We kicked off TalentTrack with a powerhouse session: “What’s Now and What’s Next in Travel Healthcare.” Featuring industry leaders Holly Bass and Kenny Kadar from NATHO, this session breaks down the current state of travel healthcare staffing—what’s working, what’s shifting, and what’s coming next.
From AI trends and staffing challenges to market forecasts, mergers, and margin pressures, Holly and Kenny offered a comprehensive snapshot of the healthcare staffing landscape and practical advice for navigating it. Whether you’re a seasoned agency leader or new to the space, this session offers valuable insights to help shape your strategy going forward.
Watch the full video or browse the transcript to catch up on this essential conversation.
TalentTrack Session 1 Transcript
Carly Miller
We’re starting the day strong with an incredible session titled What’s Now and What’s Next in Travel Healthcare. This session is going to be a deep dive into the current state of the travel healthcare industry, as well as a look at where the industry is headed next. Joining us for this session, we’re thrilled to welcome Holly and Kenny, both fantastic representatives from NATHO. So, Holly and Kenny, thank you for letting me hijack the beginning of your session. I know the audience is really eager to learn from you. So I’ll turn things over to you now to introduce yourselves and get us started.
Holly Bass
Thank you so much, Carly, and thank you so much for having us today. We appreciate the opportunity to be here. My name is Holly Bass. I’m the executive director for NATHO. I started off as a recruiter in this industry 24 years ago. I went on to be the president of PPR Healthcare Staffing and PPR Travel Nursing. And then via an acquisition, I went on to be Executive Vice President of Recruitment for Medical Solutions. So I’ve been around a long time, and I’m excited to be here today representing NATHO. And I’d like to turn it over to Kenny to introduce himself as well.
Kenny Kadar
Awesome. Thanks for having me. Nice to see you guys all today. My name is Kenny Kadar. I am the president and owner of Coast Medical Service. We are a healthcare staffing agency. Been around since 1979, founded by my mom. So, I grew up with the business, been in the industry my whole life. Serve as president and owner of Coast. We staff nurses and allied nationwide. I also had the pleasure of serving as NATHO’s president over the past year and now am officially past president. So excited to be with you all today.
Carly Miller
Great, thanks, Kenny. So Holly, if you just want to kick us off.
Holly Bass
Yeah, I’m going to go ahead and get us started. I always love Kenny’s story about how he grew up and how he now owns or runs the company. I think that’s awesome. Alright, so on our first slide, if you want to go ahead and get us going, Carly. So you’re going to see in today’s slides that we have some partnership with SIA on our slides and our content. We partner with SIA on several projects throughout the year. We have an annual benchmarking survey that we work with them on, as well as a trends and insights report that we work them on. And that’s all for our NATHO members. And we’re going to talk a little bit about NATHO and what we do later. But we did want to let you know that we do partner with them. You’ll see some of our slides are co-branded and they do work with us both at our conference and throughout the year. So we wanted to make sure that we said a special thing to SIA.
So NATHO, we’re hot off our annual conference, where we bring industry leaders together each year. At our conference, we offer roundtables, subject matter expert speakers, networking opportunities, and we give an industry update, everything from market conditions to the legal and governmental landscape, as well as technology. So, we had a lot of takeaways from the conference this year, and we’re going to focus on those takeaways today. I’m really just going to give you some highlights and headlines from the conference.
Starting off with our first slide today, we’re not going to go in any particular order. We’re going to jump around a little bit, kind of informally. But here are the things that we were really talking about at the conference and that people were discussing and comparing notes. And the first thing that came to mind is really job orders. I remember back in the day when I would track KPIs, the job order stat was usually the number one indicator on whether or not we were in a good market. Well, things have changed. Because right now jobs are steady, demand is strong, but unfortunately, that’s not quite indicative of where the market is or where the market has been over the last couple of years. But overall demand is there, and we are seeing orders pretty consistent across the board. And that’s what we hear from our members.
