Dec 6, 2023 — Carly Miller

TrackFive Hosts Travel Healthcare Recruitment Roundtable

travel healthcare recruitment roundtableTrackFive recently hosted a travel healthcare recruitment roundtable titled “Navigating the Future of Travel Healthcare Recruiting.” The event brought together industry experts from seven leading travel nursing job boards.

During the roundtable, participants shared valuable insights and perspectives on the current and future state of travel nurse recruitment. You can read the transcription or watch the full video to gain valuable insights into the industry.

00:12:07:23 – 00:12:38:11

Allie

Well, thank you, everyone, for joining our healthcare roundtable. Before we just officially get started, I just want to go over a few things. So, first of all, we love questions. So ask any questions anytime via the Q&A box. Should be down there on the bottom. And in case you need to hop off early for any reason, this will be recorded and we will be distributing it afterwards. So no worries about that. And okay, we are going to do some introductions. Oliver, do you want to hop on and start that?

00:12:38:13 – 00:13:10:27

Oliver

Yeah. Hey, guys. My name is Oliver Feakins from TrackFive. I’m the founder. I just want to thank everybody for joining our webinar series. We really, we kind of have a very happy-go-lucky ethos here at TrackFive where we really like the community that we play in and we really like our esteemed competitors here.

00:13:11:00 – 00:13:34:17

Oliver

We call them competitors, but we’re friendly competitors. You know, we’re all part of the community, right? So we kind of believe in getting community together and having the conversation and supporting each other. So we’re really happy and grateful for the other panelists to jump on and share their expertise. Not all of our competitors wanted to be on here with other competitors.

00:13:34:23 – 00:13:53:07

Oliver

So I think it speaks volumes to all of you guys that you’re here and willing to take part in that. So we have well over 100 people signed up on the platform right now from agencies across the country. Some of our clients, some not our clients, definitely some of all your clients as well.

00:13:53:10 – 00:14:17:18

Oliver

So thanks for helping promote it. And again, for those of you that are not, we’ll just, I guess go around, introduce ourselves real quick. But TrackFive, we own TravelNurseSource, AlliedTravelCareers, LocumJobsOnline, and a few other programmatic platforms and platforms in other verticals as well. We are very happy to have you guys. If any of you are looking for a talent marketplace in the travel healthcare space, we offer a pretty great programmatic solution.

00:14:17:18 – 00:14:33:25

Oliver

We’ve been in business for 15 years and we’re very grateful for our clients that are here and we’re happy to be part of the conversation. So I guess I’ll kick it down. Steve, you wanna go next?

00:14:33:25 – 00:14:55:29

Steve

Yeah, sure, Oliver. Thanks for inviting me. Hopefully, I stay on here. It seems to be kicking me out, so I’ll work through that. But it’s nice to see everybody. Thanks for inviting me. My name’s Steve Curtin. I’m the CEO of The Gypsy Nurse. So we’re responsible for The Gypsy Nurse platform that includes TheGypsyNurse.com and our social media following, as well as TravCon, the healthcare travelers conference that takes place in Las Vegas every year. It’s great to see you guys.

00:14:56:02 – 00:15:30:01

Allie

Kyle, you want to go next?

Kyle

Sure. Thanks for having me on. And thanks, everybody, for being here. This is great. My name’s Kyle Schmidt, one of the co-founders at BluePipes. We launched our platform in 2013. It is essentially a marketplace for the travel healthcare industry. We connect travelers with the companies that they love. And have been doing that joyously through thick and thin. And looking forward to what comes next.

Allie

Youssef?

00:15:36:03 – 00:16:03:25

Youssef

Yeah, I’m Youssef. I’m the founder of Vetted. We’re relatively new in this space, and I think our approach is also relatively new in the space. We do a lot of automations for our customers to help them reduce their recruiter workforce so they can staff travel nurses.

Allie

Great. Great. And Zia.

00:16:03:27 – 00:16:37:07

Zia

Alright, I’m Zia Rahman, the founder and CEO of Wanderly. First of all, I want to thank Oliver for putting this all together. I wouldn’t say we’re competitors. I think we’re innovators in a space that are, in some of our cases, trailblazers, right? Some of us were very early on, but I think we’re beginning to see a lot of the innovations come to fruition now, given what has happened with the COVID and all of the acceleration of the need for the marketplace, for job board types of platforms such as ours.

00:16:37:07 – 00:17:03:12

Zia

So thank you again, Oliver. It was nice seeing you in person. I think one conference before when you had this idea, and I said, yeah, sign me up! The first one to sign up. So yeah.

Oliver

Thanks for coming.

Allie

All right, guys. Well, we have a lot to get through today. We are asking that our speakers keep their answers to about a minute so we can hopefully get through all of our questions and just have a great discussion between everyone.

00:17:03:15 – 00:17:29:06

Allie

So let’s get started. So the first thing we kind of want to talk about is, I think of no surprise, but AI. You know, that is the big hot topic of this year, and we want everyone’s take about this new technology impacting the industry and especially with the advancement of AI itself. So, Zia, would you like to get started on this question?

00:17:29:09 – 00:17:36:12

Zia

Oh, my goodness.

Oliver

Coming out firing, Allie.

00:17:36:15 – 00:18:01:22

Zia

Yeah, I just came back from the, I’m sure some of you guys also went to the SIA conference in Vegas, and the one before was the GiG, I believe. So anything and everything and everyone is doing AI. And I think it’s important to understand, what is the use case for us in this space.

00:18:01:24 – 00:18:24:08

Zia

And as most of you guys know, Jason Lander, who’s been around in our space. Now he’s with Medical Solutions. And he’s coined the phrase, and I’m going to probably butcher it. Someone with AI skill will take your job. Right? So I think what he’s trying to do is alleviate the fear of ‘AI is going to do everything and replace recruiters and others.’

00:18:24:08 – 00:18:49:12

Zia

And I think the first place to start, and I was at the roundtable and every single person that was sitting there saying, we want to use AI. We want to use AI. And my question to them was, where would you like to apply the AI? In order to do AI and ML, it is all about data, right? You need to have that data, and no one’s going to give you that data for free.

00:18:49:15 – 00:19:12:18

Zia

And how do you accumulate the data? So to that end, you really need to think about re-engineering your existing process and automating existing processes so you can begin to capture all that data and then make sense where you need to apply the AI. So I think we’re still very early. I think ChatGPT really brought us – accelerated this whole adoption process.

00:19:12:25 – 00:19:41:08

Zia

And I think the regenerative AI has a place in our space in the chat area, in the areas of getting sourcing done more creatively. So we’re still figuring it out. Did I take everyone’s one minute? Sorry, I apologize.

Allie

No, not at all. I would’ve cut you off. But does anyone else have a response to that?

00:19:41:10 – 00:20:05:15

Kyle

Yeah. You were brave enough to go first because out of all the questions that were on that sheet that we got, that’s the one that I sat there and glazed over for a while. How do you answer that question, especially in a minute? I think of it in terms of near-term, mid-term, and long-term. And I think Zia’s right about the data. I kind of view it as perhaps near-term.

00:20:05:15 – 00:20:43:27

Kyle

It’s everybody getting their feet under them and it doesn’t have much of a measurable impact on us right now. Mid-term, it probably does become about the data set that you have access to, how it plays out in terms of how people protect their own data sets. Are people going to reel in? I mean, before we just allowed organizations like Google, etc., and search engines to crawl all of our data and sometimes have access to lots of our data and maybe that gets rethought over time and that will affect the long term.

00:20:44:00 – 00:21:08:00

Kyle

The long term is that potentially it could find its way into many, many, many aspects of what we do in the healthcare staffing industry. But it does all depend on the data set that it gets trained on. And how we can get all that set up and make good products for folks that are actually usable at the end of the day.

