Wondering what’s next for Travel Healthcare Recruiting?

Tune in to this replay of our webinar from Nov. 14, 2023. Our panel of experts will delve into the latest trends, discuss efficient talent strategies, examine the impact of technology, and explore healthcare staffing optimization strategies. This webinar is a part of TrackFive’s ongoing commitment to share valuable industry insights through engaging virtual content. Get ready to learn from some of the best minds in the business and connect with a network of fellow professionals.

Allison:

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’ll 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?

Oliver:

Yeah. Hey guys. My name’s Oliver Feakins from TrackFive. I’m the founder. Just want to thank everybody for joining our webinar series. We kind of have a very happy go-lucky ethos here at TrackFive, where we really you know, we really like the community that we play in. We really like our esteemed competitors here. 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, you know, getting community together and having the conversation and supporting each other. So we’re really happy and grateful for you know, the other panelists to jump on and share their expertise. Not all of our competitors wanted to be on here with other competitors, right? So I think it speaks volumes to all of you guys and you know that you’re here and willing to take part in that. So, I have well over a hundred people signed up on the platform right now from agencies across the country. Some of our clients, some non-clients, definitely some of all your clients as well. So thanks for helping promote it. And again, for those of you that are not, we’ll just, I guess go around and introduce ourselves real quick, but TrackFive, we own Travel Nurse Source, Allied Travel Careers, Locum Jobs online, a few other programmatic platforms and other verticals as well. We are very happy to have you guys. If any of you are looking for you know, talent marketplace in the travel healthcare space, we offer a pretty great programmatic solution. We’ve been in business for 15 years and yeah, 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 want to go next?

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 gypsynurse.com and our social media following, as well as TravCon, the Healthcare Travelers Conference that takes place in Las Vegas every year. So, great to see you guys. 

Allison:

Right. Kyle, you want to go next? You’re next to him.

Kyle:

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

Allison:

Yes.

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 this space. We do a lot of automations for our customers to help them reduce their recruiter workforce so they can staff travel nurses.

Allison:

Great. Great. And Zia?

Zia:

Alright. I’m Zia Rahman, 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 that, the acceleration of the need for the marketplace or job board types of platforms such as ours. 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, thanks for coming.

Allison:

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. 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?

Zia:

Oh my goodness.

Oliver:

Coming out firing, Allie.

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. So and I think, you know, it’s important to understand, you know, what is the use case for us in this space? And as most of you guys know Jason Lander, who’s been around in our space now, he’s with medical solution. I mean, 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. And I think the first place to start, and I was at the round table 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. And how do you accumulate that data? So in to that end, you know, you really need to think about re-engineering your existing process and automating your existing process 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. And I think the regenerative AI has a place in our space, in the chat area, in the areas of, you know, getting sourcing done more creatively. So we’re still figuring it out.

Allison:

Yeah. Does anyone have any-

Zia:

Did I take everyone’s one minute? So I apologize.

Allison:

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

Kyle:

Yeah. You were brave enough to go first because of all the because of all the questions that were on that sheet that we got. You know, that’s the one that I sat there and glazed over for a while. I didn’t know how to answer a question, especially in a minute. You know, I think of it in terms of near term, midterm and long term, and I think Zia’s right about the data. I kind of view it as perhaps near term, it’s everybody getting their feet under them. And it doesn’t have much of a measurable impact on us right now. Midterm, it probably does become about, you know, the dataset that you have access to, you know in long term, how we or I should say so midterm, how it plays out in terms of how people protect their own datasets. Are people going to reel in? You know, I mean, before we just allowed organizations like Google, et cetera, and search engines crawl all of our data and sometimes have access to lots of our data. And maybe that gets rethought over time and that’ll affect the long term. The long term is that potentially it could you know, find its way into many aspects of what we do in the healthcare staffing industry. But it does all depend on the dataset that it gets trained on and you know, how we can get all that set up and you know, make good products for folks that are actually usable at the end of the day.

