In Session 4 of TalentTrack, “Job Board Confessional: What We Wish Our Clients Knew,” industry veterans (and friendly competitors) Oliver Feakins of TravelNurseSource and Youssef Eid of Vetted sit down for an unfiltered conversation about what agencies get right—and wrong—when working with job boards. This session feels like a live episode of their Placement Playbook podcast, packed with sharp insights, hot takes, and actionable advice.
From data hygiene issues and recruiter burnout to unrealistic expectations and ghosting nurses, no topic is off the table. Whether you’re a large agency, a startup, or somewhere in between, this conversation delivers honest, practical perspectives on navigating the post-COVID staffing landscape and building stronger agency-job board partnerships.
Watch the session below or dive into the full transcript for all the confessions and takeaways.
TalentTrack Session 4 Transcript
Carly Miller
Hi everybody, welcome if you’re just now tuning in, or welcome back if you’ve been with us for a while. We just wrapped up session three of TalentTrack, which was such a great conversation all about social media recruiting. A huge thank you again to Mikayla, Travis, Brianna, and Nick for sharing their expertise. Now I’m super pumped to get into our next session, which is titled, Job Board Confessional: What We Wish Our Clients Knew. Ooh, it’s a little dramatic. For this session, we are joined by Oliver and Youssef. And I have to say, I am honored to be sharing this screen with the two of you. It really feels like I’m a part of the Placement Playbook podcast.
Oliver Feakins
There you go. Anytime, Carly.
Carly Miller
Yes. Thanks. For those of you in the audience who don’t know, Oliver and Youssef are actually business competitors, but they’ve built such a great collaborative relationship. So much so that they started a podcast together called the Placement Playbook. You can definitely check out those clips on LinkedIn, but it’s exciting. It feels like we’re at a live podcast recording, and I’m like the weird fan who jumps on the stage, but I’m excited to turn it over to Oliver and Youssef so they can quickly introduce themselves before we jump into these questions.
Oliver Feakins
Cool, Youssef, you go first, man.
Youssef Eid
Sure, yeah, I’m Youssef, I’m the founder of Vetted. So we came onto this space probably five years ago or so. I’ve been in the industry maybe 10 years. So we’re a marketplace. We compete friendly with Oliver and his team, but we basically work with a bunch of different healthcare staffing companies to send them nurses that exist in our marketplace.
Oliver Feakins
You guys know us, TravelNurseSource, AlliedTravelCareers, LocumJobsOnline, a couple other verticals as well. So happy to be here, and yeah, happy to wrap it up with Youssef over here at Vetted. It’s gonna be some good choppin’, you know? So it’s gonna be good. Chop it up.
Carly Miller
Thanks, guys, for those introductions. I’m really excited for this session. Both of you have a wealth of shared experience in this industry, and I think it’s important for agencies and job boards to kind of learn from each other. We both see different sides of the industry, but when we come together, there’s a lot we can share and take away from one another. So that leads into our first question, which is, what’s one surprising thing you’ve each learned about staffing agencies over the past year?
Youssef Eid
I can maybe start. I think the most surprising thing that I actually saw at NATHO this last year was there’s a lot of roll-ups and mergers. So I think a lot of staffing companies are noticing that they can’t, they don’t have as much leverage individually as they could as a unit with other staffing companies. So, even recently we saw that with TotalMed and Travel Nurse Across America, them merging to create more leverage in the industry. That basically just boosts their job supply. They can unify their ATSs, they can unify their clinician database, and then they can also combine the best tactics that have worked for each agency. You also see this with smaller staffing companies doing roll-ups and merging together to form a larger entity. So you might notice a small staffing company that has 15 to 20 million dollars per year in revenue, and what they’ll do is they’ll roll up with five or six other staffing companies to create that leverage so they get more job supply from the VMSs and MSPs because then they’re considered a medium-sized player. So a lot of these staffing companies that are smaller, that are maybe not getting access to large job supply and not feeling like they have the leverage to negotiate with VMSs and MSPs, they’ll combine so that they do have the leverage and can operate at a larger scale.