Allie

Yeah, that’s a great point.

00:21:08:02 – 00:21:31:07

Steve

Yeah, Allison, I’ll give you my take. And I agree with much of what Zia and Kyle had mentioned, but, I, too, attended SIA. I sat on one of the panels about clinician engagement, and I think a couple of themes came out of it. Number one, AI was talked about a lot, but not a lot of people understand yet what it’s going to do for them.

00:21:31:07 – 00:21:54:11

Steve

As Kyle was mentioning, certainly in the short term or medium term. So I think it was, people were saying, ooh, AI. But nobody really necessarily understood what it’s going to mean for their business. Number two, a theme that I continue to hear, and I think this will be consistent for many years to come, is the human element when it comes to healthcare staffing.

00:21:54:14 – 00:22:19:26

Steve

I think that where AI comes into play, it will be that it will certainly assist in terms of connecting candidates with organizations. It will assist in terms of taking away some of the more mundane tasks, as they say, away from the recruiters. But where do you take that efficiency and where do you take that extra time? It becomes the relationships.

00:22:19:26 – 00:22:52:06

Steve

People will still continue to need to connect and create relationships between the agency, the recruiters, and the candidate. I don’t think that’s ever going to go away. So I think it’s how can AI help take away some of the more mundane stuff and facilitate more time for connection. The panel that I was on, one of the things that I talked about is, I think one of the dangers that we run into in staffing is, is it a transaction or is it a relationship?

00:22:52:14 – 00:23:15:20

Steve

And I think the more that we reduce it to a transaction, that’s going to continue to turn people off. So I think we always need to create that balance of technology to assist in what we’re doing, but still maintain that sense of connection and relationship.

00:23:15:20 – 00:23:41:02

Oliver

That’s a good one. I’ll jump in, too, real quick. I think where we’re leaning into it in TrackFive, I think initially, is helping us make better use of data. One big pain point for us, and I would assume some of our fellow esteemed colleagues here as well, is being able to pull the data out of our clients. For example, hiring needs, job posting schemas, things like that. That’s always a really big lift because there’s so many different applicant tracking systems that provide data in so many different ways.

00:23:41:04 – 00:24:02:27

Oliver

We’re really leaning into using AI to help us pull out points of not only the agency’s offering but the agency’s job details. So we can scheme it in and sort it out and do so in a way to help make that heavy lift a little bit lighter. And then we’re also using it to help in the search experience and the matching experience.

00:24:02:27 – 00:24:27:13

Oliver

So, matching our users to specific jobs based on data points over many points in time. And we’ve been working on that right now and for the future as we’ve been kind of re-architecting the way we house our data. But that’s basically the two ways that we see it, right? So making better use of data that’s not structured and getting it into a structured form so we can leverage it, and then also helping our user experience on the site.

00:24:27:16 – 00:24:50:08

Oliver

We’ve heard – we’ve done some experimenting with helping people write better job posts. And, if they feed us poor data or poor job descriptions or whatnot, we’ve used it to try and accelerate that. But there’s all kinds of laws coming out in like New York and California and things like that now. So it’s a little bit of the Wild West, and you only need to make one critical mistake.

00:24:50:11 – 00:25:13:29

Oliver

And it could be terrible. I think it was Chase, or something like that, just had one. They were using it to write job postings. And under the ideal qualifications, the job post started off with, the ideal candidate would be a 40-year-old white man. So it made the news. All you need is one mess up and you’ve got a class action discrimination suit. So I think until we’re able to get control on that, it makes sense to use it where we can control it.

00:25:13:29 – 00:25:34:02

Youssef

I think for us, the most short-term application that we see and highest value application that we see for AI is around messaging. So I don’t think AI is going to replace the conversations that recruiters have with clinicians.

00:25:34:02 – 00:25:54:05

Youssef

But what it will do is fill in the gaps in conversations. So it has the ability, if you look at some models that exist in the market today, so GPT is a really good one. Amazon Lex is a really good one as well that isn’t talked about as much. And they really – they’ve broken the barriers to enter into AI so the applications can be applied to several industries much faster than it was possible before.

00:25:54:08 – 00:26:28:03

Youssef

So the cleanest, shortest-term application we see is around messaging intent detection. So you can actually have conversations with clinicians and fill in the gaps – recommend jobs. That’s one, detect the intent of the candidate in those conversations so that you can notify recruiters of that intent and then have basic conversations around questions that travel nurses are having. So if they have questions around a job posting’s details, so the shift details of a job posting, that’s very easy for AI to answer that question with a large enough dataset of the job postings.

00:26:28:05 – 00:26:47:14

Youssef

So where the value actually comes is in the staffing companies that have access to that data. So it’s two parts of data. One part is around messaging and conversation data. So if they have a lot of data around the recruiter conversations with clinicians that they’re having in the text message conversations, that’s amazing. Training data for GPT or Lex.

00:26:47:16 – 00:27:23:07

Youssef

The other part of it is the job supply. So if they have very clean job data, then that can be indexed and trained on GPT so that AI can answer very basic questions about those job listings.

00:27:23:10 – 00:27:44:22

Allie

Yeah, great takeaways there. Really insightful. Alright, we’re going to move ahead to the next question there, so no more AI talk, Kyle. We’ve heard from clients across the board that placements are harder to come by under the current environment regardless of the source.

We’ve seen that even referrals are down a bit, and that’s quite a phenomenon in our take that we are seeing across the spectrum. So I don’t know who may want to start with this question. Steve, perhaps, can you talk about why that may be?

00:27:44:24 – 00:28:16:07

Steve

Yeah, Allison. I mean, I think from our perspective, there is a couple of things going on. I think number one, you have the phenomenon of nurses that are going back to staff jobs. So relative to travel healthcare, which is certainly what we specialize in at The Gypsy Nurse, you have nurses that are going back to staff jobs. The average bill rate has gone down, the pay rates have gone down. So therefore, you get nurses that are saying, you know, I’m going to come back into the market when the pay starts to go up and some of the hospitals are starting to pay their staff more.

00:28:16:09 – 00:28:43:04

Steve

So I think you see that relative to an effect on candidates. Number two, certainly healthcare travelers continue to retire. You are seeing a number that are kind of in that baby boomer era, and they are leaving the profession, and some of them are also leaving the profession because of stress and mental health issues. So unfortunately, I think that that was exacerbated through the pandemic.

00:28:43:04 – 00:29:04:12

Steve

But even as we come out of it, there are a number of people that have some very significant stress-related issues that are saying, you know, I put my time in, and enough’s enough. I’m going to be doing something else. The quit rate for new nurses is extremely high. And again, I’m speaking to nurses, but I think you can extrapolate this out to the entire healthcare traveler ecosystem.

00:29:04:14 – 00:29:28:06

Steve

But the quit rate is very high. I saw a recent statistic, and I forget the exact number, but it was an inordinate amount of nurses that were just starting out in their careers that felt that they had made the wrong decision and they’re leaving. You have throughput issues in terms of educational organizations not being able to accept enough candidates because of the lack of nurse educators.

00:29:28:08 – 00:29:52:18

Steve

So there’s really a variety of factors, I think, that are that are contributing to this. And I recently saw a stat the other day that said somewhere in the neighborhood of there are 20 to 25% fewer healthcare travelers on the market now than there were just a year, a year and a half ago. So the supply, if you will, from that regard continues to go down. But I think it’s really a variety of factors.

00:29:52:18 – 00:30:20:23

Allie

Yeah. Yeah. I would say the pandemic definitely played a role in that. Just the stress from that, yeah.

Oliver

So I’d also jump in and just some interesting conversation we’ve been having with some clients. So, you go through COVID, right? And massive demand, huge needs, and there was definitely, it was less of recruiting and I would say more order taking during that time period from what we’re hearing.