Placements and revenue. Where are the placements coming from? Well, we found out through our benchmarking survey that most of our placements are all now running through VMS and MSP platforms. And I’ve seen this stat reported a couple of different ways, and it really ranges between 70 and 80% of your revenue these days is now flowing through MSP and VMS platforms. So now more than ever, it’s really important that the healthcare staffing companies remain really relevant, have great relationships with all the third parties, and have great partnerships. Just something to make sure that you’re focused on and working on, because that’s the bulk of where the revenue and placements are flowing through these days.
One of my favorite quotes from the conference back in April was, “flat is the new up and to the right,” right? We were like, we all kind of giggled, but that’s kind of how we feel. We are seeing stabilization in the marketplace. We are seeing normalization in our results. But at the same time, there are some companies, even though it’s June, we were hoping to start seeing a more upward trajectory with revenue, headcount, but unfortunately, we are still hearing some companies are going backwards. Some are holding, and some are starting to see moderate growth. So, depending on where you are in that range, we do see and hear a little bit of everything.
On the good news front, overdue AR is improving, and AR is getting better for our healthcare staffing companies. So if you and your team are not experiencing a better result in DSO, I would work with your team immediately because you want to benefit from that too.
A hot topic, of course, at our conference and probably everywhere that we see is AI. And it’s really the power of AI and technology. What we found is that some companies haven’t even started using AI and other companies are really off running already. One thing that we found is that companies really aren’t looking to, and we’ve heard this before too, aren’t looking to replace staff with AI. They’re looking to create workflows and use AI agents and platforms in ways that really enhance and complement their teams and make them more efficient. So where we see this technology is really plugging in is in candidate sourcing, candidate engagement, and candidate screening. That’s where we’re seeing the bulk of AI being used. So we wanted to share that with you today.
Of course, M&A, we’re seeing a lot of market and brand consolidation, mergers and acquisitions. You see a lot of activity in this area. You have Aya acquiring Cross Country. We saw Uniti Med and GQR last year. And then, most recently in the last week or so, we saw Travel Nurse Across America and TotalMed join forces. So, we think that you’re gonna see more of that potentially over the next year or two, because when you join forces, you’re more impactful together. You can leverage those partnerships, be more impactful with clients, with all that revenue and those jobs, all funneling through MSPs and VMS platforms, you can be more relevant with clients. Maybe go from tier three to tier two or tier two to tier one. So the opportunity to leverage those relationships, create more efficiencies, and just be more impactful in the industry. We’re definitely seeing some of that.
The good news, too, is the supply and demand trajectory is still going in the right way for our industry. You’ll find we’re going to show a slide later where we talk about supply is still down, but demand is still up. And that’s where our industry really plugs in and helps with things. So I always say sometimes it’s bad for healthcare delivery when there’s this gap, but it’s good for us in contingent labor because we go out and help solve that gap.
Projections for 2026, you’re gonna see us share a slide that’s gonna show you some recent growth predictions for our market in 2026, where it stands today. Obviously, this always changes and could change quite a bit from now until the end of the year, but we are hoping we’re finally gonna see some very small, but some single-digit growth into 2026.
And not listed on this slide because again, I told you we’re hopping around a little bit, and it’s a little organic. But another topic that we were discussing at our conference is continuation in us seeing reduction in force and layoffs in our industry. Just when we thought that the dust had kind of settled on that topic, we are constantly hearing and seeing waves of reductions coming through. Thought it had kind of ended last year, but we did see the beginning of this year, and even as of a couple of weeks ago, that we are seeing waves of reductions continuing. And it’s kind of like, wait a minute, where are the jobs going?
And that leads kind of to that next topic, which is offshoring. Some of the jobs are going away because we have volume issues. We don’t have the same volume that we did when we had all that staff, but also some jobs, particularly in the back office and the support roles, are being offshored. And obviously that’s done to be competitive, keep costs down, keep SG&A down, and still be able to provide technology and people where we need to leverage it, but also keep those costs down. There’s lots of platforms and different vendors out there that offer offshoring services. So if you’re not doing that, we’re finding that’s quite a trend as well.