Oliver Feakins
Yeah, I would say also the business development side of that, right? Like a lot of these agencies are banding together for their access to single-serving contracts, and kind of putting them together. And doing kind of more with less as well, but that is true. I would say, so in the last year or so, we’ve been really diving into data with our clients. And really extrapolating data from them, you know, with their permission, and rolling it through our platform and merging everything together. And it’s given us a really interesting perspective on how our clients kind of judge us or their marketing tools and services. I think the overarching headline that we’ve came away with is that, and this is no surprise to agencies, is that their data is very much not correct, right? It’s not. And they all are partly convinced that it is, or as good as it’s going to be, but the other half knows it’s not correct. But as we’ve been washing this data through, we’re looking at
this data that’s not accurate. It really plays to a strategic conversation about how their agency utilizes inbound leads or candidate leads or how they recruit. The data tells a story. And if that story is based on incorrect data, the strategic conversations and decisions that the agencies are making are different as well. And we’ve seen dramatically different needs from doing this data. So it was really eye-opening. And sometimes it’s not even wrong. Like we’ve made this mistake, and we’re misattributing. That is part of it. But some of it is just, there’s so many things hitting the HR tech stack, which are changing data. There’s so many layers in the HR tech stack. You think of things like Staffing Engine, Sense, you know, all these different analytics modules, like everything is coming in and touching this data. And the data hygiene component is just a really big issue right now. And I think it’s only going to get worse.
Carly Miller
Awesome. Thank you both. As job board owners, you guys get to interact with all kinds of agencies, from the big players to the underdogs and everything in between. And with that perspective, you get the chance to see a wide range of what works and what doesn’t. So, in your opinion, and from what you’ve seen, what will the smartest agencies be doing 12 months from now that others won’t?
Youssef Eid
I think touching on what Oliver was saying, the smartest agencies that we see, they’re centralizing their data to get more intent data inside of their ATS. They’re getting cleaner on their attribution model to know what is the true source of placements. And they’re fine-tuning automations using SMS and emails to make sure that candidates are getting contacted promptly whenever somebody applies to a job. Even things like scoring candidates so that the highest-urgency, highest-intent candidates are being pushed through the process faster. So knowing which jobs are likeliest to convert, allocating resources efficiently so that recruiter time is spent on the right candidates, the ones that are most likely to convert. Because recruiter time is a real asset. So where you’re allocating that attention and that resource is super important. So if a lot of recruiters are contacting leads, who are maybe CNAs, low margin positions, or unlikely to place positions. That’s just a waste of recruiter time. And what we’ve seen is that staffing companies are getting leaner. So that means recruiter time is becoming more scarce. So recruiters need to spend time on the most likely to convert candidates and the most likely to convert job supply as well.
Oliver Feakins
Yeah, and I would kind of build off that a little bit. And I think some of the biggest opportunity across the board here is this realignment of perception of timeframe and kind of recruiter style. So like where I’m going with this is, you know, a lot of the conversations we’re having with the C-suite down is kind of realigning how they look at the time needed to place, for example, or how many touchpoints go into that placement, or when they can expect that, you know. The role of nurturing to go into this lead. For example, well, we’re expecting candidates to place within an X amount of time. And now there’s that conversation about taking a little bit longer. And while it’s taking a little bit longer, there’s that nurturing process that goes in. So the go-to is like, let’s blast them with Sense, let’s email them. And the conversation really, everyone’s doing that right now. I mean, the nurses and candidates are getting inundated with automation, like on an hourly basis. Like everyone is just handing it to automation, which is fine. That’s what it’s there for. But what we’re seeing, what some of these agencies are telling us, is that some of the clinicians are responding better to the agencies that are actually reaching out manually, right? Because now, reaching out manually is cutting above the generic one-liners that are coming out of Sense or email marketing, or heaven forbid, agencies are using like voice drops and like AI voice agents. Now, just having a normal human experience is the outlier. Who would have thought? But I would say that’s the other part. And again, we’re all coming off this really high COVID with, we’ll be honest, a dominant platform which gamified everything through text messaging. I think recruiters are having a hard time getting back on the phones and having to put in that amount of work. So we’re seeing a lot of the agencies restructuring their recruiting requirements, their teams, rehiring, retraining. Because the mission is completely different than it was. We all know that, but we haven’t all quite right-sized yet. And we’re still on calls every day with agencies that are still feeling that problem. It’s really costing them dearly. I’m assuming, Youssef, you hear the same thing.