00:30:20:23 – 00:30:53:00

Oliver

I mean, there were seven nurses for every position, the rates were three times as high. It was a really easy sell. A lot of these agencies onboarded a lot of recruiters who, to their knowledge, that was the job, that was the market, and the environment. And what we’re hearing from some of the clients, they’re being honest is, a lot of our pre-COVID recruiters, or recruiters that have been doing this for a very long time before the environment was like that, seemed to be doing better than the ones that were hired during COVID because where they could afford to maybe let go of a follow-up or not be as effective because they had seven other nurses that were placed for that position in 15 minutes.

00:30:53:00 – 00:31:11:16

Oliver

Now it’s hard work. We’re rolling up our sleeves. Now the recruiting and the hard work actually begins, and that has a play in it too. There’s an old proverb or something that says a poor workman blames his tools, right?

00:31:11:16 – 00:31:32:29

Oliver

But, it’s kind of the part and parcel here. So some of this has to be on the training. We had worked with an agency, who, we were helping them do some analytics on their – on the candidates we sent over, and they end up finding out that they had all these opportunities that were dropped. They had leads that weren’t going into the system.

00:31:32:29 – 00:31:50:17

Oliver

They had all kinds of other issues besides the platform, and the CEO got involved. They stopped the shop, you know, 80 recruiters in this company, and they literally went back to basics. Training camp. Started again. And had to teach people actually how to recruit rather than just take orders. So I think it’s a compounded issue with a lot of things. But yeah. Yes, Steve, you’re absolutely right too.

00:31:50:17 – 00:32:12:10

Youssef

I think the main thing that we saw is that job supply just got cut by over 50%. So when that happens, it’s just extremely competitive for all these staffing companies. So what would happen before, during COVID, is you might submit a candidate. Let’s say three candidates, three times, and you would get one placement.

00:32:12:10 – 00:32:34:05

Youssef

So the conversion rate for submission to placement is about 30%. What’s happened now is you have to submit a nursing candidate maybe ten, 20 times to get that same placement. So obviously, the placement rates kind of dropped, and that’s just because the job supply got cut. So there’s a lot more staffing companies competing for the same jobs, and that’s happening with the transition of hospitals building an in-house travel program. So these large health systems are building out in-house travel programs, and then nurses moving more toward staff positions.

00:32:34:05 – 00:33:13:22

Zia

Yeah, I would jump in and 100% agree with Steve talking about – nurses are exhausted, post-COVID, lots of retirement. And on top of that, piggybacking off what Youssef said, jobs have been – the orders are less. So if you believe the numbers that are published, 68 to 75% of the businesses that small to midsize agencies have are through MSPs.

00:33:13:27 – 00:33:44:09

Zia

So when that takes place, when the orders are going down, MSPs are naturally going to fill those first, and the ones that you’re going to get are going to be much, much harder than when you were short on nurses. So I think the challenge really is now, we’re going through this transition where the pendulum has swung the other way, where there are less job orders nationally speaking, there are regions that are still hot, no question.

00:33:44:11 – 00:34:07:18

Zia

New York, being one of them. The other would be – I meet with our Vice President of SaaS, and she’s telling me that we’re having much more sign-ups on Wanderly than we ever had. So how do I address that when the orders are less, but we have a lot more agencies that are signing up on Wanderly?

00:34:07:23 – 00:34:33:18

Zia

I’ve never seen these types of numbers before. And then I look at the agency names. I don’t recognize 90% of them because I think these are the folks that came over during the COVID or post-COVID times from the IT worlds. So you now are competing with all of those agencies that didn’t exist before. So obviously, there may be a consolidation that takes place. So your challenge, not only MSPs are dialing down the orders, but you’re also competing against all these newcomers that came into our space. And so we have to work through that narrative right now.

00:34:33:20 – 00:35:19:04

Kyle

Yeah, so, I’m just going to jump in and say that I think everybody’s covered almost everything there is to cover here. One of the benefits of going last on such an experienced panel. I agree with everything that everybody said and all I would do would be to piggyback on things here. I mean, I heard Steve mention, I believe in passing a little bit like maybe there were, you know, seven submissions for every job before.

00:35:19:04 – 00:35:36:00

Kyle

I would be curious to know what that number is now. And again, a lot of it has to do with the fact that we had – I remember there was a time, it could have been potentially been like this time last year where we might have had, you know, 200 or 250.

00:35:36:00 – 00:35:57:14

Kyle

And we don’t dedupe jobs on our job board like we don’t dedupe. We don’t do a lot of those things, but we had like 200-250,000 jobs on the job board. Now we have 100,000 with more partners. As Zia said, we’ve had a lot of partners approach us. We’re signing up new partners right now as opposed to churning partners.

00:35:57:14 – 00:36:32:13

Kyle

And I think that there is, you know, we are unwinding from the pandemic to a certain degree. It’s going to take some time to see how that plays out. And then to speak to Oliver’s point, what do agencies do in the face of that? You got to retrench and get back to the basics kind of thing and, get all your processes and procedures down. Get all those as friction-free as they possibly can be and start getting back to those basics of communicating with the candidates. Remembering what staffing really is. In normal times, basically.

00:36:32:15 – 00:37:02:14

Allie

Well, Kyle, why don’t we start with you on this one then? I think that we’ve all heard that gross margins are decreasing as hospital bill rates are shrinking. How is this affecting how companies are using sourcing partners like advertising channels? And then on top of that, how does this affect how recruiters should engage with potential candidates?

00:37:02:14 – 00:37:27:13

Kyle

Yeah, it’s interesting. When I see the question about how it’s affecting how they’re using advertising partners, like I said and like Zia affirmed, we’re getting more sign-ups now from that side than we were previously.

00:37:27:16 – 00:37:51:10

Kyle

We’re getting more inbound interest than we would normally. And so from that perspective, I feel like the agencies are on the other end. Because in general, there are just far fewer candidates. They’re not finding the candidates elsewhere.

00:37:51:10 – 00:38:09:29

Kyle

And it’s really competitive for candidates. It’s highly competitive for candidates. And a lot of that has to do with some of this lower bill rate. We’ve kind of covered that lower pay rate, lower bill rate. People exit the environment and go back to staff or do something else. Maybe they’d made an awful lot of money during the pandemic and rightly so.

00:38:10:01 – 00:38:34:08

Kyle

And now they’ve got to take a little time off. There are a lot of things that have happened. So with respect to how agencies are approaching services like ours, I think there’s a thing where they’re not getting – they’re going everywhere right now to try and find those candidates, and they’re going there with these lower pay rates and they know they’re going there with these lower pay rates.

00:38:34:08 – 00:38:52:29

Kyle

And so the second question is, what do they have to do now? Well, those are really tough conversations to have. I see them. We manage a couple of social media groups so we can see conversations play out in real time between healthcare travelers and recruiters. Extremely difficult conversations to have.

00:38:52:29 – 00:39:19:19

Kyle

On the one hand, I would firmly, totally agree that healthcare professionals have been underpaid here for a little while. And maybe they’re starting to get some pay increases. That’s a tough conversation to have because that’s part of what you’re recruiting for, right? There are people who travel for lifestyle and all that kind of stuff.

00:39:19:19 – 00:39:47:18

Kyle

And there’s people who travel for the pay. When the pay is down, that’s a tough conversation to have. And that’s where you get back to what Oliver had mentioned. Got to get back to the basics got to have that training around how to have those conversations. How to have those discussions like, hey, you know, you can wait three weeks to get three or four or $5 more an hour. But, if you wait three weeks and you’re not working, you lose that three weeks of pay. There’s only 52 weeks in a year. So, at the end of the year, you have these conversations and sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. There’s no easy way around how companies recruit in the face of lower pay.