And another trend that we’re seeing is companies are still wanting to hire really great recruiters. And I read an article last week that talked a lot about, hey, when you talk to candidates, yes, they want to have the opportunity to utilize technology. Yeah, anybody can upload a certification. Anybody can go in and upload a timesheet using technology. But when it’s time to talk about a new assignment, understand a facility, get up and move 3000 miles from your home, they still want to talk to somebody, and they still want a relationship with the recruiter. And that’s really great news for our industry.
And then going to the next slide, margins is always a topic because we’re still seeing quite a compression in margins. When you look at the complicated relationship and friction between bill rates and client expectations, candidate expectations and pay, inflation, housing costs, et cetera, they all play into those margin compressions that we’re all still seeing. Hopefully, we’ll start seeing those go up a little bit as we’ve made changes to back office, we’ve made changes to the way we run our businesses. So that was a topic.
And then difficult to fill orders. A lot of travelers and clinicians we’re hearing are all being very selective about what jobs they will and will not take. They won’t leave their home unless it’s the perfect set of circumstances, the right job at the right price, at the right pay, and the right time. And so we have to keep working to bring those true travelers back into the industry. Otherwise, we’re finding jobs are just remaining unfilled in the hard-to-fill jobs. Also, the rural areas are also remaining unfilled.
And this also led to a little common consensus, too, especially on the benchmarking survey, was that recruiter and account management productivity continues to be down. Look, these are highly motivated, money-driven, commission-driven salespeople that are also struggling in this market. Companies are still expecting the same type of activities in return, but it’s tougher out there between working from home, I call it like less traffic out there to direct as far as leads or as far as candidates to work with or finding the right job for them or the right fit, it’s tougher out there. So it’s definitely created, I think, a lot of stress for that group of people too.
And then also we’re gonna show you a slide on quit rates for nurses. It’s down quite a bit. And when it reached its highest, the peak of COVID, we’re now starting to see quit rates reduced back to pre-COVID levels. So that’s a good thing.
Alright, and now onto the next slide. Thank you, Carly. If you want to know or be reminded, what is the size of our market? What is the size of healthcare staffing? And you can see this year, we’re projected to be right around just under $41 billion. And you look back where it came from back in 2010, and we were eight billion. So that’s quite a run. And when we were at the NATHO conference, we had an inspirational speaker, Sean Ellis. He did a lot of research on the industry so that he could understand our audience, understand the challenges that we’re facing. And he kind of said, Holly, if you were to kind of put your fingers and hide 21, 22, and 23, those anomaly years, that is still an incredible growth trajectory when you look at 2020 to 2024. It’s like 60% growth. And I said, yeah, but it still just doesn’t feel that good as you’ve been in it the last couple of years. But I thought that was kind of an interesting perspective that I think all of us would have taken that type of growth if we didn’t know any better and gone through kind of the hard times that we have gone through over the last couple of years. So kind of interesting there.
So on the next slide, we think about our market. How is it segmented out? And I think this slide does a good job of showing how that is segmented out. You can see the allied and locums are both around 10 billion of that 40 billion, per diem nurse is right around 5.2. And of course, travel nursing still takes up the bulk of close to 16 billion and is the largest segment by far. So, good snapshot there of how things are divided out.
Alright, and on the next slide, I mentioned this earlier, how the supply and demand is still going to be there. This is a great graphic. The orange line is the demand, and the blue line is the supply. And you can see 15, you know, 12, 15 years out that there’s still a shortage, which that’s where we come in. That’s where we come in and solve those problems. So to me, this shows us that there’s still an opportunity for our industry. There’s still going to be a gap in filling orders and open orders. There’s still going to be a need for the travel market. We’re still relevant. And it’s up to us to continue to move that labor pool around to fill those hard-to-fill orders and high-demand areas. And that’s where we really come in and shine. So, important there.