Youssef Eid
Yeah, we’re hearing the same exact thing. I think there’s been a very high turnover in recruiters, partly because the training that was done for recruiters during COVID is very different from the training done today. Rates have dropped drastically. So it’s much more difficult to sell candidates today than it was previously. There’s the recruiting cohort of people that existed pre-COVID that still know what the expectations in the market is. And it’s also similar for nurses. So nurses that entered pre-COVID also understand expectations of this market and what it means to be a travel nurse. I think the recruiters, but also the nurses that entered the market during COVID have very drastic expectations of the market. So now things are kind of leveling down to what it used to be before the pandemic.
Oliver Feakins
Yeah. And I would also say, I see something on the chat about cold calling, right? Like the art of outreach. And I’m not talking Sense. I’m talking the art of outreach. My older directors of recruiting and agency owners, even like salty dog recruiters that have been doing this for a very long period of time, you will all remember this, but the art of getting on the phone and like cold calling or recruiting somebody over the phone is now a skill. Like it’s a skill and you know, rebuttal handling, right? Being able to take an objection, being able to get past the gatekeeper. I mean, I think it was Mark that was talking about recruiting being a sales function. It really is. So just like sales, you have a gatekeeper, you have a series of objections you have to handle, you have to close. And I don’t know if we’re necessarily, as an industry, equipping our recruiters in that capacity. I think we’re equipping our recruiters more as marketing agents than we are sales agents. And I think that has to strategically change. I really do.
Youssef Eid
But I’m also seeing that training functions within the staffing companies are getting a lot stronger and getting a lot more respect. So, making sure that you’re training recruiters to be salespeople versus just moving papers around, getting a submission packet, and trying to submit a candidate. So legitimately being salespeople.
Oliver Feakins
And you have to, not only that, but let’s just take post-sale. Like, you get a submission and everything’s working, and you’re in that lull period, you know, while they’re ready to show up, right? Like you have to walk these candidates, like kindergarten, for the first day of class, because the abandonment rate, the no-show rates are high, 15 to 20% in general for the industry right now. We learned this at NATHO, right, Youssef? The amount of personal contact and effort required to just to get these candidates to show up and stay, let alone re-enlisting. There’s no way you can automate this. And there’s no way you can text message and message this through. This is a much bigger and larger game than we really give it credit for. And I know everybody on this webinar would probably agree. I mean, someone’s got to say it. It’s hard.
Carly Miller
Yeah, speaking to that cold calling and recruiter training piece, a little shameless plug here, Oliver and I filmed a little bit of a parody video, but not so parody, about cold calls that we’ve heard from TravelNurseSource. So I think speaking to Charlene’s point, nurses don’t like cold calls because they’ve heard so many bad ones. And preparing your recruiters to stick to that human element and get to know the candidate rather than just getting right into the job is so important.
Oliver Feakins
And sometimes just the authenticity. Nora, who’s on the chat, you guys can see her back and forth. She heads up our business development. And Nora’s cold call opener, her favorite cold call opener right now in her sales prospect that she’s calling agencies, some of you are on the chat. Her first like sentence is, hi, this is Nora, you’re gonna hate me. This is a cold call. She puts it out there, right? Like it’s that authenticity of like, hey, this is a cold call, but I’m here to talk about something that we may have that you may like. Do you have 37 and a half seconds for me? So I think just leading with authenticity and leading with that skill would be the game changer for agencies right now in this environment.
Carly Miller
Awesome, we’re going to move on to a little bit of a fun question that raises the stakes a little and gives you a little more control. So, if you could force every staffing firm to do one thing tomorrow, what would it be?