00:39:47:18 – 00:40:28:29

Steve

I’ll just jump in here, Allison. Certainly from my perspective and we have a very large social media platform on The Gypsy Nurse. We’ve got about 600,000 followers across Facebook and a number of other major platforms and we see a lot of conversations, as Kyle was mentioning.

00:40:29:02 – 00:41:03:06

Steve

And I think there is this challenge of lower pay, as Kyle was mentioning. Also, too, when you look at the business of healthcare staffing, it is a very immediate business. And when you have organizations that are looking to fill positions, you have hospitals that have immediate needs. It’s a very immediate satisfaction type of business.

00:41:03:08 – 00:41:27:07

Steve

It’s staffing is very, very hectic. It’s very demanding. Recruiting is a tough job, and so you have that aspect of it from the agency side. But then, on the candidates’ side, as Kyle was mentioning, a lot of folks are looking for the pay rates. The pay rates have dropped. They have a staff job now. They’re not sure they want to go back into travel.

00:41:27:09 – 00:41:55:26

Steve

It takes this relationship building and really what I like to call, and I think Oliver and I have talked about it back over the summer, but I call it the long game. It’s this balance between getting somebody and getting them into a contract versus somebody may not be available now, but they may be looking in three months or six months or nine months.

00:41:55:28 – 00:42:21:16

Steve

So it is making that connection, developing that relationship, and finding the balance between the immediate needs and candidates are immediately available and building relationships with candidates for the long term because eventually those needs may come along. And to Kyle’s excellent point, I think, about this, kind of that recruiting dynamic and getting back to basics, that’s part of getting back to basics.

00:42:21:16 – 00:42:50:24

Steve

It’s about cultivating these relationships that may not pay off, so to speak, now. But they may pay off in three months or six months or nine months. I think probably as organizations that work with a variety of healthcare staffing firms to help them meet their candidate needs, I think we all face that challenge of while we supply and make connections between the agencies and these candidates, the fact is that 95% of these folks are currently working.

00:42:50:27 – 00:43:13:16

Steve

Even in a down market, most of the healthcare travelers out there are working. So it’s finding that balance between the immediate needs and building a relationship between your agency and them to eventually, when they are looking, bring them into the fold and hopefully you can place them in an agreement.

00:43:13:18 – 00:43:38:06

Allie

Yeah, Yeah. Oliver, what would you have to say on that or Zia, I saw you were about to speak, Zia.

Oliver

Go ahead, Zia.

Zia

It’s okay. Oliver can go first.

Oliver

No, after you. After you.

00:43:38:09 – 00:44:11:20

Zia

I’d put it into two buckets. One are things that agencies kind of control, but they don’t have total control. And the other, they do. And I’ll try to articulate that. On the side of you can partially control, as we’re coming off the COVID high, if you would, from a pay rate perspective, and you are trying to find the nurses, you are now, it’s a sliding effect, right? How do you keep those pay packages higher? Well, in order to do that, as the bill rates are coming down, it is naturally going to eat into your gross profit margin so you can attract the nurses, especially on the nurse side.

00:44:11:22 – 00:44:41:24

Zia

At the same time, as I said earlier, you now have many more agencies that came into this. So now you are also challenged and you have more challengers. So everyone is lowering that gross profit margin, trying to keep up with the pay package and not to mention what everyone’s touched on is you have less nurses to pick from because of all all the reasons that Steve and Kyle mentioned earlier.

00:44:41:27 – 00:45:03:10

Zia

So what do you do? There are two levers you have. Either you try to manage your gross profit or you try to manage your bottom line. So that’s the other side of this is, as an agency, you have to think about A to Z. As much automation and integration and seamless integration you can have with your sourcing partners.

00:45:03:12 – 00:45:27:24

Zia

All of us here – most of us integrate with every single ATS you can think of to a point where you can also help push them into the VMS and MSP system. So when you have that end-to-end integration, which is what we offer at Wanderly, at the same time, making sure that it’s all about speed to market, right?

00:45:27:24 – 00:45:53:06

Zia

So that’s why you need to have that integration. The other thing that falls within the integration is every agency has their tech stack, right? And they are going to these conferences, and they see all these innovative solutions. They’re bringing home all these different stacks and they’re trying to fit them in. And the core competency of most agencies, unless you’re one of those large ones, are not technology.

00:45:53:06 – 00:46:15:23

Zia

And so they’ll try it out for a year, 18 months, they’re swapping them out. So you have lots of inefficiencies there where you thought you have so much automation. So that’s something to think about is, who are the partners that can help you seamlessly integrate into that tech stack as well?

00:46:15:23 – 00:46:38:14

Allie

Now, I want to pivot there, and then we can come back to this question for Oliver and Youssef to add in. But you had talked about leads, right? And we actually had a comment here from Jacob, and he had said it’s hard to keep quality when you have a programmatic or ad-driven job board and transactional products create transactional leads. That kind of goes with what you said. So what would you say to that?

00:46:38:17 – 00:47:10:27

Zia

Well, I think some of us, when we first touched on the AI and the ML component, there’s so much- I mean, that itself tries to remove the human element of that and get you leads to the extent, get you matching the extent, but it does not replace that human touch need on the agency side. You must have, and I think I saw the stats at SIA that 80% of the clinicians, yes, pay is number one, but the rest of the 80% is about relationship, relationship, relationship.

00:47:10:27 – 00:47:37:05

Zia

Treating them with honesty and integrity. They want to know that pay packages are published or the AI automatically matched to is indeed what you’re going to deliver. Right? So that matters. And the human element. Yes. I mean, on the Wanderly platform we make less money. But when a clinician applies to an agency, that agency gets that lead.

00:47:37:07 – 00:47:57:29

Zia

We don’t distribute it to all other agencies saying, here are all the other agencies that you may want to submit to. They can do that, but we don’t submit it automatically. So it’s important to make that human connection. And when someone wants to chat with you, you need to respond. There is no substitute, not responding, because they have choices.

00:47:58:01 – 00:48:16:13

Zia

They will go to various platforms to chat with someone else. You can put a chatbot and try to do all sorts of things, but at the end of the day, you are taking a nurse from middle of nowhere and moving them to say, New York or moving them to Florida, moving them to San Francisco. It’s a life-changing event for a lot of these folks. They want to feel comfortable, and they want to talk to a recruiter.

00:48:16:15 – 00:48:37:17

Oliver

Youssef, do you want to jump in on this, too? I want to get you some time as well.

Youssef

Yeah, sure. So what we found is that agencies are prioritizing a lot more recruiter efficiency. So what that means is they’re prioritizing lead sources and doubling down on lead sources that have historically been performing in placements.

00:48:37:20 – 00:48:59:17

Youssef

So if I have a lead source that is converting at a low percentage from lead to placement, I’m going to cut that because the margins are lower. So I’m going to prioritize recruiter efficiency. So I’m going to prioritize the lead sources that convert at a healthier rate because margins are lower.

Allie

Great. That was spot on. Oliver, I know you have a say on this.

00:48:59:20 – 00:49:17:27

Oliver

Yeah. I think efficiency is one thing. It’s interesting too, because a lot of the clients will – if you talk to 20 or 30 different clients, depending on who you’re working with and the organization, they have different KPIs and metrics they use for success, whether it be cost per candidate placement, hire, things like that.

00:49:17:27 – 00:49:38:25

Oliver

So you are sometimes having many different conversations with different people, and you do have to kind of bring them together around a single KPI or get them on the same page. The other thing we’ve seen is, and I love Zia’s point about that expanding tech stack, because I feel like at times, what we’ve seen is some of our partners get really entrenched with – we’ll call it the shiny object in the room, right?

00:49:38:26 – 00:49:54:26

Oliver

If it’s this platform or this platform, and they’re not really taking a second to think holistically about how these pieces play together. If they play together, how they connect together, and the more complexity you add to your tech stack and HR stack, the harder it also is to manage that stack.