Allison:

Yeah, that’s a great point.

Steve:

Yeah. Allison, I’ll give you my take and I agree with much of what Zia and Kyle had mentioned. But, you know, I too attended SIA, sat in 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, 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. 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. 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 it a transaction or is it a relationship? 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.

Oliver:

Yeah, that’s a good one. I’ll jump into real quick. I think where we’re leading into it in TrackFive, I think, initially is helping us make better use of data. You know, one big pain point for us, and I would assume for 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 postings, 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. 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. 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 you know, 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. We’ve done some experimenting with helping people write better job posts and, you know, if they feed us, you know, 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 AI to make one critical mistake, and, you know, it could be, you know, terrible. I think it was Chase or something like that, just have one—they were using it to write job postings. And under the ideal qualifications, the job post started off with most, you know, the ideal candidate would be a 40-year-old white man. So it made the news. So you know, all you need is one mess up and you’ve got, you know, class action discrimination suit. So I think until we’re able to get control on it, it makes sense to, you know, to use it where we can control it.

Youssef:

I think for us, the most short-term application that we see in highest value application we see for AI is around messaging. So I don’t think AI is going to replace the conversations the recruiters have with clinicians, 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’ve 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. 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 a 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 postings 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. 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 and the text message conversations, that’s amazing training data for GPT or Lex. 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.

Allison:

Great takeaways there. Really insightful. All right, 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, right? The 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?

Steve:

Yeah, Allison, I mean, I think from our perspective, there’s 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. So I think you see that relative to, you know, 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 was exacerbated through the pandemic. 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, enough is 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, 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. So there’s really a variety of factors I think, that are contributing to this. 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 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.

Allison:

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

Oliver:

I’d also jump in and just some interesting conversations we’ve been having with some clients. So, you know, you go through COVID, right? And, you know, massive demand, huge needs, you know, 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. I mean, there was seven nurses for every position. The rates were three times as high. It was a really easy sell. And 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, you know, a lot of our pre-COVID recruiters—or recruiters 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 you know, where they could afford to maybe let, you know, let go of a follow up or not be as effective, you know, because they had seven other nurses that were placed for that position in 15 minutes. Thanks, Chloe. Now you know, now it’s hard work, right? We’re rolling up our sleeves now, the recruiting and the hard work actually begins. And you know, that has a pain or two, you know, as much as, you know, there’s an old proverb or something, this is a poor workman blames his tools, right? But you know, it’s kind of the part and parcel here, right? 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 the candidates we sent over. And they ended up finding out that they had all these opportunities that were dropped. They had leads that weren’t going in the system, 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, Steve, you’re absolutely right to it.

Youssef:

I think the main thing that we saw is the 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. So the conversion rate for submission to placement is about 30%. What’s happened now is you have to submit a nursing candidate maybe 10, 20 times to get that same placement. So obviously the placement rate’s going to drop 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… the transition of hospitals building in-house travel programs. So these large health systems are building out in-house travel programs and then nurses moving more towards staff positions.

Zia:

Yeah, I would jump in, and I a hundred percent agree with Steve talking about nurses are exhausted post COVID, lots of retirement. And on top of that, you know, piggybacking off what you Youssef said, jobs have been… the orders are less. So if you believe the numbers that are published, 68–75% of the businesses that small to mid-size agencies have are through MSPs, right? 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 harder than when you are short on nurses. So I think, you know, 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. New York being one of them. But the other would be, you know I meet with our vice president of SaaS Group, and she’s telling me that we’re having much more signups on Wanderly than we ever had. So how do I address that when the orders are less, but we have lot more agencies that are signing up on Wanderly? 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 world. 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 you are challenged, not only MSPs, they’re dialing down the orders, and you’re also competing against all these newcomers that came into our space. And so we have to work through that narrative right now. 

Kyle:

So I’m just going to jump in and say that I think everybody’s covered almost everything there is to cover here. 