Youssef Eid
I think it’s just kind of following up with leads, making sure that you’re calling leads using multiple touchpoints. Time to contact is super important. So, getting in touch with the lead as quickly as possible. I do think you have to prioritize lead flow because not every lead is kind of built equal. So if you have a hundred leads that are coming into your agency every hour, you do have to prioritize to some extent to make sure that your recruiters are focused on the highest intent leads, the ones that are most likely to convert. But even then, it doesn’t mean that you just disqualify leads that are coming top of funnel. You do have to call every lead. You have to follow up with every lead. And you have to do it timely because the market right now is super competitive. That means agencies are getting in touch with candidates within minutes, which means if you’re not doing the same, then you oftentimes will lose out on that lead. Same for time to submit. So the agency that’s able to get the submission documents as quickly as possible from a candidate is likely the one that’s going to win the placement. So I think the big one is calling leads, making sure that you’re actually a salesperson, you’re following up multiple touchpoints, not just calling the lead once, leaving a voicemail, and giving up there. If it’s a high-intent, high-quality lead, and a good candidate that you think you can place, I think it’s doing multiple touchpoints with that candidate so that you can beat out the competition.
Oliver Feakins
I would agree. Flawless execution is what we ideally want from all of us, right? I would say on top of just what Youssef said about calling quickly, using best practice, putting in some sort of a realistic nurture phase. I would say another thing is my wish for our partners and future partners, and past partners, if I could change it tomorrow, would be to answer the damn phone. So, I’ll show you why, right? Youssef, you and I have had this on the podcast, right? You know, even just from the candidate perspective, we have like 80% of candidates that call our agencies are not answered. They’re not answered during business hours or they’re on an eight minute hold time, or they have to be transferred four times to somebody’s voicemail. And this is just your inbound. So if that’s how you treat your inbound, how are you treating your outbound? So that’s one. Two, you know, we work with over 150, 180 agencies, right? We’ve been doing this for 17 years now. Hopefully another 17. We know kind of what works. We also have had decent success in making the majority of our clients, not all of them, but do well, right? So we call every month to try and get agencies to get aligned so we can help them perform better. And sometimes it’s not even tactical. It’s like, hey, we hear this is working. Have you tried this? Or hey, this modality is really popping off. Have you dedicated time to this? And it’s a struggle just to get agencies to answer the phone because they’re busy. They’re at bandwidth. But by not kind of taking part in that, we don’t get the opportunity to help people succeed. And that would be my one wish, and I’m assuming Youssef is the same way. Another thing besides picking up the phone for us to help them is just allowing us to make sure everything’s working and things like that. Oftentimes, there’s technical issues that we can fix that would dramatically change the game for them and we’ve had issues where people, their API’s have failed or, whatever LaborEdge exploded and they’re missing lead flow and we just cannot even get them on the phone, like answer your damn phones. That’s my wish.
Carly Miller
Thanks, guys. As we talked about before, you both work with a wide range of agencies and sometimes, especially in this market, things get tough. It’s never easy to see an agency struggle, especially one of your partners, but it’s something that we’re all familiar with in this market. And at the end of the day, we want to do everything we can to help agencies get back on track. But a big part of that is figuring out why they’re struggling in the first place. So our next question is, what’s a red flag that you can spot instantly when you’re talking to a struggling agency?
Youssef Eid
I think this goes off the same topic, which is recruiter engagement. So, if recruiters are not highly engaged, they’re not trained well, then that’s often a big red flag. There are some things that are outside of the control of the agency. So if your job supply is not strong and you don’t have good relationships with the MSPs and VMSs, it’s often just going to be difficult for you. It’s going to be an uphill battle. So for us as job boards, if you’re coming to us with limited job supply or job supply that’s highly competitive, meaning as soon as you submit a candidate, there’s already 20 submissions in front of you, that’s often very difficult for any job board to work with. And then recruiter engagement. I think the only way that you can really counteract some of the difficulties that exist in the market conditions today is by having stellar recruiters. So if your recruiters are extremely engaged, much more engaged than let’s say a large staffing company that has you beat on job supply and on relationships and direct job supply specifically, then you can beat them by having more engaged recruiters. More engaged recruiters means maybe they’re working after hours when recruiters of a large agency are not working. That’s one way to do it. Maybe they’re picking up the phone more. Maybe they’re trying harder with each individual lead. And one way that you can do that is by improving their commission structures. So if you’re a lean, small agency, you can improve the commission structures of your recruiters to incentivize them more to be hungrier than that of a large staffing company.