00:49:54:26 – 00:50:14:18

Oliver

So we’ve seen issues where automation has gotten away from our partners. And they haven’t been tracking it. And they’ve had text messages that go crazy and texting the wrong people or blasting so many people. So they opt out. We’ve seen a lot of that type of stuff.

00:50:14:18 – 00:50:31:10

Oliver

So to kind of expand on Zia’s point is yeah, there’s a lot of great technology out there in the world, especially in the reengagement side. But it really is adhering to a strategy and making sure that everything works together. So it does take kind of a step-back approach.

00:50:31:13 – 00:51:01:24

Zia

So, Alison, I actually literally took this question and typed it into ChatGPT to see what it would say, and it answered. If you saw me a little distracted, I was typing. It says, “a decline in hospital bill rates can indeed impact gross margins negatively, posing financial challenges for healthcare providers. It’s essential for them to adapt strategies to maintain sustainable operations amidst such challenges.”

00:51:01:26 – 00:51:32:20

Zia

So again, I interpret tech stack, integration, automation, to be able to move your bottom line.

Oliver

Welcome ChatGPT to the webinar, everybody.

Allie

Youssef, what were you going to say there?

Youssef

Yeah, one more thing that we’ve seen is that staffing companies are prioritizing jobs that have better margins. So if they are primarily advertising VMS jobs and they have some direct positions, they will prioritize the direct positions and do targeted advertising because they know they can fill those positions easier and the margins are healthier.

00:51:32:22 – 00:51:58:04

Youssef

So it’s going from a world where some staffing companies had tens of thousands of jobs where they could just take a candidate, and there’s a good chance they could fill it for whatever position is currently available to a world where they’re recruiting based on the job to the candidate. So they’re picking the job first that has healthy margins, that has a direct relationship with the facility, and then trying to find candidates for that position because they know they can fill that position easier at healthier margins.

00:51:58:06 – 00:52:19:12

Allie

Yeah, somebody said building a pipeline is also one of the major and important aspects of recruiting and referrals. Yeah, if anybody here – we have quite a few people on. If anybody here has questions, feel free to drop them in and we’ll ask them.

00:52:19:18 – 00:52:41:14

Kyle

Real quick. I’d like to jump in real quick and kind of speak to Jacob’s question that you read. First, I’ll say, I want to talk about this tech stack thing real quick. Remember, as an agency, when you’re using third-party tools that you’re not the only person, or you’re not the only one using that third party tool, so when you got text messaging, everybody got text messaging. And you have to think about the candidate on the other side of that equation.

00:52:41:20 – 00:53:12:19

Kyle

And you’re going to determine what the value is based on the results that you get and you go from there. But there can be kind of commoditization in the sense when we’re all using the same third-party tools, right? And so that’s where the human touch comes into play as well. But to get to to Jacob’s questions just real quick here was that, this idea of job boards being transactional and I think there are many, many different kinds of job boards out there, job board is kind of a catch-all phrase.

00:53:12:19 – 00:53:39:23

Kyle

There’s aggregators, there’s lead generators, there’s all these things. But the thing about this panel that I believe I recognize is that we’re all engaged in the niche. None of us are importing anybody else’s jobs and then doing pay-per-click advertising off of our job board to some other job board. And if you’re not familiar with any of these things, let me take a step back and go back to when BluePipes first started, we did not want to have a job board.

00:53:39:26 – 00:54:05:02

Kyle

We wanted to be completely 100% relational. And we tried that approach, trying to be like LinkedIn, where you could come and connect with people. You could send in mail, connect, and build a relationship. And unfortunately, it didn’t work very well. And so we ended up going with the job board. But the way that we operate our job board is such that we try to build a relationship.

00:54:05:02 – 00:54:34:26

Kyle

And I think that everybody here does that. And what I mean by that is – I encourage everybody to really spend some time going around out there and clicking. Do a search on Google for travel nursing jobs and then click through the process a candidate goes through. It is a freaking nightmare. I mean, it is a nightmare of dark patterns designed to part you with your contact information so that they can sell it to somebody else. None of us here are engaged in that activity.

00:54:34:28 – 00:54:55:28

Kyle

What we do instead is we take jobs from our partners that we work with directly. We do not resell clicks to somebody else, etc. We don’t take people’s contact information and then just sell it willy nilly to anybody who’s going to buy it, including Zoom info or any other service on earth.

00:54:56:04 – 00:55:20:02

Kyle

You’ve heard every single one of us talk about the relationship. And I think that we’re trying to build those things as best we possibly can in our platforms. And I fully agree that there are job boards out there that do and have that completely 100% transaction-based approach. I don’t think that’s anybody here. I mean, you can see it with The Gypsy Nurse. They have all of these communities, and outreach, and a conference, and everything that they’re doing to build relationships.

00:55:20:02 – 00:55:44:26

Kyle

Youssef’s website’s got a great, amazing, beautiful job board that is designed – and then he’s got the chat thing going on to help the candidate through the process. You go to another job board and you’re just in some dark, black hole where you don’t know what happens next. Wanderly’s doing the same thing. TrackFive’s doing the same thing. We’re all trying to build those things into our job boards and kind of innovate on what a job board has traditionally been.

00:55:45:01 – 00:56:15:25

Allie

Really good. Alright, we’re going to pivot here a little bit, but we’ve heard from some agencies that they are seeing an increase in hospitals filling their own positions with new hospital internal staffing agencies popping up. How do you think this will affect the market as a whole? Because I know that this is a big shift. And whoever wants to go first. Youssef, would you like to start? You haven’t started yet.

00:56:15:26 – 00:56:35:10

Youssef

Yeah, sure. So it’s true that large health systems are building out their own internal staffing companies. This isn’t as easy for smaller facilities or health systems because they just don’t have the budget or process in place to be able to do that. So they will still end up relying on staffing companies.

00:56:35:10 – 00:56:58:05

Youssef

It’s these large health systems that have multiple facilities, so a large health system, let’s say, that has 100 facilities. That is a prime kind of example. They can build out an internal travel staffing program. So yeah, that’s happening. I think the job supply will continue to compress because of that. But you also have smaller facilities that will rely on staffing companies.

00:56:58:08 – 00:57:28:03

Zia

Yeah, I think I’ll jump in and say it is definitely a new model that the hospitals are receptive to. Given the fact that what has taken place with the bill rates and whatnot during COVID and we’re quite familiar with that, and this is a byproduct of that. So there are different names for these things, you know, direct sourcing and various other types of things, you know, agency in a box, what have you.

00:57:28:03 – 00:58:01:16

Zia

So there are many hospitals that are trying to do it themselves, and there are also many hospitals who tried to do it themselves and failed. And you can Google that and look that up. But there are some partners that do it very well who have experiences in building these platforms and working with hospitals. So I read somewhere on SIA that about 18 to 22% of the existing MSP/VMS business may migrate toward that.

00:58:01:18 – 00:58:25:20

Zia

So when I say toward that, it takes the existing mid to small size agency and fits them in a different way. So there may be a different tiering level that the hospitals try to fill it themselves first. And where they can’t, they will open it up to others. So this is a different flavor on a VMS type of platform slash MSP, but the MSP, in this case, is the hospital, right? So you’re seeing a new model here, and a few of us are working very diligently in that space as well to empower the hospitals.

00:58:25:20 – 00:58:53:11

Steve

Allison, I’ll jump in here too, and I agree with what Zia is mentioning as well as Youssef. I think in a perfect world for the facilities, they would prefer not to have to rely on travelers.

00:58:53:13 – 00:59:14:14

Steve

And that’s been going on since time in memoriam. Yeah, ultimately they would prefer not to have to use travelers, but the reality is they continue to do so. And I think they will continue to do so in the future. I don’t – I think that Zia was mentioning there are a lot of different models that they’re currently trying to implement.

