t. You know what I mean? You’ve gotta be ready to commit to this. And we as leaders and we as trainers and directors, in whatever role you want to call it, mentors, leaders, we’ve got to remember that they are going to need us to back them up and it’s not their fault. They can be at fault for things, but if we don’t give them the support that they need, they will fail.
Carly Miller
I appreciate those answers. Thank you. We are nearing the end of our set questions for the session, and I’m hoping to have some time to get to some of these questions in the audience. But I have one more question to close with, and it’s kind of a forward-looking topic. It’s more of a big picture question, and I’m excited to hear your thoughts on where we’re headed. We heard a little bit from Holly and Kenny in the previous session about where the industry is headed and how agencies can position themselves for long-term success. So what trends do you see shaping the future of healthcare staffing? And how can agencies prepare to stay ahead?
Rich Smith
You can go in two different directions here right now. You can go with as much technology as possible and go that way. You can go with as much of the human touches as you want. And I think what’s going to win in the end, what is going to come back to the surface is, like we’ve all talked about here, is that human connection. And that is going to win. I will bet all 21 years of my career in healthcare staffing on that because I’ve never seen a tech play even now that has shown to be better than the people that are doing it.
Miles Bennett
I agree with that take. You can’t ignore the tech that’s happening right now and how quickly it’s evolving. That would be a mistake, right? We need to become a tech-enabled service company. And if we can do that and we can maintain relationships throughout, I think we will win. However, I’ll add something we didn’t talk about quite as much, which is on the client side, we need to start saying no. I think for a long time we were taking every job order we could get and throwing it in. That’s not the strategy. Just as some of our VMS partners tier us, you should tier them. Where are you converting? Where are you getting feedback? Where are your candidates extended? Where can you milk the most lifetime value? And if those aren’t numbers that you’re looking at, you need to know where you can get high lifetime value and conversions and where you can’t, and you need to say no to the ones that you can’t. And taking a hyper-focused approach on the client side with a tech-enabled service on the candidate side, I think we’ll win.
Mark Zabludovsky
Mic drop.
Carly Miller
Mic drop? I like that.
Mark Zabludovsky
I’ll layer onto that. Speed, it’s been what we’ve been talking about this entire session. Speed and engagement. I mean, that’s how you’re going to win on it. Being able to build those relationships, staying focused on that while also doing the right job for your candidate to make sure that they get the job they want, like I said before, that is so important to them. And then on the flip side, being able to, if that job is closed, which feels like it always is, right? If that job is closed, having the ability to think outside the box and present them other options where this cost was lower than that one. So it winds up being a wash. I mean, I’m not going to, I could jump into a thousand different scenarios there or different situations, but you get my point there. Being able to, I forget who mentioned it earlier, but being able to do math. I mean, who doesn’t love some money math? If you can’t have that conversation with them where you break down, not just what they’re making per week, but what they’re making per month or for the entire life of the contract. Somebody actually, somebody asked in one of the questions, I think in the last group, I think it was Letitia. She had mentioned, I even wrote it down. She had mentioned something along the lines of, kill me, I’m going to make us pause right now. What do you say to the nurses that are going staff for sign-on bonuses because rates are low right now, or they’re deciding to go staff instead? So I wonder if recruiters have actually broken down the difference between the staff pay on that assignment versus what their travel pay would be, figuring out what the difference is for every week, multiplying that over the three months, right? And seeing what the actual difference is between that staff position and what they can make on the assignment, and that bonus coming into play as well. I remember when I first started out, I had nurses saying, well, if I leave my staff position early, I’m gonna have to pay back three months on my bonus. And running the numbers, like sometimes it’s just worth it because over a certain period of time, if they’ll wait a year before that is done, within three months, they could have had that money back and then been free and clear from that moving forward to make that additional money for the rest of the year. Without going down a rabbit hole here, I think it’s it’s understanding the numbers and being able to help our candidates understand that as well.
Brad Baumer
And I would just add this one thing too. This is still a relationship business. Don’t ever forget that. Nurses talk, allied professionals talk, word travels fast. You know, this is a small community as big as it feels. You know, these agencies and recruiters who truly listen, who are advocates for their clinicians, they’re gonna win. They always will, not just today, but long-term.
Rich Smith
Yeah, I wrote this down years ago was the court of public opinion is swift and it’s brutal. Do not get caught on that wrong side, right? Train from the very beginning, this is how we do it, and you’ll be fine.
Carly Miller
Yeah, I love that. Thank you, guys. We just have a little under three minutes left. So unfortunately, we don’t have time for audience questions. But if you’ve asked a question in the chat already, don’t worry. We will be saving all of those. And then I’m going to send those questions to our speakers after the event. Get some written responses from them so that none of your questions will be left unanswered, because I’m sure that this panel has so much more they could share, but I have confined them to 40 minutes. So that’s my bad. But thank you again, all of you, for sharing your expertise. This has been a really fun panel. So many good quotes and messages to take from here. We’re going to take another five-minute break before session three, where we’ll be diving into social media recruiting, which is going to be really exciting. So go ahead, grab a coffee, a stretch, or like earlier, the chat will be open during the break. So feel free to network and talk. But thank you guys for joining.
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