Oliver Feakins
Yeah, and I would say, red flags for us would be kind of unrealistic expectations. You can have these calls with agencies as they’re onboarding. My favorite one is like, can we do a one-week trial? Like, can we just have access to the platform for three days? Or we want to have 50 placements in month one. And we look at these type of partners and we’re like, we won’t even let them on the board because we’re just going to take their money. And that’s not what we do. Unrealistic expectations from the get-go are one. And then two, I would say, where they’re telling us what they want and not what they need. Do you know what I mean? I’ll piggyback off what Youssef was talking about. You have an agency, let’s just say agency one, right? You know, two or three recruiters, they’re high MSP. They’re not very price competitive. They have maybe rookie recruiters or newer recruiters. And they’re going up against these MSPs and VMSs with all the best agencies in the country. Like they’re going up against the veterans. I’m looking online here like Andy, right? The OneStaffs, you know, well, for that matter, the TruStaffs, the Atlases like, they’re going up against there, right? And they want that active lead flow that’s applying to jobs. Those candidates are probably gonna apply to a couple of different jobs, which means that agency one, that rookie agency that has just jumped on a bunch of VMSs, they’re gonna have to go up against the A squad, right? So yes, they may want that because logically speaking, that makes sense, right? Well, these guys are applying to our jobs. Yeah, you’re absolutely right. However, you’re going to be an uphill battle against an agency that has a much larger infrastructure than you. So we may recommend, for example, a more passive approach. To go backwards, right? So instead of taking a candidate to a job, take a job to a candidate because it’s going to be less noise, there’s going to be less competition, and it is more work, but they’re going to do better. And we’ve seen agencies in this category do better in the passive approach, like by a factor of 10. But if we go and explain that to an agency and they’re like, no, no, no, no, no, we want this, we want this. And we just know how our platform is going to work for that persona of agency. Like we know, we’ve been doing it for 17 years, we know. And if we can’t set them up for success, we won’t work with them. So those are kind of the red flags.
Youssef Eid
And the most difficult thing is if the recruiter can’t maneuver a candidate to another job because the job supply is limited. Then they won’t be able to get the placement. Large staffing companies oftentimes will have a large enough job supply that they can maneuver the candidate to another job. What’s interesting is we often see 80% plus of the candidates that apply to a job not actually getting placed at the job that they’ve applied for, which means the recruiter’s ability to sell and maneuver the candidate and recommend additional jobs is where placements are made.
Oliver Feakins
There’s two sides to that. There’s job inventory and then there’s recruiter skill. Like redirecting is the same as objection handling, and it is difficult. If you ask 10 CEOs or 10 VPs of recruitment, they’re going to tell you that redirects are one of their biggest challenges with their recruiting teams. It’s very difficult to get somebody who’s heart set on going to one place and one place only. But the other part of it is job supply, right? If you’re like an agency that just does the East Coast or you have a concentration in like the Northeast, for example, you know, somebody goes to like, I don’t know, Des Moines, Iowa. You may not have a ton of whatever MedStar shops in Des Moines, Iowa. You have nothing to offer them. So now you’re back in the redirect game. So again, you have to be honest with yourself as an agency and in coordination with your partners, like the marketplaces like us, so we can help show you how to use our products for your success and benefit. And that may be different than what you want or think. So, it’s a little bit of trust.
Carly Miller
Awesome. I do want to talk about metrics a little bit and what metrics matter, which ones don’t and how agencies and job boards can get aligned on what really matters. I know, Oliver, you’ve spoken a lot before about how important it is for an agency and a job board who are working in a partnership together to be aligned on how they define success. So from your perspectives, what is one underused metric that recruiters should be obsessing over?