Zia:

I’m going last next time.

Kyle:

One of the benefits of going on last on such a, you know, experienced panel. I agree with everything that everybody said, and, you know, all I would do would be to piggyback on things here, you know. 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. You know, I would be curious to know what that number is now. And again, and a lot of it has to do with the fact that, you know, if we had, I remember there was a time, you know, it could have been potentially been like this time last year where we might’ve had, you know, 200 to 250… 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 have like 200 to 250,000 jobs on the job board. Now we have sub 100,000 with more partners. As Zia said, we’ve had a lot of partners, you know, approach us. We’re signing up new partners right now as opposed to churning partners, right? And I think that there is, you know, we are unwinding from the pandemic to a certain degree, right? That’s going to, it’s going to take some time to see how that plays out. And then to speak to Oliver’s point, you know, that what do agencies do in the face of that, right? You got to retrench and get back to the basics kind of thing. And, you know, get all your processes and procedures down and get all those, you know, friction free or as friction free as they possibly can be. And you know, again, start getting back to those basics of communicating with the candidates, remembering what, you know, staffing really is in, you know, in normal times basically.

Allison:

Well, Kyle, why don’t we start with you on this one then? I mean, I think that we’ve all heard, did I miss somebody? No, sorry, somebody was laughing. So then I got nervous I missed somebody. I think that we’ve all heard that you know, gross margins are decreasing as hospital bill rates are shrinking, right? 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?

Kyle:

It’s interesting, you know, when I see the question about how it’s affecting how they’re using, you know, advertising partners, like I said, and like Zia, you know, affirmed, we’re getting more signups now from that side than we would, than we were previously. We’re getting more inbound interest than we would normally. And so from that perspective, you know, I feel like the agencies are on the other end, maybe the tools that, you know… because in general there are just far fewer candidates—they’re not finding the candidates elsewhere. And it’s really competitive for candidates, right? It’s highly competitive for candidates. And a lot of that has to do with some of this lower bill rate. Like, and we’ve kind of covered that, you know, lower pay rate, lower bill rate, people exit the environment and go back to staff or do something else. You know, maybe they’ve made an awful lot of money during the pandemic, and rightly so. And now they’re going to take a little time off, whatever. There are a lot of things there that happen. And so with respect to like, how they approach you know, agencies are approaching services like ours, you know, I think there’s a thing where they’re not getting, you know, 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. And so the question then, the second question is, what do they have to do now? Well, those are really tough conversations to have. I see them, you know, we manage a couple of social media groups where we can see conversations play out in real time between, you know, healthcare travelers and recruiters. Extremely difficult conversations to have, you know? Like on the one hand, I think, you know, I would firmly, you know, I totally agree that healthcare professionals, you know, have been underpaid here for a little while, and maybe they’re starting to get you know, 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. And there’s people who travel for the pay. When the pay is down, that’s a tough conversation to have. And so, you know, and that’s where you get back to, you know, what Oliver had mentioned. You got to get back to the basics. You 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 $3 or $4 or $5 more an hour, but if you wait three weeks and you’re not working, you know, you lose that three weeks’ worth of pay. There’s only 52 weeks in a year. So at the end of the year, you know, so you have these conversations. And sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t, you know, there’s no easy way around how companies recruit in the face of lower pay, right?

Allison:

Yeah. Yeah.

Steve:

I’ll just jump in here, Allison. You know, 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. And I think there is this challenge of, you know 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. It’s staffing is very hectic. It’s very demanding. Recruiting is a tough job. And yet, so you have that aspect of it from the agency side. But then on the candidate side, as Kyle was mentioning, a lot of folks are looking for, you know, the pay rates. The pay rates have dropped, they have a staff job now, they’re not sure they want to go back in and travel. It takes this relationship building and really what I like to call, and I think Oliver and I have talked about it you know, back over the summer, but it’s this, I call it the long game. It’s this balance between getting somebody and getting them you know, into a contract versus somebody may not be available now, but they may be looking in three months or six months or nine months. So it is making that connection, developing that relationship, and finding the balance between the immediate needs and candidates that 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 you know, kind of that recruiting dynamic and getting back to basics, that’s part of getting back to basics. It’s about, you know, 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 a, 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, 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.