Alright, onto the next slide. Here, I mentioned earlier that a lot of our revenue is now running through MSPs and VMSs. And you can see back in 2018, 58% of our revenue was running through. Now this particular slide shows 73%. And then the pie graph does a nice job of showing if you’re a company, how does that break out for you? And obviously, this can vary based on whether or not you have an MSP or you don’t have an MSP. But anyway, I’ve also seen this on another survey where it was closer to 80% also depending on the type of company that you are or if you have your own MSP. So we wanted to kind of highlight this and also show you the graph behind it.
Alright, and then on the next slide, we have, I mentioned those pre-COVID level quit rates. You can see that nurses were quitting at an all-time high back in 2021, 2022, and then they started to come down in 2023, and they’re continuing to come down. So on a percentage basis point, you can see that nurses are staying in the field now longer. They’re not leaving their jobs as quickly. And this is also good because it keeps more of them in the marketplace for all of us. So I thought that was important stuff to share with you, too, also from the conference.
And then on the next slide, where’s healthcare going? We hear a lot about, it’s going home. Healthcare is going home. They’re pushing out of acute care. They’re pushing patients out of the hospital. And that’s true, but it’s not always going to the home setting. This is essentially what is called a site of care volumes forecast for the next 10 years. And it kind of breaks down different areas of where healthcare is going. So, for example, emergency department, not a lot of change, inpatient, not a lot of change, skilled nursing facility, projected to go down. Hospital and ambulatory centers, projected to go up. I would be looking at this slide from the lens of, if I was going to get into a new area, a new segment, or a new space, this might be a good guide to show you where the forecast is going over the next 10 years. Home, up 20%. Retail, down. Office and clinic settings, up. But look at the virtual. 26% of all of that evaluation and management of healthcare and the volumes and the settings will be done virtually in a virtual setting. So, really interesting information. And I thought this was a great snapshot to show everybody kind of where healthcare is going, what the settings look like, the acuity levels, and everything. So Kenny, I think that this is actually where I turn it over to you.
Kenny Kadar
Awesome. Thanks, Holly. Nice job. So, I have some staffing company updates, just to keep us all in the loop of what’s going on. Holly touched on some of them. One of the biggest recent ones is the passing of Alan Braynin from Aya. As you guys know, Aya has really accelerated their growth over the last several years. They’ve become the largest company in our industry. That was largely driven by Alan, who’s no longer with us. So, huge news in our industry and something to keep an eye on ongoing.
There’s also been a lot of consolidation, as Holly mentioned; she talked about the TNAA/TotalMed merger. Those are two of the largest companies in our space. They decided to partner together. I think that’s a big one to keep an eye on. And then also in the mid-market, you see a lot of moves. Recently, CareCareer announced an acquisition of four companies, Alliant, MedUS, Amare, Next Move, bringing those companies closer to like a hundred million, I believe, combined. So you’re seeing consolidation on the larger companies, on the mid-size companies. And then beyond that, you’re continuing to see layoffs and shakeups across the board. Holly touched on that. You thought you might be past that in the market, but it’s still happening. So there’s a lot of movement happening in the marketplace, which represents an opening for all of us if we can find the right opportunities.
And then going to the next slide, Carly, I kind of wanted to just summarize. Holly gave a lot of good information about where the market is at. From my perspective, this is sort of how I look at it. The industry has declined for the third, this is gonna be the third year in a row. We all feel that. We’re all living through that. Our teams are living through that. Holly talked about our salespeople, the recruiters, the account managers, the ones who are really heavily commission-based, they’re feeling that as well. But all that said, when you look at the chart, the industry is up over the last, 10, 15 years, the trend line continues to be up. And there’s a lot of opportunity there. So while we all feel that, we should all feel like the rise of the industry as well. I could speak for ourselves that we’re significantly further advanced today than we were, you know, in 2011 when I started in this industry.
I also want to highlight the MSPs, you know, they continue to win business. They’re 80% of our market when you include VMS as well. That is something that cannot be denied and something that we all have to account for when we’re looking at our strategy and our business planning and how we want to grow.