Youssef Eid
I think an obvious one is time to contact as a job board. So, how quickly are candidates receiving a response from recruiters? Oftentimes, you’re going to be competing with recruiters that are able to get back to candidates within minutes. I think another one is the number of submissions per candidate. So this market condition is super competitive, which means you have to submit candidates to multiple jobs. Because if you just submit them to one job, the odds you get that placement is rare. So you do have to kind of maneuver around the job supply that you have and try to recommend them to several jobs, submit them to several jobs. And then the last one is probably the time to submit. So the first submission is oftentimes going to be the most competitive. So if you’re able to get the submission packet in as quickly as possible, submit them as quickly as possible, you’ll be competitive with other agencies.
Oliver Feakins
Yeah, I would say one KPI that I really like, to your point, it depends on what you’re trying to evaluate, right? So if you’re trying to evaluate like us as a marketing platform, then my favorite KPI is not actually placing, it’s CMAs. Candidates made active. So, how many of the candidates reproduced you? Did you have active conversations that you got on the phone that were legitimate? Maybe not even necessarily qualified for the job you hope they take or the assignment you hope they take. But were they real nurses looking to travel? Some of our most successful partner agencies and some of our largest, they use this model, they use this CMA metric because their candidates made active score, which we happen to be in some of the higher ones of, allows them to say, hey, we couldn’t place them, but that’s not you, you gave us a quality nurse, you gave us a quality nurse who’s interested to go. We just couldn’t get them on that VMS assignment. It closed or they weren’t interested or whatnot, but we’re gonna get them. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but maybe next month, maybe three months from now, we’re gonna get them. So, CMA is really important. Then I guess also we know that clinicians aren’t applying to just one job, and you wouldn’t either if you were a nurse, right? You would apply to a couple of different jobs, get a couple of different options, you know, anywhere between two to four, two to five, sometimes by itself is what we see. We know that 80% of the time, the agency who calls first is the one that’s gonna get them. We know that after two hours of waiting from the time the lead comes in, your chance of connecting initially with that candidate drops by 50%. We know that. And we also know that the faster you get in there and the more relationship you’re going to have built within that first call, you’re also going to be able to demystify or close against a higher price. So, it’s not always pay rate. Sometimes building that relationship, we’ve seen people that were the first people to call in with lower pay rates and less offerings still win the lead, right? Because they built that relationship. So time to call is huge. And then also, again, number of submissions, five to seven submissions is what we’re seeing. I think NATHO talked about five to seven, five to eight, depending on the modality. A lot of times, we’re hearing agencies just submitting them to one or two. It’s not a plan A or plan B like it was a couple of years ago. It’s really plan A through G at this point.
Carly Miller
Yeah, thanks, guys. Just speaking a little more to what Oliver was saying, all of those statistics and tips are things that we have started incorporating into our recruiter trainings. Another shameless plug here, but it’s a very helpful thing that we’re offering to our clients. So if you’re a client on this call and you are hearing those statistics and you’re getting a little bit scared, definitely sign up for one of our recruiter trainings because we dive in a lot more into all of those things. We have a lot of great audience questions in the chat. So I’m actually going to just ask one more question of each of you and then we will turn to those. But like I said at the beginning of this session, the two of you are competitors, plain and simple. And a lot of people kind of shudder at the idea of working so closely with a competitor, but you both managed to strike a great balance between competition and collaboration. And I’m curious how you think this approach could be applied more broadly across the industry. Or in other words, how can agencies or other job boards balance competition and collaboration within the industry to foster growth?
Youssef Eid
Yeah, I think we already see this among staffing companies. Staffing companies are very friendly in their competition. There’s a bunch of conferences that they go to, and a lot of them are acquaintances and friends between each other. And they share their best practices, their lessons, the marketing channels that work best for them. And I think it’s similar for Oliver and I, where we have a friendly competition, where there’s lessons that we’ve learned building these businesses and working with staffing companies. There’s very few job boards that are within this niche. So we end up having very specialized knowledge where if we can learn from each other, then the entire industry benefits. And we both believe that this industry is large enough that if we’re sharing lessons between each other, the market as a whole for us will just grow. So we’ll be able to convert better with our customers. We’ll be able to serve them better. And I think it’s the same for staffing companies. Even at NATHO, we saw that a bunch of competitors were sharing insights on what’s working best for them. I think in this down market, a lot of strategies have been shared between staffing companies of what might work so that you can get out of the downturn and survive it. It’s really down to execution. If somebody is sharing with you a key lesson on what might have worked for them, it’s whether or not you’re executing beautifully on that to capitalize on the advice.