Allison:

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

Oliver:

Go ahead, Zia. 

Zia:

That’s okay. I’ll let you go first. 

Steve:

No. After you. After you.

Allison:

Battle.

Zia:

I think, you know I put it in 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 were coming off the COVID high, if you would, from a pay rate perspective, and you were 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. 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, you know, what everyone’s touched on is you have less nurses to pick from because of all the reasons that, you know, Steve and Kyle has mentioned earlier. So what do you do? There are two levers you have, you know, either you try to manage your gross profit or you try to manage your bottom line, right? So that’s the other side of this is, as an agency you have to think about A through Z as much automation and integration and seamless integration you can have with your sourcing partners, right? All of us here, you know, most of us integrate with every single ATS you can think of, right? To a point where you can also help them push it 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 speak to market, right? So that’s why you need to have the 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. And, you know, so they’ll try it out for a year, 18 months, and 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.

Allison:

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 this what you said. So what would you say to that?

Zia:

Asking me?

Allison:

Yeah, sorry.

Zia:

Well I think, you know, some of us, when we first touched on the AI and the ML component, right? 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 to the extent. But it does not replace that human touch you 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; treating them with honesty and integrity. They want to know the pay packages that you published or the AI automatically matched to is indeed what you’re going to deliver, right? So that matters in the human element. Yes, I mean, on Wanderly platform, we make less money, but when a clinician applies to an agency, that agency gets that lead, you know, 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. They will go to various platforms to chat with someone else. You can put a chat bot 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, or moving them to San Francisco. It’s a life changing event for a lot of these folks, and they want to feel comfortable and they want to talk to a recruiter. 

Oliver:

Yeah. 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 start 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. 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.

Allison:

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

Oliver:

Yeah, I think, you know, efficiency is one thing. It’s interesting too because a lot of the clients will you know, if you talk to 20, 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, you know, placement hire, things like that. So you are sometimes having many different conversations with different people and, you know, you do have to kind of bring them together around this, a single KPI or get them on the same page. The other thing we’ve seen is, and I love Zia’s point about, you know, the 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? 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, right? So we’ve seen issues where automation has gotten away from our partners, right? And they haven’t been tracking it, and they’ve, you know, had text messages that go crazy and, you know, email, you know, texting the wrong people or, you know, blasting so many people so they opt out. You know, we’ve seen a lot of that type of stuff. So I think it’s really, you know, to kind of expand upon Zia’s point, I think you know, yeah, there’s a lot of great technology out there in the world, especially in the re-engagement side, but it really is adhering to a strategy and making sure that everything works together. So it does take a kind of a step back approach.

Youssef:

One more thing just to add.

Zia:

So Allison, I actually literally took this question and typed 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 amid such challenges. So again, it kind of, I interpret that tech stack integration automation to be able to move your bottom line. 

Oliver:

Welcome ChatGPT to the webinar, everybody. 

Allison:

Yes. Youssef, what were you going to say there?

Youssef:

Yeah, one more thing that we’ve seen is that staffing companies that are prioritizing jobs that have better margins. So if they are primarily advertising VMS jobs and they have some direct positions, they’ll prioritize the direct positions and do targeted job advertising because they know they can fill those positions easier and the margins are healthier. 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 to 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 direct relationships with the facility, and then trying to find candidates for that position because they know they can fill that position easier at healthier margins. 

Allison:

Yeah, somebody said building a pipeline is also one of the major and important aspects of recruiting and referrals. 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.

Kyle:

Real quick, I’d like to jump in real quick and kind of speak to Jacob’s question that you read.