The recruiting challenges we’re facing are real. Lead generation has become more challenging. Agencies are finding it more difficult to attract candidates. You know, I think during COVID, when you’re offering $10,000 a week, you know, it’s a very easy decision for somebody to take it. It’s like that meme where it’s like, fuck this, I’m out and they throw the papers everywhere, right? Well, that’s not exactly happening anymore. I mean, we’re still offering pretty substantial pay rates and generally rates that are higher than what you know, clinicians can make full time. But it’s not that like FU money that we were seeing before. So thus, it’s just a little bit more challenging to attract candidates. And it’s not only money, it’s other things that will ultimately make the deal.
And as a result of that, we’re seeing the margin compression. There’s increased competition. A lot of companies have really scaled up during the high-growth period. And so they’re fighting to essentially keep their market share. And that’s led to margin compression, lower profitability overall on deals, also coupled with sort of lower bill rates that we’re facing as well. So that’s kind of how I would summarize it. Now, the next question is like, okay, Knowing all that, what do you do about it?
So Carly, next slide, please. The key is ultimately to be sort of honest with yourself. Like, identify what you’re good at. Where do you have a competitive advantage? Is it geographically? Is it with a certain facility type? Is it with a certain shift type or unit? Are you really good with, you know, ICU nurses, or are you good at therapy or imaging, or whatever it may be? Like, really identify where you can win, where you can have a competitive advantage. Identify the clients that need help in that area. So, you know, it could be a big health system. It could be surgery centers. It could be home care, long-term care, whatever it may be. There are a lot of different delivery options out there, and really getting good at identifying where you can win. And then focus on that. Like, really go deep. Like, focus on lead generation for that area you have a competitive advantage. Focus on the client relationships where you have that and keep building on that and scaling there.
And then also being disciplined about saying no to the opportunities where you can’t win. So like, if you’re really focused on therapy and a place, you know, a client comes to you and says, hey, can you do ICU nurses? You might want to say no if you can’t. We’ve really been trying to be focused on the areas we can be good and where we feel like we can win, but also not focused on the areas where we can’t win. And I think, you know, there are still opportunities in this market. The overall industry has faced growth, but there are a lot of challenges that we’re facing as well. And so, really being focused, being honest with yourself, and being focused on where you can generate candidate quality and where you have those quality relationships will ultimately lead to wins for everybody. There are still opportunities to win while the market has been rocky. There are companies that are doing well in this market, and there are companies that aren’t, right? And so I think if you can apply the market updates in this fashion,you can be one of those companies that can show growth.
And then one of the other things is just attending things like this, you know, keeping your ear to the street, joining NATHO has been huge for us, you know, making sure that you have a pulse of the market, that you’re building the relationships that you need to build on. NATHO is a great place to do that. And I’ll pass it back to Holly to share more about NATHO.
Holly Bass
Thanks, Kenny, throwing me a softball here to pitch NATHO to everybody. Well, for anybody on the call that is a member of NATHO, thank you so much for your support and membership. You do really help keep the industry going. And for those of you who are not a member of NATHO, we really would love to have you. We’re really making waves. We’ve really, over the last couple of years, created more of a community feel versus a trade organization feel. We’re very passionate about what we do. And although I’m working for NATHO now, I was on the board of NATHO for five years and also a past president. So I really have always believed in what we did and what we have to offer.
We do offer networking and collaboration opportunities, resources, education. We have several committees in place that you can join. We have monthly roundtables. We’ve got some webinars planned for the rest of the year. And like I mentioned at the very beginning, we also partner with SIA on several data like the data surveys and benchmarking surveys, as well as the trends and insights report, which is taking data that you and others give us and putting it together. We have a new state regulatory guide that probably might be worth the membership alone, particularly for smaller companies who can’t have an in-house council with all the reporting and changes that are required state by state. We now offer that as part of our membership, and then also part of your membership is free access at no charge to our annual conference. We did just have our annual conference in April, but we already have next year’s date set and it’s May 7th and 8th in Las Vegas. We’ll be putting more information out about that as it gets a little bit closer. But if anybody ever has any questions or suggestions or membership, anything that you need, you can always email me at [email protected].