Oliver Feakins
Yeah, I mean, what’s the phrase, iron sharpens iron? Youssef and I have two very similar platforms, do things a little bit differently, but we come from different kinds of worlds. But I think we have the shared desire to move this industry forward and to clean it up a little bit. To put a little bit of humanity back into it, to make it a little bit more honest and ethical and I want to say recruiter-focused, but more agency-focused. And we want to swing the pendulum back that way. And we can complain about it and bitch about it, or we can actually get in and do something about it. Our podcast, you should check out our podcast on LinkedIn, but it really stems from Youssef and I talking about, man, the industry is really depressed. There’s a lot of pain with our agencies. Agencies are hurting, our partners are hurting. What can we do? And obviously, as much as we’d like to give our services away for free, we can’t. But what can we do, right? We can take everything we’ve learned and what we’re seeing and help our agencies do better. So we basically have went on this crusade of trying to give as much information to agencies and the recruiters, hence this conference, as we possibly can to kind of help out there. And that’s our ethos, right? We don’t make any money off the content that we give. We’re all just trying to help the agencies. And Youssef and I are aligned there. And we’re also friendly like you said. Youssef came out to Lancaster, Pennsylvania. We picked him up in a horse and buggy. He loved it. So, anyway, it’s great. Yeah, we’re really happy. I hope to do a lot more things with Youssef and Vetted. We’ll still vigorously compete, but yeah, it’s a friendly partnership.
Carly Miller
Thanks, guys. I love those answers. We’ll turn now to some audience questions. We have about 10 minutes, so we might not be able to get to them all. But if there’s questions left over, we’ll save them and shoot them over to Oliver and Youssef to cover in the next podcast. So we’ll start with David’s question. He asks, how do you guys see AI-generated search responses affecting organic traffic to job boards and agencies now and then in the future as well?
Oliver Feakins
Yeah. So I’ll jump on this one because we’regoing to be doing a webinar in about two or three months on this. It’s actually related to getting your jobs listed in ChatGPT and AI, specifically Gemini and stuff. I used to own an SE agency prior to this for many, many years. So I’m pretty solid on this stuff. So, zero click search results or Gemini AI is resulting in probably think it’s like 10 to 20% less of an amount of clicks on Google, for example, so there’s less traffic. The click-through rate, although, is up, even on less traffic. So what that means is you’re getting more intentful clicks, but you’re getting less of them. What that’s doing is contributing to a little bit of drying up in the online landscape. So that’s something to be considered. We do have a small amount of traffic moving over to things like ChatGPT and AI-driven search. There’s like three or four different ones besides ChatGPT. However, I don’t know how much of this is long-term. I think there’s always gonna be bouncing back and forth. The other thing you have to consider is like ChatGPT’s general algorithm is not updated in real time. It’s updated several months, I think three to seven months it’s updated. So when you’re querying, like for example, ChatGPT, like help me find a travel nurse job, you’re hitting a database that’s not current. It’s older. They do have different job search engines that are updated more frequently. But again, it’s still very, very early on in this, but yeah, Google is definitely suffering on a volume scale. We’ve actually seen, for example, like Bing, believe it or not, see an increase in search market share over Google, which hasn’t happened in ever. Maybe you guys don’t even know who Bing is. It’s been so long. Anyway, Youssef, you go ahead.