00:59:14:16 – 00:59:39:19

Steve

Some of them successfully, some of them not very successfully. But I think that the need for travelers will always be there. It’s supply and demand. It is census issues. There are a variety of reasons that they need to bring people in from the outside. So I think that relative to what we all do and what the agencies do, the need is always going to be there.

00:59:39:19 – 01:00:08:03

Steve

I think there will be times where some systems and some large facilities will be more successful than others. But I don’t think that these new models, if you will, will eliminate the need for organizations like ours or certainly the agencies. The need will continue to go on.

Allie

Kyle, I’m interested to hear your thoughts on this.

01:00:08:08 – 01:00:33:25

Kyle

Yeah, if I can. I think the points have been touched on. I think what’s important here for me, at least the way I look at it, is there’s a reason that healthcare staffing agencies kind of exist, and that’s because they are able to realize economies of scale from pooling hundreds to thousands of jobs together. And we’re looking for folks who are extremely difficult to find. It’s like finding a needle, a slightly tinged needle in a haystack full of needles to find this person that’s going to take this travel job.

01:00:33:27 – 01:00:53:18

Kyle

And so what I would say is, anytime an agency partner comes to us, one of my first questions is, how many jobs do you have? And the reason I ask that question is because you have 20 or 50 jobs, you’re going to have a really difficult time at having an agency.

01:00:53:20 – 01:01:09:02

Kyle

And it has to do with all kinds of things, including the way that the market works in general. We’ve talked about it a thousand times. It’s the speed to market. Most of the time, you’re not going to be able to submit the candidate that you got to apply to a job while the job was open. You had to have that candidate ready to go to submit at the time a job opened in order to get them to get there.

01:01:09:02 – 01:01:29:29

Kyle

So this whole idea of taking a job and then going out and advertising that job and then finding a candidate – it does work that way. But it also works other ways. And so the point is, it’s very competitive and you need to have the next job for that candidate to go to/

01:01:30:03 – 01:01:48:29

Kyle

So if you have 5000 jobs and that one job didn’t work out yet – What other job can I get for you? I’ve got all of them. I’ve got all of the jobs. You can place that candidate anywhere. And then when the candidate gets done with their contract, that contract is done. You need to place them on their next contract.

01:01:49:02 – 01:02:11:13

Kyle

And all of this – you’re competing as a hospital doing this. And speaking to Youssef’s point, it is smaller organizations. And I don’t know how small that organization is because let’s remember HealthTrust slash Parallon slash whatever they were called before. HCAs have been around for a while and many hospitals have tried this over the years.

01:02:11:13 – 01:02:28:07

Kyle

And there are some places where it has worked, you know, there’s certain hospital systems in Florida that have needs routinely at the same time every single year. And so they pull people in that way. But for a small – and I don’t know what small means here. To me, it’s a number of job orders that you have.

01:02:28:07 – 01:02:52:21

Kyle

If you have fewer than hundreds of open job orders at any given time, you’re going to have a struggle competing against agencies with thousands of job orders. And the economy is not going to make dollars and cents for you. Right? You know, in the short term, I think it might matter because a bunch of them are going to be trying to do this and get it set up and they’re going to be having some success here and there. But in the long term, they’re probably going to realize this is not a profitable way for me to operate.

01:02:52:21 – 01:03:15:29

Zia

I’ll just take 30 seconds to add too. I mean, Kyle hit this right on the nail. From day one, one really was never, and I’m sure everyone here represented, is about a database. You know, when I have an agency or partner that asks, “Zia, how many clinicians do you have in your database?”

01:03:16:01 – 01:03:36:10

Zia

That’s the wrong question. And I think, Kyle, you hit it. It’s a needle in a haystack, right? Do you know who is looking for a job that day? So if you’re simply looking for how big is your database, you can go buy the 3.5 million RN database and cold call and all of that. All of us here, we’re a marketplace.

01:03:36:10 – 01:03:57:10

Zia

It’s a two-sided marketplace. And to your point, Kyle, you have to have – I think we have a rule, we won’t accept anyone less than 200 jobs, I believe. For some reason, that’s the very low end and most will be not successful on the lower end. And that’s why we got to have a two sided marketplace. Otherwise, you won’t make the connection.

01:03:57:14 – 01:04:17:26

Zia

So yeah, I had to fight that. Is Wanderly a job board? No. We’re a marketplace. We’ve been called Kayak of our industry by someone else.

Allie

Oliver, do you have any opinions on this one?

Oliver

No, I’m good. If we can keep it moving. I think it’s all been said.

01:04:17:26 – 01:04:45:10

Allie

Alright. We only have time for one more question.

Zia

We had 14 questions, and we only got to five, alright.

Allie

Well, this one, I for sure want to talk on. So if we have time for one more after this, then great. But if not, let’s end on this question. So the phrase vendor-neutral has started to be thrown around more as agencies buy out or create their own job boards and then lead sources.

01:04:45:10 – 01:05:15:26

Allie

And even VMS systems. How do you think this will impact the industry, especially with smaller agencies? And then to add on to that, what is your take, as we’ve been seeing this play out, with something like Fusion and Aya. Whoever wants to jump in.

Zia

I’ve talked a lot, so I’ll just be quiet. Also, a very sensitive topic.

01:05:15:28 – 01:05:43:19

Oliver

Yeah, yeah. So I’ll take it up a level. So this question is about kind of the gray line between – so you used to have your staffing agencies, you used to have your marketing agencies, you used to have your job boards, platforms, talent source platforms, whatever you want to call it. And now what we’re seeing, and you have your VMSs, and now you kind of have this trend where everyone’s kind of – and you used to have your clients, and they would go to sourcing providers, right?

01:05:43:26 – 01:06:08:08

Oliver

And now the lines are very much blurring. We’re seeing, for example, Indeed, getting into staffing. We’re seeing VMS systems getting into talent acquisition, specifically in some of our other verticals. I’m sure it’ll head this way at some point. We’re seeing clients open up talent platforms alongside so the lines are blurring a little bit as we move forward.

01:06:08:08 – 01:06:26:27

Oliver

And I don’t know if that’s an opportunistic type of thing. I’m sure part of it is or just a reallocation of internal resources for some of these businesses. But yeah. I think it’s going to change the industry a little bit because I think that, like I said, the lines are blurring.

01:06:26:27 – 01:06:50:29

Oliver

Everybody kind of had their corners and I think, if this progresses long term, I think it is going to change the landscape a lot. I don’t see how it couldn’t. I don’t know.

01:06:50:29 – 01:07:14:23

Zia

It’s actually very positive if it’s truly indeed a vendor-neutral platform. It’s really positive for mid to small-sized agencies because you get to participate. You have more VMSs to work with. And if the intentions are pure, then it’s great for the industry. But Oliver is on to that also. Is this the flavor of the year where, to acquire some of these companies and be part of the vendor-neutral? So I think we’ll look back a couple of years from now and see what really transpired.

01:07:14:26 – 01:07:33:29

Youssef

So one of the challenges that we saw with Fusion Marketplace is that a lot of the companies that were on Fusion Marketplace, they know it’s owned by Fusion and they don’t want to be giving money to their competitor. So a large staffing company that’s going to be giving money to a job board that is owned by one of their competitors where they know the data is owned.

01:07:33:29 – 01:07:52:17

Youssef

It might be organized as a separate company or whatever. But at the end of the day, they know it’s owned by their competitor, and they don’t feel comfortable doing that. So that’s one challenge. The other challenge is that these vendor-neutral VMSs oftentimes are not as neutral as they advertise them to be. So a very large vendor-neutral program is not as vendor-neutral as they say it is.

01:07:52:23 – 01:08:29:07

Youssef

They will cut job supply and fulfill those orders themselves if the job supply is low. So these smaller staffing companies will suffer because they can’t fulfill their own jobs.