Carly, before we hand it back to you, we just also want to say thank you for being a great partner with us, prepping us, helping us make sure our slides look great, and putting us in a good spot today. So, thank you so much for your partnership today as well.
Carly Miller
Thank you, Holly and Kenny. I really enjoyed this presentation, and we have some NATHO fans in the chat, and I’m not surprised because this was so much valuable information. I was talking with Holly and Kenny in the waiting room earlier. Our team got to go to the NATHO conference this year, and they came back with so much knowledge. We actually had an entire lunch and learn in the office, and this presentation just scratched the surface of all the information they learned. So, we really do recommend joining NATHO. The conference is so worth it.
We do have about 15 minutes of time for questions. So, I saw we had some questions come in earlier. We can tackle those now. But if you’re in the audience and you have any questions about the presentation or about NATHO, drop them in the chat and we’ll ask them to Holly and Kenny live. But going back to some questions that came in earlier, I’m going to go back in the slides presentation.
Tim asked about a certain statistic that was shared. I think it is here. Tim asked, is that 73% just for travel nursing, or does it apply to allied and locum as well?
Kenny Kadar
That’s travel nurse.
Holly Bass
Travel nurse, yeah.
Kenny Kadar
My assumption is that it’s similar for allied. I think locums is probably less, although my guess is locums will continue to go the way of travel nursing with increased MSP presence.
Carly Miller
Speaking of MSP, we have an MSP question that Peter had asked. He had wanted to know, at what point does or will the MSP/VMS model outprice itself by increasing fees to an unsustainable point for vendor partners?
Kenny Kadar
That is a tricky question. Personally, I don’t see MSPs going away, and so I think that ultimately, you know, there will be probably a come-to-Jesus where everybody kind of figures out a plan that sort of works. But I don’t see MSPs going away. And I sort of think that that’s what that question was getting at. That’s not going to happen. So if you’re hoping that MSPs are going to price themselves out, you can keep hoping, but that’s unlikely to happen.
A better strategy is to find a way to work with them or to alternatively, go the opposite direction and don’t work with them and find some of these alternative deliveries where you can be successful. My philosophy is that if you want to play in large healthcare systems in the United States, you’re working through an MSP. Like that’s just the way it is.
Carly Miller
Thanks, Kenny. Allison had a good comment about that. She wrote, I think growing market share within key MSP programs and driving your volume with that program can help reduce the pain with the increased MSP fees. So, thank you for sharing that, Allison. Keep your questions coming. We have some time here, and we have two awesome people from NATHO here ready to answer all of your burning industry questions. So please don’t be shy in the chat. They are here and excited to answer all of your burning questions.
Kenny Kadar
I mean, I could I could just dive deeper on that one. I agree with what Allison said, and that’s sort of what we do too. And kind of what I was trying to get out of the slide is like, figure out where you actually have relationships that want to work with you. If you’re subbing to an MSP, and you’re getting no response, it’s like a black hole. Is that really a place to spend your time? For us, it’s not. Or at least we want to try to find ways to work those relationships to be able to get the feedback that we’re looking for. If you’re not getting it, then you got to find a place where you are.
And I think that sometimes like the knock on MSPs is like, well, you know, I submitted people and there’s this black hole. It’s like, okay, well that may be the case. And maybe that MSP isn’t that interested in working with you. So it’s kind of like finding somebody who is, because they do exist. You just got to find it, and you’ve got to find a way to deliver for them. Maybe what you’re providing for them, they don’t need. Maybe you have it, but they don’t need it. So that’s part of the problem. Find out what they do need and provide that. I promise it won’t be a black hole. And that’s easier said than done, obviously, but that is sort of what it takes in this market. You’re not throwing darts anymore. And I think that that’s kind of what people got in the habit of in COVID is like, I have a candidate. Well, I’m easily gonna place them because there’s so many needs around the country and everybody will just take them. But that’s not the case.