Youssef Eid
I think what we’ve seen is that AI search results are more or less indexing from Google search results. It will never try to give you a stupid answer. So, if something is very low in the search results, it’ll probably not surface that as a recommended result in the first place. So if you ever search for jobs, for travel nurse jobs using ChatGPT, oftentimes it’ll redirect you to a major site. So it’ll redirect you to Indeed or Monster or Career Builder, or it’ll redirect you to a major agency like an AMN Healthcare or Trustaff or whatever else. And it does those redirects because it’s basically scraping existing content on search, and it’s surfacing results that have already been ranked on Google search. So, it’s unlikely to give you a recommendation that isn’t already popular. So, more or less, if you’re indexing highly on search results, you will probably show up on ChatGPT search results. But like Oliver said, a lot of these results are not real-time. So at the end of the day, it’s still going to redirect you to a job board site so that you can then apply to a job on the job board site. So it might give you a result. But a lot of times, currently, that result is out of date. And then it’ll redirect you to Indeed. And if it’s redirecting you to Indeed, then it’s basically the same game that we’re playing anyways, which is somebody searching on Google for jobs. They’re clicking on the Indeed link and then applying to a job on Indeed. So, ChatGPT is not at the point where it’s kind of an autonomous agent for you that’s applying to jobs on your behalf. It’s still redirecting you to a job board.
Oliver Feakins
Yeah, you guys should check in that webinar when we do it. There’s a lot of good stuff there. Very similar, not a total scrape, if it ranks on one, it should rank on the other, but not always. So there’s some specifics. We’ll go over that.
Carly Miller
I wanted to bring up a question that Allison had put in the chat. She had directed it more towards agencies asking their travelers this question, but I am curious to hear your perspectives. Oliver, you brought up about walking the kindergartner to the first day of class. And something that our team learned from NATHO was that the fall-off rate for travel nurses is 22%. So what that means is that 22% of nurses are not showing up to their first day, even after they’ve been submitted and agreed, and ready to go. And that’s scary. So Allison asks, why are nurses ghosting their assignments? What is causing them to quit mid-assignment? What do you guys think the reasoning for this is?
Oliver Feakins
Yeah, I’ll jump in real quick. We’ve actually looked at this extensively because we threw to our product teams, like, is there anything we as a platform can do to help mitigate this? So the problem is right now is all these agencies, our partners, you guys here, are all feverishly battling vigorously for placements. And that doesn’t subside to a candidate once they’ve been submitted or accepted an assignment. They’re still going to get calls from everybody. While some agencies may say, you’re starting somewhere, great. We’ll call you in three months. Some agencies are going to be like, well, really I can get you over here. Just walk away. I mean, this is they’re feverish, right? I think what it goes to, kind of what we were talking about in session one, is building that relationship. right? If you like your recruiter and you would actually feel shame by calling them and telling them or ghosting them that you’ve gone to another agency, that’s going to help. But if you have only received text messages through a platform and you have no idea who this person is and someone calls you and says, we’ll pay an extra $2 an hour to come over here. Just walk away from that other agency. You’ll never work with them again. You’re going to do it. So we’ve actually had agencies tell us like, oh, this month we had a higher number of walkouts or whatever from TravelNurseSource. Your platform only delivers nurses who don’t show up to their assignments. No, are we delivering nurses? It’s the industry that’s causing this. So you have to have that relationship. And we asked that person like, when did you last talk to this nurse? They’ll be like, well, when we, when we gave them the offer, when they accepted the offer, and that was it. So you have to literally hold their hand, walk them to the first day of class, give them the lollipop, put them in school. That’s it.
Youssef Eid
Yeah, this is less likely with large agencies. So if you’re an Aya, for example, they will mark you as do not rehire. So you’re less likely to walk away from a large agency that has a large job supply. If you’re going to be contracting with a small agency, I think as a traveler, you’re probably looking at it as, there’s a lot of small agencies. I have other offers. I’m going to walk away and take the higher-paying offer. So there’s no incentive, especially if you don’t build a relationship with that candidate. There’s no incentive for you to be retained. The best is if you have a relationship with a recruiter and you’ve been on multiple assignments with the same recruiter.
Carly Miller
Awesome. Thank you. We only have three minutes left, and I don’t think that that’s enough time to dive into some of these other questions. So I am going to save them, and hopefully you guys can cover them in your next podcast. But I want to thank both of you for being here today. This was a super fun chat. We are going to take our last five-minute break. This conference has really flown by, but we’ll see you back here for our final session of the day shortly.
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