Allison:

Oh, great.

Kyle:

First I’ll say, you know, 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 that you’re not the only one using that third party tool, right? 

Allison:

Exactly

Kyle:

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, right? And, you know, you’re going to determine what the value is based on the results that you get and you know, go from there. But you know, there can become a commoditization in a 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 Jacob’s question just real quick here, was that, you know, this idea of job boards being transactional and I think there are many different kinds of job boards out there. Job boards is kind of a catchall phrase. There’s aggregators, there’s, you know, lead generators, there’s all these things. The thing about this panel that I believe I recognize is that, you know, 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 with some other job board. And if you’re not familiar with any of these things, you know, let me take a step back and go back. When BluePipes first started, we did not want to have a job board. We wanted to be completely 100% relational. And we tried that approach. So by trying to be like LinkedIn where you could come and connect with people, you know, you can send emails, connect and build a relationship. 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’re trying to build a relationship. And I think that everybody here does that. And what I mean by that is, you know… I encourage everybody to really spend some time going around out there and click, you know, do a search on Google for travel nursing jobs, and then click through the process that the candidate goes through. It is a freaking nightmare.

Allison:

Yeah.

Kyle:

I mean, it is a nightmare of people, 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. What we do instead is we take jobs from our partners that we work with directly. We do not, you know, resell clicks to somebody else, et cetera. We don’t take people’s contact information and then just sell it willy-nilly to anybody who’s going to buy it, including ZoomInfo or any other service on earth. And so I think all of us here are 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 as we possibly can to 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 from The Gypsy Nurse, they have all these communities and outreach and the conference and everything that they’re doing to build relationships, you know, use this website’s, got this great amazing, beautiful job board that is designed, you know, and he’s got the chat thing going on to help the candidate through the process. You know, you get another job board and you’re just in some dark, you know, black hole. If you don’t know what happens next, you know, Wanderly is doing the same thing. TrackFive’s doing the same thing. You know, we’re all trying to build those things into our job boards and kind of, you know, innovate on what a job board has traditionally been. 

Allison:

Really good. All right. We’re going to pivot here a little bit, but we’ve heard from some agencies that they’re 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.

Youssef:

Yeah, sure. So what we found, it’s true, so 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. It’s these large health systems that have multiple facilities. So large health system, let’s say, that has a hundred facilities. That is a prime kind of example that 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’ll still have smaller facilities that will rely on staffing companies.

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 rigs and whatnot during COVID, and we’re quite familiar with that. And this is a byproduct of that. So, you know, 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. So there are many hospitals that are trying to do it themselves. And there are also many hospitals who try to do it themselves, have 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 the SIA that about 18 to 22% of the existing MSP–VMS business may migrate toward that. So when I say toward that is 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/MSP but the MSP in this case is the hospital. So you’re seeing a new model here and few of us are working very diligently in that space as well to empower the hospitals.

Steve:

Yeah. Allison, I’ll jump in here too. And I agree with what Zia is mentioning as well as Youssef. But also too, you know, I think in a perfect world for the facilities, they would prefer not to have to rely on travelers. And that’s been going on since time immemorial, you know, it’s that 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 think that, Zia was mentioning there are a lot of different models that they’re currently trying to implement. 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. It is, you know, 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 you know, what the agencies do, the need is always going to be there. 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.

Allison:

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

Kyle:

Yeah, if I can. 

Zia:

You may.