Zia

I think, I won’t name anyone, but there are a couple of vendor-neutral companies that are truly vendor-neutral. There’s terminology confusion. I always debate with my president, what is an MSP and what is a VMS? To me, an MSP service provider utilizes, supposedly a VMS technology, right?

01:08:29:10 – 01:08:58:01

Zia

And it all got blurred when ShiftWise was acquired by AMN and all of that took place. A true vendor-neutral really is for the benefit of the hospital, going to the hospitals and saying, I have 100 agencies that will equally get all of these. Of course, there are some tiering that happens because of the SLAs that the agencies have to meet, but that truly is what a vendor-neutral should be. Agnostic to the vendors that are behind them.

01:08:58:04 – 01:09:23:22

Zia

But in MSP world, it’s not. They will fill it themselves, and they have their favorites and so on, so forth. So that is a challenge. But yeah, I mean the ones that I know starts with H so, they’re both H.

01:09:23:24 – 01:10:03:09

Steve

Just to expand the conversation a little bit and you know, we talk about different supplies and sources and so forth. Many years ago, when I was involved with a startup that was an online community for nurses, we had an advisor that made the statement, “Nobody owns the database.” And I think that as we talk about this, it all kind of bearing that in mind, meaning that these healthcare travelers, not only are they with, frankly, all of our respective organizations in terms of, you know, profiles and what have you, but they are with a variety of different agencies. They’re with a variety of different facilities in their own internal databases, if you will.

01:10:03:11 – 01:10:37:08

Steve

So I think what, kind of circling back to the original part of our our discussion here, I think that, you know, nobody can say, hey, this person is mine. This is part of my organization, this candidate is mine. I think really what it comes down to is who is going to treat that candidate in the way that they want to be treated, interacted with, whether it is the platforms that we all manage or whether it is the agencies or the facilities, because it’s a finite amount of people out there.

01:10:37:10 – 01:11:08:15

Steve

It continues to be a challenging market. It will continue to be a challenging market in the future. So rather than looking at it as a – I think there are some out there, you know, beyond us that look at it as kind of a proprietary database. I think the reality is, is that these healthcare travelers interact with a variety of different organizations and probably should continue to do so because in a free market, they’re looking to find the best opportunities, the best deals, the best relationships, the best organizations to work with.

01:11:08:18 – 01:11:30:29

Steve

So I think it’s up to us as platforms, and it’s up to the agencies and frankly, the facilities to treat these guys in a matter of, you know, respect and transparency. And I think that is what eventually wins is how these guys are treated and interacted with. So I just wanted to put that out there from from my perspective.

01:11:31:01 – 01:11:59:13

Allie

Thanks, Steve. Kyle, do you have any input on this before we jump to questions from the audience?

Kyle

Yeah. So I think Zia nailed it a little bit there with differentiating what makes a VMS a VMS, and an MSP an MSP. They are different. To me, the VMS is the one that, on the hospital side of things doesn’t – that that the hospital doesn’t know where this is coming from.

01:11:59:15 – 01:12:34:13

Kyle

It’s a best candidate at best price thing, whereas with the MSP, the MSP is always going to have the incentive to put their candidate in front of the hospital first and try and get one of their candidates hired. And that might not be the best candidate. And so again, I will agree with that, if it is a true vendor management system or a neutral vendor management system, then that’s, I think, the best thing for the industry as a whole and for healthcare organizations as well.

01:12:34:15 – 01:12:59:01

Kyle

And to speak quickly to something that Youssef mentioned, you know, I think it’s interesting, this idea that with Fusion marketplace and agencies being not comfortable, you know, going that route because they’re a competitor kind of thing. There’s some nuances there that I think are interesting to unpack that agencies should be considering. One, and I’m going to say maybe you shouldn’t be so concerned about that with a Fusion marketplace type of model.

01:12:59:03 – 01:13:27:20

Kyle

And the reason that I would say that is because as an agency, you’re not sending Fusion marketplace your candidates. Instead, they’re supposed to be finding candidates for you. Right? You’re not going and dumping your candidates into Fusion Marketplace’s database or something like that. That’s where I would get concerned if I was an agency. Am I going, and am I taking my candidates and putting them somewhere else that some other agency has access to?

01:13:27:23 – 01:13:51:16

Kyle

And that, I think, is a nuance that kind of gets lost. And there are situations that are like that. The last thing I’ll say about that is I think, and I’ve heard this from many agencies, that sometimes they feel like the rug is going to get pulled out from under them, that a marketplace is going to get built and suddenly it’s going to turn into a staffing agency.

01:13:51:16 – 01:14:10:19

Kyle

That, of course, is a fear. But it doesn’t necessarily need to be just a fear for a Fusion marketplace, or it could be a fear for any marketplace out there. And as Oliver mentioned, we’re seeing that with Indeed now. I mean, let’s face it, Indeed is trying to get into the staffing game and they’re doing kind of a good job of it right now.

01:14:10:21 – 01:14:29:27

Kyle

So really what they did was they went out and said, let’s get all the candidates on the platform. Okay, now we’re a staffing agency. And so that’s always going to be a fear no matter where agencies or employers in general – it’s kind of a tough spot for staffing agencies to be in, but they just kind of have to accept in good faith. That’s the way the way the market kind of works right now.

01:14:29:27 – 01:14:46:14

Allie

Alright. Well, we have two questions here I’d like to get to in the chat. And if you guys could take just like a couple of seconds each since we’re just over time, but I would like to get to them. That would be great. So the first one is from Chloe.

01:14:46:16 – 01:15:11:20

Allie

What’s the sweet spot with job count you’re all seeing? Some platforms are pushing agencies now to post 2 to 3000 and others are saying post 7000 plus.

Kyle

I think it depends on how many candidates you’re looking to get. The thing about a job board is none of us should be manufacturing applicants for you. They should be coming naturally to some degree.

01:15:11:20 – 01:15:25:21

Kyle

So I can’t tell you how many applicants you’re going to get for giving them a job. So what I can tell you is that the more jobs that you have on the platform, the higher the likelihood is that when that candidate comes searching for that job, that they’re going to find your job because you have something that matches there.

01:15:25:21 – 01:15:45:02

Kyle

So it just increases it or that we have more jobs that we can then send to our database of candidates to say, hey, you know, are you interested in this job? Because it matches some criteria that you’ve entered into our platform previously. So that’s what the whole job count thing does at the end of the day.

01:15:45:04 – 01:16:12:04

Kyle

And so the sweet spot, it depends on how many candidates you want to get and the platform that you’re posting them on can deliver. It’s going to vary.

Zia

And definitely, you know, quantity matters because if you’re on a marketplace, you want some visibility, right? So to Kyle’s point, you do need enough jobs so you get visibility in the marketplace.

01:16:12:07 – 01:16:39:04

Zia

Obviously, the pay package matters. Obviously, where you’re looking regionally matters more. People want to go to those. All the states we all know. California, New York, Florida, Vegas. If you have jobs there, that has a factor into this. So it’s a tough one to answer, to quantify, really. But it starts with number of jobs.

01:16:39:07 – 01:17:03:15

Steve

So, Allison, just real quick. I would agree with what Kyle and Zia were saying. And just to further expand upon that, you know, what’s also important is what is in the job, what is in the job description. I think it’s, and I know oftentimes we have agencies that are pulling from other areas, but it certainly from our perspective, with our board, there is a correlation between I mean, you have to have, to Zia’s point, you have to have a certain number of jobs to gain visibility.

01:17:03:15 – 01:17:33:02

Steve

Particularly, we have an organization that’s posting 5000 versus somebody that’s posting 500. So that volume of jobs is important. But once you have that volume, what is in the description itself? And we’ve seen a correlation between organizations that, you know, “ER Nurse Boston, $5000 for pay” or whatever, and there’s nothing else. And I think that, forget healthcare staffing for a second.

