TTATN 024: A Behind The Scenes Look At a Travel Nursing Recruiter’s Job

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Hey everyone, welcome to the truth about travel nursing podcast. This is Kyle Schmidt and I’m your host. Thank you so much for joining us for episode 24 of the podcast. In this episode we’re going to discuss travel nursing recruiters. Specifically, we’re going to discuss what travel nursing recruiters do and how their job performance is measured. [Please note that this is a transcript of a podcast episode. As such, grammar and spelling are not optimized for written content.]

In the course of this discussion, we’re going to answer tons of common questions that travel nurses have about recruiters. Why do I get so many telephone calls? Why don’t they just email me or send me a text message? Why don’t recruiters remember my preferred name? What is taking so long for me to land a job? And many more. The information we cover about your travel nursing recruiter’s job will help you gain a far deeper understanding of the industry and ultimately get better results out of your time as a travel healthcare professional.

Now, keeping with the tradition and reputation that we have on this podcast and on BluePipes Blog, we’re going to give you a behind the scenes look at this topic. We’ll provide the details that agencies and recruiters typically won’t discuss about this topic, not because there is anything wrong with discussing these details, it’s just that agencies and recruiters don’t really see any value in it. But we do see value in it. I believe it helps us understand the industry better which increases our confidence and helps us get more out of travel healthcare.

So in this case, for this topic, we’re going to essentially discuss the travel nursing recruiter’s job by looking at it through the lens of how agencies view the role of recruiters and how they measure their recruiters’ job performance. These details speak volumes about your travel nursing recruiter and provide you with the reasons why travel nursing recruiters perform certain tasks and actions.

Travel Nursing Recruiters Are Essentially Salespeople

Okay, so fundamentally speaking, the job of a travel nursing recruiter is by and large considered to be a sales job. This is true for recruiters that work at all types of staffing companies, healthcare staffing, IT staffing, financial staffing, you name it. Technically speaking, travel nursing recruiters pretty much perform all of the tasks that any telephone based sales representative performs, but when a travel nursing recruiter closes a deal, the client comes to work for the company, hence the term “Recruiter”.

Now, you’ll find a fair number of folks who will disagree with this characterization and I’ll address their concerns in just a bit. But first, we need to take a quick look at why recruiters are pretty much sales representatives. We’re going to take a look at three things.

The Recruitment Process Mirrors The Sales Process

First, let’s take a look at the recruitment process. The process of recruiting includes sourcing leads, qualifying leads, developing and maintaining relationships, providing customer service, negotiating and closing deals, which in the case of travel nursing recruiters means to obtain signed contracts. Now, that’s exactly what almost every sales representative on the planet does.

Travel Nursing Recruiters Need To Sell To Be Effective

Second, let’s stop and think about a recruiter providing you with service. Let’s say, for example, that you asked two recruiters what ICU travel nursing jobs they had available in the Los Angeles, California area. The first recruiter says:

I have two jobs available. Both of them are for 12 hour day shifts, 7am to 7pm. One of them pays a little more than the other but they’re both pretty good hospitals.

The second recruiter says:

I have 2 jobs available. Both of them are for 12 hour day shifts, 7am-7pm. They are both really good opportunities. One of them is level 1 trauma hospital and a teaching facility. It’s listed as one of the top hospitals in the country every year by every reputable rating service including US News and World Report. It’s sometimes referred to as “the hospital of the stars”. So you could see Brad Pitt there…no joke. The other hospital isn’t as prestigious, but it pays $2 more per hour and it’s much newer, so the facility is totally modern. Also, I think the chances of floating are much lower at this facility because they have a reputation of running a really tight ship. Both facilities are in awesome areas, so as long as your housing is within 5 to 10 miles of either facility, you’ll be close to most of the cool stuff to do in the LA area including the beaches.

Now, those are two different descriptions of the same exact jobs. My guess is that the first recruiter has a small chance at getting you to let him submit you to one of those jobs, while the second recruiter has a pretty good chance at getting you to let her submit you to both of those jobs. And the only difference here is in salesmanship. Recruiters have to be good at this to be successful. Moreover, recruiters are competing with other agencies for your business and often times they’re competing with one another for the same jobs. They have to be able to effectively sell their services to win business.

Travel Nursing Recruiter Job Postings Mirror Sales Job Postings

Okay, the third thing I want you to consider is recruiter job postings. These are the job advertisements placed by agencies looking to hire new recruiters. I searched for travel nursing recruiter jobs on indeed and LinkedIn this morning. I found job postings for small, medium and large staffing agencies. Every single one of them made some mention of sales. Here are some examples:

From American Mobile: 18 months sales experience in the service industry and/or recruiting experience

From Maxim Health: The Senior Recruiter is a sales/management oriented individual

From SqadBuilders: Associates Degree or minimum 2 years sales or recruiting experience

From ATC Healthcare: Some level of Sales (can come from any industry) and Customer Service experience

Every job makes mention of sales experience or sales in general. And if that’s not enough, just look at the responsibilities that these job postings list. They say things like:

• Engage in successful lead generation
• Implement sourcing techniques
• Build a pipeline
• Screen Candidates
• Negotiate compensation
• Generate referrals

90 plus percent of the job description for a travel nursing recruiter matches exactly with almost any sales job.