Kyle:

I think the points have been touched on. I think what’s important here, for me, at least in the way that I look at it, is there’s a reason that healthcare staffing agencies kind of exist. And that’s because they’re 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, right? That is like finding a slightly tinged needle in a haystack full of needles, to find this person that’s going to take this travel job. And so what I would say is, you know, any time an agency partner comes to us and says, and you know, one of my first questions is, how many jobs do you have access to? And the reason I ask that question is, because if you have 20 or 50 jobs, you’re going to have a really difficult time at having an agency. And it has to do with all kinds of things, including, you know, the way that the market works in general from we’ve talked about it a thousand times, is the speed to market, right? Most of the time, you’re not going to be able to submit a 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 the job opened in order to get them to get there. 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, you know, the next job for that candidate to go to, right? So, if you have 5,000 jobs, you’re like, and that one job didn’t work out, what other job can I get for you? I’ve got all of them, you know, I’ve got all of the jobs kind of thing. And you can place that candidate anywhere. And then when the candidate gets done with their contract and that contract is done, you need to place them on their next contract. And all of this, you know, you’re competing as a hospital doing this, you probably—and speaking to uses point, that these smaller organizations, and I don’t know how small that organization is, because let’s remember HealthTrust/Parallon/whatever they were called before—HCA’s arm of doing it; it’s been around for a while, and many hospitals have tried this over the years, 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 can just, you know, pull people in that way. But for a small, you know, and I don’t know what small means here. To me, it’s a number of job orders that you have. 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 there’s the economy, it’s not going to make dollars and cents for you as 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.

Zia:

I’ll just take 30 seconds and add to… I mean, Kyle hit this right on the nail. From day one, Wanderly 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? 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, you know, 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. 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 you’ve got to have a two-sided marketplace, otherwise you won’t make the connection. So yeah I had to fight that. Is Wanderly a job board? No, we’re a marketplace So we’ve been called, you know, kayak of our industry by someone else, so, I agree.

Allison:

Oliver, do you have any opinions on this one?

Oliver:

No, I’m good. We can keep it moving. 

Allison:

All right. 

Oliver:

I think it’s all been said.

Allison:

We only have time, maybe for one more question. 

Zia:

We have 14 questions. We only got to five. All right. 

Allison:

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

Zia:

I’ve talked a lot, so I’ll just be quiet.

Allison:

Oliver, why don’t you start with this one?

Zia:

Also a very sensitive topic.

Oliver:

Yeah. So I’ll take it up a level. So this question’s 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 you know, job boards, platforms, you know, talent source platform, whatever you want to call it. Right? 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 used to have your clients, and then you had, you know, they would go to sourcing providers, right? And now the lines are very much blurring. We’re seeing, you know, for example, indeed getting into staffing, right? We’re seeing VMS systems getting into talent acquisition, you know, specifically in some of our other verticals, I’m sure it’ll head this way at some point. You know, we’re seeing clients, you know open up talent platforms alongside you know. So, you know, the lines are blurring a little bit as we move forward. And I don’t know if that’s an opportunistic type of thing. You know, 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, you know, like I said, the lines are blurring. Everybody kind of had their corners and you know, I would think if this progresses long term, I think it is going to change the landscape, you know, a lot. You know, I think yeah, I didn’t see how it couldn’t, you know. Anyone else have any thoughts on that?

Zia:

I would say it’s actually very positive if it truly indeed is a vendor-neutral platform. It’s really positive for mid to small size agencies. Because you get to participate, you have more VMSs to work with. So and if intentions are pure, then it’s great for the industry. But Oliver is onto 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 years from now and see what really transpired.

Oliver:

See what happens, very early.

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 doesn’t want to be giving money to a job board that is owned by one of their competitors where they know the data is owned—it might be, you know, 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 they’re not as neutral as they advertise them to be. So a very large vendor-neutral program is not as neutral as they say it is. 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 fulfill their own job supply.

Zia:

I think, you know, I won’t name anyone, but there are couple of vendor-neutral companies that are truly vendor-neutral. You know, there’s terminology confusion. I always debate with my president of what is an MSP and what is a VMS, right? To me, an MSP service provider utilizes supposedly a VMS technology, right? And it all got blurred when ShiftWise was acquired by AMN and all of that took place. But true vendor-neutral really is for the benefit of the hospital, going to the vendor 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, is it’s agnostic to the vendors that are behind them, but an MSP world is not; they will fill it themselves, and they have their favorites and so on and so forth. So that is a challenge. But yeah, I mean, the ones that I know starts with ‘H’, and they’re both ‘H’.