Carly Miller
Great. Thanks, Kenny. We have a question about NATHO. Cody in the chat wrote that he was excited to learn more about NATHO, so he’s curious about the NATHO fee. He’d like to know if it’s yearly or monthly.
Holly Bass
That’s a great question. Our fee is annual, and we do run a February-to-February membership, but anybody’s welcome to join any time, and we would be happy to prorate that membership. The fees are based on your revenue level, and we do have that on natho.org where you can look at that, look at your revenue level, and see how much that annual fee is. But remember, with that annual fee comes the annual conference at no charge, and then access to all of the things I talked about and many more. So I’m happy to take a more specific call with somebody and talk to them about everything. If you’d like to give me an email or a call, again, executivedirector at natho.org. And I’d be happy to walk him through that.
Kenny Kadar
And just to add, I feel that NATHO is one of the best values in our industry. The cost is incredibly reasonable for all that you get. I like to tell people, if you only go to the conference, you’ll get way more value than you’re spending. And, the cost of the NATHO membership is around or less than the cost of many conferences that you already may be attending. And so just for that alone, the value will be there, but there’s so much more that we do. Joining NATHO was huge for us. We joined I think four or five years ago and that was really coincided with a lot of our industry knowledge and relationships.
Holly Bass
Yeah, and specifically, again, depending on your membership level, it can be between 1500 and 3500 for the whole year. And so again, we can talk about that. You can hit the join button or give me a reach out, and I’ll be happy to help and walk you through it.
Carly Miller
Thank you. Our next question comes from Oliver. What is your prognosis for the rest of the year regarding order growth? Summer is typically slower, and are you seeing that right now?
Kenny Kadar
I mean, every company is different. We had a strong Q1. Q2 has been not as strong, but I wouldn’t say that’s an order problem. For us, it’s been more of a candidate flow issue, like less leads coming in. You know, obviously partnering with you all at TrackFive to help with that. But, you know, less leads overall.
And the quality of candidates. I think there’s just less people interested in traveling. There’s still a large segment of people who are, but just not quite as many as before. And so, you know, I think for us, it’s just been quality submissions that has been an issue. But overall, this year for us should be above last year, which, you know, is against the trend that Holly had presented. So it kind of proves, I guess, that you can still show growth in this market if you do good work, ultimately. However, you could also do good work and not grow, like there’s no guarantees.
Carly Miller
Holly, I know you talked about how AI was a major headline this year. It feels like AI is the major headline of life lately, but Chad wants to know, what is the best use cases we are seeing using AI for lead gen and AI agents?
Holly Bass
I’ll be honest, I think people are kind of keeping that close to the vest. The companies that are out ahead are not really as forthcoming in sharing what they’re doing or how they’re using it. But I think I mentioned earlier that candidate engagement, candidate screening, and sourcing are the areas where we are seeing AI being used the most.
There’s AI agents that also can do back office tasks. There’s AI now where you can also build your own workflows with your own team and then utilize AI. And again, that’s all to complement and to gain more efficiencies within the team. Kenny, from an end user standpoint, you might have a little bit more data on that, but. that’s kind of just what we’re hearing. Again, it’s so all over the place. I think people that are ahead of the game are kind of keeping what they’re doing to themselves.
Kenny Kadar
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, there’s basic AI like ChatGPT. I mean, everybody should be using that for sure. And we certainly do. We’ve looked at a lot of different programs. There’s a back office one that we’re going to be going live with that can help significantly streamline things on the back office. We are doing some stuff on the candidate side, though, for us, you know, I think we’re more of a boutique agency, if you will. And so, you know, those quality of relationships is really important for us. So we’re very careful, I guess, about what interaction AI or even offshore, we use with our candidates.