01:17:33:02 – 01:17:55:03

Steve

If you look at kind of job posting 101, employment marketplace 101. I’m a candidate. I’m not going to take that seriously. That’s kind of the old school, which is, well, call us for more information or apply and we’ll give you more information. I think now, more than ever, people are looking for transparency. There’s an expectation of transparency.

01:17:55:05 – 01:18:14:05

Steve

So the aspect of robust job descriptions and really putting some meat on it, I think, are very, very important when you talk about the type of reaction and response you’re going to get.

Allie

Youssef, you had touched on – thank you, Steve. You had touched on that question in the chat. Do you want to just touch on it for everybody else?

01:18:14:06 – 01:18:32:29

Youssef

Yeah. So the challenge that we see is that when a staffing company comes in, they post, let’s say, 10,000 jobs. The jobs that they’re posting, a lot of them are extremely competitive job postings. So their jobs with very high pay are locations that have, you know, tens of submissions on them. And those are just very difficult jobs to actually place.

01:18:33:01 – 01:18:53:14

Youssef

So what we’ve seen agencies do is prioritize jobs that they know are likely to be placed, so they’ll focus on specific specialties and state combinations that they think will have a higher conversion rate compared to other higher-paying jobs. The ones that post 10,000 jobs – they’re playing a volume game. So they know that, you know, if a person applies for job, the pay is $4,000 a week.

01:18:53:17 – 01:19:11:05

Youssef

They’re unlikely to get that job. They’re going to get the applicants, but they’re not going to get that job. And that’s because it’s extremely competitive, and they’re just trying to get them on the phone so they can massage the conversation and get them filled to another position. What we find is that most of the time when somebody applies for a job on Vetted, most of the time they actually don’t end up getting that job.

01:19:11:11 – 01:19:42:14

Youssef

They get a different job. So we’re talking – let’s say 70% of the people that apply for a job on Vetted don’t end up getting that job because by the time they’ve filled out all the paperwork and gotten their submission packet ready, the job is already filled. The job takes three days to be filled. So yes, it’s good to host a lot of jobs, but that also means that you’re going –

Allie

Oh, you’re cutting out, Youssef.

01:19:42:17 – 01:20:06:05

Kyle

Yeah, but I think I think the point was received and it’s a really, really super good point that he’s making there from an agency’s perspective. Like we can send you tons of applicants, but if you’re not placing them, you’re spending money needlessly versus if you’re really strategic about the jobs that you are getting posted, you might get a lot fewer applicants, but you’re going to have a higher hit rate.

01:20:06:08 – 01:20:29:14

Kyle

At least you should. I mean, that’s assuming that you’re posting the jobs you have high hit rates on. And one thing that’s interesting in there, though, and this goes back to the – we need to get back to traditional recruiting. I mean, how many nurses are going to raise their hand and say that they want to go to Nome, Alaska, for that job in the middle of winter?

01:20:29:14 – 01:20:53:20

Kyle

I would always say when I was recruiting, my book was filled with people who wanted to go to San Diego, California, in the middle of winter. And none of them were there. So that’s one of those things where your recruiting chops and your techniques, they come into play.

01:20:53:23 – 01:21:12:23

Kyle

You got to find the next best thing. And I think that’s where those volume players come in. They have a lot of jobs, and they’re going to get the candidate convinced. I shouldn’t say convince, but, you know, discuss with the candidate about the other options that are on the table out there for them and why those might be good options.

01:21:12:26 – 01:21:30:29

Oliver

Cool. Well, guys, I’m going to – I’ll answer a little bit here, and then I’ll send us home. But yeah, I think not only quality, we talked about that. For us, we want as many jobs as you can have on there that are legitimate, well-crafted, high-quality jobs. If you don’t swing the bat, you don’t get the hit.

01:21:30:29 – 01:21:46:23

Oliver

So if you don’t put your jobs out, you’re just not going to get any applications for them. So we will take as many as you can give us as long as they’re well-crafted. So on that note, the big thing I’d recommend, too, is making sure, we talked about integrations and things like that.

01:21:46:23 – 01:22:03:00

Oliver

I think that comes into play really handy in being able to filter those jobs and be able to match those jobs. You need to be able to pull the data out of those specific postings’ requirements. So really having a solid integration really helps there because if people can’t find your jobs, they’re not going to apply to them, right?

01:22:03:00 – 01:22:23:18

Oliver

So the platforms will recommend jobs based on the data that they can pull out of it. If they can’t pull them out, they’re not going to recommend them or there’s a longer road there. So having those structured data points pulled out is really helpful. But yeah, equality is huge, deduplication is huge. We do a lot of internal testing and, take us all out of it for a second.

01:22:23:18 – 01:22:47:23

Oliver

You know, guys, ladies and gentlemen, if you’re using Indeed, or you’re sending jobs to whatever – ZipRecruiter, Talroo, or whatever, any programmatic – Appcast whatever you’re going to call it. A lot of these sources have requirements as far as what they will take in job feeds. So you have to make sure you’re meeting those requirements, and there’s a whole host of them there.

01:22:47:23 – 01:23:06:29

Oliver

So job quality does matter. It is absolutely important. You could be throwing jobs to a platform. Any one of us. It could be being suppressed or whatnot based on quality guidelines, the metrics that are there. We have clients send us a job post with information that is below our quality guidelines.

01:23:06:29 – 01:23:38:01

Oliver

We won’t put it out. We will wait. We’ll go back to the client. So I’m assuming it’s the same with everybody here. But anyway, I know we’re over, so I wanted to just take a quick second to thank everybody for coming and taking part in our webinar series. Also, want to thank all the presenters – Youssef, Steve, Kyle, Zia, and Allie for hosting and doing a great job. All these guys are fantastic platforms. We reached out to another platform that will remain nameless that you would know and chose not to take part in this.

01:23:38:01 – 01:23:54:21

Oliver

I think it’s a shame. But you know what? It’s a small community, and I really appreciate the fact that all of us got on and had a great conversation, supported each other, and supported the community. Wish they would have been here, But, yeah, thank you all for coming. And thanks to everybody for attending.

01:23:54:24 – 01:24:13:22

Oliver

We’ll do more of these. If you have any ideas or suggestions, please shoot it in there in the comments as well. And also there’s going to be a recording of this available as well. So we had about only half the people show up and typically what happens is the other half of the people get email copies of this and also it goes on social in perpetuity.

01:24:13:24 – 01:24:30:02

Oliver

So there’s going to be a lot more people that are viewing this content over a long period of time. It will live forever on this thing called YouTube. So we’ll go from there. But thanks, guys, for coming and we look forward to doing more of this.

Zia

Hey, Oliver. Can I just say one last thing?

Oliver

Yeah, sure. Hit it, Zia. Yeah.

01:24:30:03 – 01:24:54:04

Zia

Very bullish, very bullish Just bringing it home. You guys all know this. And the reason we exist is we were only an $18 billion business market before COVID, Right. Last year, $42 billion. This year, supposedly $30 billion. Next year, $27 billion. It sounds like we’re going backwards. No, it’s very bullish for next year.

01:24:54:04 – 01:25:15:16

Zia

We’re going to be 50% more than we were before COVID. So it is very important that you do find your partners here, us and everyone that’s represented here to work with us, because you will need those clinicians tactically. So I think it’s very bullish for all of us going forward. Yeah. Thank you, Oliver. Thanks everybody!

Allie

Thank you guys, so much.

01:25:15:16 – 01:25:34:24

Oliver

Dare I say happy holidays? Is it too early to say happy holidays?

Steve

Never too early.

Allie

It’s never too early. It’s November 1st.

Steve

Take care, everybody. Thank you!

Kyle

Thanks, guys.

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