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 and their own internal databases, if you will. So I think what, kind of, circling back to the original part of 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 and interacted with, whether it is the platforms that we all manage, or whether it is the agencies, the facilities. Because it’s a finite amount of people out there. It continues to be a challenging market and will continue to be a challenging market in the future. So rather than having, you know, 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 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. 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 manner of, you know, respect and transparency, right? And I think that is what eventually wins, is how these guys are treated and interacted with. So, just wanted to put that out there from my perspective. 

Allison:

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

Kyle:

Yeah, so I think Zia kind of, you know, nailed it a little bit there with differentiating what makes a VMS a VMS, and an MSP an MSP, right? They are different. To me, you know, the VMS is the one that on the hospital side of things, the hospital doesn’t know where this is coming from. It’s a best candidate at best price thing. Whereas with the MSP’s always going to, you know, 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, 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. 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, you know, and I’m going to say maybe you shouldn’t be so concerned about that with a Fusion Marketplace type of model, right? And the reason that I would say that is because as an agency, you are 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, am I taking my candidates and am I putting them somewhere else that some other agency has access to? 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. Right? Like, 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 so, you know, it’s sort of as Oliver mentioned, we’re seeing that with Indeed now, right? I mean, let’s face it. Indeed is trying to get into the staffing game and they’re doing kind of a good job at it right now. And 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, you know, agencies or employers in general go. It’s kind of a tough spot for staffing agencies to be in, but so they just kind of have to, you know, accept in good faith. That’s the way the market kind of works, right? 

Allison:

All right. 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 seconds each since we’re just over time, but I would like to get to them, that would great. So the first one is from Chloe. What’s the sweet spot with job count you’re all seeing? Some platforms are pushing agencies down to post 2-3000, and others are saying post 7,000 plus.

Kyle:

I think it depends on how many candidates you’re looking to get. I mean, the more, you know, the thing about a job, none of us should be manufacturing applicants, you know, they should be coming naturally to some degree. So I can’t tell you how many applicants you’re going to get for a given number of jobs, but 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 their service, it just increases it. Or that we have more jobs that we can then send to our databases 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, right? So that’s what the whole job count thing does at the end of the day. And so the sweet spot depends on how many candidates you want to get, and the platform that you’re posting them on can deliver, right? It’s going to vary.

Zia:

Definitely, you know, quantity matters because if you’re on a marketplace, you want some visibility, right? So to Kyle’s point, you know, you do need enough jobs, so you get visibility in the marketplace. Obviously, pay package matters; obviously, where you’re looking regionally matters. More people want to go to all the states we all know, right? California and 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.

Steve:

So Allison, just real quick, I would agree with what Kyle and Zia was 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? And I know oftentimes we have agencies that are, you know, 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, particularly when you have an organization that’s posting 5,000 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, you know, 5,000 for pay or whatever, and there’s nothing else. And I think that forget healthcare staffing for a second. If you look at kind of, you know, 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, so that the aspect of robust job descriptions and really putting some meat on it, I think are very important when you talk about the type of reaction and response you’re going to get.

Allison:

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

Youssef:

Yeah. So the challenge that we see is that when a staffing committee comes and they post, let’s say 10,000 jobs, the jobs that they’re posting, a lot of them are extremely competitive job postings. So they’re jobs with very high payer locations that have, you know, tens of submissions on them. And those are just very difficult jobs to actually place. So what we’ve seen agencies do is prioritize jobs that they know are likely to be placed. So they’ll focus on specific specialty 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 to a job that pays $4,000 a week, they’re unlikely to get that job. They’re going to get the applicant then unlikely 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 to a job on vetted, most of the time they actually don’t end up getting that job. They get a different job. So we’re talking, let’s say 70% of the people to apply to a job on Vetted, they don’t end up getting that job because by the time they’ve filled out all the paperwork and get their submission packet ready, the job’s already filled. Job takes three days to be filled, and they take [Inaudible 1:07:18] to complete a submission packet. So yes, it’s good to post a lot of jobs, but [Inaudible 1:07:20].