I will say, from my perspective, I do feel like AI is still very expensive. We’ve looked at a lot of programs, and people are less expensive than the AI, and they can be better and do more things. And so that’s sort of like the question we’re asking is like, can we hire somebody for less or the same, and can they do more? And in many cases, the answer is yes, still today. Now I do think that over time, as AI continues to advance and the technology continues to get better, the cost will also go down, and those answers will probably be no at some point, but today that’s not the case. And so I’d encourage you guys to really do a cost comparison on AI. Because oftentimes, yeah, it’s shiny and everybody’s talking about it and there’s a lot of hype behind it, but is it actually better? Not always.
Carly Miller
Yeah, awesome. We probably have time for a couple more questions. I want to ask this one that Oliver had thrown in. What are your thoughts on the growing allied/therapy segment and locum as well? A lot of agencies are thinking about expanding into these markets, and then I guess a follow-up question to that as well. How does that differ from travel nursing? Because you can’t recruit the same way for travel nursing as you can for allied and locum.
Kenny Kadar
We have a big allied presence. We really invested heavily into that, I’d say starting four years ago. And so we have quite a bit of material and training, and things like that around our team to help. It is different for sure. I would say it’s more similar to nursing than locums, which we’ve also looked into. Locums is significantly different. Locums requires a different insurance. Typically, you’d have to have a different company to do that. There’s ways to do it, but like, you know, typically requires different insurance, different, you know, company name, things of that nature. And locums, as I looked into it, is a lot more per diem than you think. So like, while it’s very far in advance, it’s often like, one shift here, one shift there, you know, and the dollars are very big. Significantly bigger than what we see in nursing and allied, but the delivery is significantly different. And the lead time is also longer. There’s a lot more compliance documentation needed. And anybody in our space knows that there’s already a lot of compliance. But with locums, it’s even more. So it’s certainly doable, but you do need to be prepared for it to be significantly different that you would need to figure out new processes, new workflows, likely new vendors and a lot of different things. It’s not like a plug-and-play by any stretch of the imagination.
Carly Miller
Thank you, Kenny. And then our next question is from David. He wants to know, any thoughts on how to prescriptively direct candidates to those jobs you are specifically trying to fill versus just all the jobs you have available?
Kenny Kadar
That’s a good question. I think you know, we could all do a better job with that. You know, for us, I mean, it starts with how you’re getting the candidates. So sure, if a candidate’s coming and applies to a random job on a job board, they’re going to be interested in that job. I think sourcing for that, the job that you’re trying to fill is the number one key. So going through your database, other databases out there, and really targeting folks that you think could be a good fit for those types of jobs is number one.
And then once you have somebody on the phone, whether they’re interested in that job or not, you certainly want to throw it out there. And you want to acknowledge what they’re looking for. To me, it’s like, you always want to understand, like, why are you doing this? What are you doing it for? What are the motivators for you? And then you kind of use those to pitch your own job, like, hey, I know, maybe speed to getting a job is important for you. If that’s really important to you, here’s the place where I can get you the job the fastest. It’s this targeted job. And then you throw it out there and see what they say. Do you like it or not? You can’t fit a square peg into a round hole. Don’t think you can force somebody to do something they don’t want, but you can also lay it up in ways where it’s like, hey, I know this, this, and this are important to you. This job has this, this, and this. What do you think? You know, and try to get some feedback that way. And if they’re interested, then great, you can get a submission to a job that you think you can get an offer on. And if they’re not, at least you know what’s important to them. And then you can start looking for jobs that meet some of those criteria.
Carly Miller
Awesome. Thank you, Kenny. We just have about three minutes left. So we actually are going to stop taking questions right now. We don’t want to cut into the rest of the sessions, and a lot of the questions that were asked in the chat, we actually will be covering through future sessions. So if you want to stick around, please do. I’m sure that you’ll gain a lot of insights from our other speakers, but I just want to say thank you so much again, Holly and Kenny for kicking us off. I really enjoyed this presentation and I can tell our audience did as well based on all of the interaction.
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