Allison:

Oh, you’re cutting out, Youssef.

Kyle:

Yeah, but I think the point was received, right? And it’s a really super good point that he’s making there from an agency’s perspective, right? Like, we can send you tons of applicants, but if you’re not placing them, you know, 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. At least you should. I mean, that’s, you know, assuming that you’re posting the jobs that you have high hit rates on. One thing that’s interesting in there though, I think is, and this comes 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? And yet every single, you know… I would always say when I was recruiting my, you know, 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, right? Like, so that’s one of those things where your recruiting does, you know, your recruiting chops and your techniques, they come into play. I mean, you know, you got to find the next best thing kind of thing. And I think that’s where those volume players come into play, right? That they have a lot of jobs and, you know, they’re going to get the candidate, convince the—you know, 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. 

Oliver:

Cool. Well, guys, I’m going to, I’ll answer a little bit here and then I’ll send this 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, you know. If you don’t swing the bat, you don’t get the hit, right? So if you don’t post, if you don’t put your jobs out, you’re just not going to get any applications for them. So you know, 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, right? I think that comes into play really handy. And 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? So the platforms will recommend jobs based on the data that they can pull out. If they can’t pull them out, they’re not going to recommend them where there’s a longer road there. So you know, having those data, structured data points pulled out is really helpful. But yeah quality is huge. Deduplication is huge. We do a lot of internal testing, and whether, you know, take us all out of it for a sec, you know, ladies and gentlemen, if you’re using, you know, Indeed, or you’re sending jobs to, you know, whatever, ZipRecruiter or Taru or whatever, any programmatic, you know, UpCast, whatever you want to call it you know, a lot of these, you know, sources have requirements as far as what they will take in job feeds. So you know, you have to make sure you’re meeting those requirements and there’s a whole host of them there. So job quality does matter. It is absolutely important. You could be throwing jobs to a platform, any one of us, and it could be suppressed or whatnot based on quality guidelines and metrics that are there. We have a, you know… Clients send us a job post with information that is below our quality guidelines. We won’t put it out. We will wait, you know, we’ll go back to the clients. 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, you know, Steve, Kyle, Zia, and Allie for hosting and doing a great job narrating. All these guys are fantastic platforms. You know, we’ve reached also out to another platform that will remain nameless that you would know and chose not to take part in this. 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. I wish they would’ve been here, but yeah, thank you all for coming and thanks for everybody for attending. We’ll do more of these. If you have any ideas on 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 will get emailed copies of this, and also it goes on social in, you know, perpetuity. So there’s going to be, you know, a lot more people that are viewing this content over a long period of time. It’ll live forever on this thing called YouTube. So we will we’ll go from there, but thanks guys for coming and we look forward to doing more of that. 

Zia:

Hey, Oliver, can I just say one last thing?

Oliver:

Sure. Hit it, Zia. Yeah. 

Zia:

Very bullish. 

Oliver:

No.

Zia:

Very bullish. 

Oliver:

Bull away.

Zia:

So just bringing it home-

Oliver:

Bring it home.

Zia:

You guys all know this. And the reason we exist is we were only an $18 billion business market before COVID, right? Last year, 2020, 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, right? We’re going to be 50% more than we were before COVID. So yeah, 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, you know, it’s very bullish for all of us going forward.

Oliver:

Yeah. Thanks Steve.

Zia:

Thank you, Oliver. Thank you everyone.

Allison:

Thank you guys so much. 

Oliver:

Bye everybody.

Kyle:

Thanks Oliver and thank you TrackFive. Thanks everybody.

Steve:

Thank you Oliver and Allison, Youssef, Kyle, Zia. Thank you.