This Is Not a Bad Thing

Now, there are many people out there who are going to think that this is a negative thing, that a travel nursing recruiter shouldn’t be a salesman. They’re going to start equating travel nursing recruiters with used car salesmen. And that’s not the right approach. It’s actually in a travel healthcare professional’s best interest for their recruiter to be a salesman….you just need them to be a good salesman as opposed to a sleazy salesman.

Think about the example I discussed early with the two recruiters pitching jobs in Los Angeles. You’d love to have the second recruiter. Someone with knowledge and ability to give you the details you need to make good decisions.

Of course, they should also be able and willing to give you the negative information as well. And that’s part of what a good salesman will do. I mean, your recruiter doesn’t want to get you in a really bad situation, remember that one of the key aspects of their job is to build a relationship with you. They want you stick around with them for the long haul. Retaining your business is key to their long-term success. So, good recruiters will give you the nitty-gritty details on the jobs they have and bad recruiters will only give you the fluff.

What Are The Goals of Travel Nursing Recruiters?

Okay, so why is it important for us to understand that recruiters are essentially salespeople? Well, it helps us understand how their job performance is measured and why it’s measured the way it is. And understanding this will help us figure out the day to day activities that travel nursing recruiters engage in.

So, knowing that their recruiters a largely salespeople, agencies tend to measure the performance of their recruiters similar to how most organizations would measure the performance of sales people. You start by looking at what the end goals are and then you determine what actions need to be taken in order to achieve those goals.

Goal: Get Travelers Working

Obviously, for a travel nursing recruiter, the primary goal is to get travel nurses on contract so the agency can bill for the time and generate revenue. Now, different agencies are going to have different target goals for their recruiters in terms of how many travelers they should have on contract. So they may have a minimum goal, they may even have a maximum goal because they worry that the service their recruiters provide could suffer if they’re working with too many travelers at once.

In any case, the minimum goals or requirements vary from agency to agency. And a big reason that they vary is that different agencies have different levels of support staff for their recruiters. So, one agency may require that their recruiters take care of every last detail. Another agency might have some support staff in place to help with things like compliance and credentialing, housing and travel arrangements. The agency with support staff will typically require a their recruiters to maintain a higher minimum number of travelers on contract because more of their time should be freed up for recruiting. Also, agency needs more travelers working to pay for the support staff.

It’s tough to say what the minimums are around the industry. However, my guess is that agencies require recruiters to maintain at least 10 travelers on contract once the recruiter has been there for 1 year. And that’s the bare minimum. If a recruiter isn’t at that level, then they’re going to be receiving some additional scrutiny and coaching.

As far as maximums are concerned, there’s really no telling. I know that I once had 46 full time equivalent travelers on contract during an entire quarter or 3 month period. That was a lot given the support staff we had. However, there was another recruiter at my company who eventually had more than that. At larger companies with tons of support staff, this might be common…I’m not sure.

Measuring The Performance of Travel Nursing Recruiters

Either way, that gives us an idea of what the goals are. So once the agency knows the goals, the next thing that any organization does is to determine the actions that are required to achieve those goals. There is a term for this, and some agencies use it and others don’t, but the term is Key Performance Indicators. KPI is the acronym that’s commonly used to reference it. You may have even heard this term used in hospitals you’ve worked in. It’s a really popular management term. KPIs are defined as business metrics used to evaluate factors that are crucial to the success of an organization or individual members of an organization.

Even if agencies don’t use this term, they still know what the actions are. They know what actions their recruiters must take in order to get travelers on contract. So what are those actions?

Call Requirements For Travel Nursing Recruiters

Well, the most important set of actions are centered on communication. Recruiters have to be communicating with potential candidates in order to be successful. There are tons of different ways to communicate including telephone conversations, emails, text messages and these days, social media.

However, the most preferred method of communication for agencies is the phone. For this reason, many agencies, in fact, a strong majority of agencies, have call volume requirements. They might require a minimum number of telephone calls to be made per day or per week. They might also require a minimum level of talk time. Talk time is the total time that is spent on the phone.

For example, some agencies require their recruiters to make and/or receive a minimum of 100 calls per day. That’s the higher end of requirements….at the lower end, some agencies require 40 to 50 calls per day. Meanwhile, an agency might also require minimum talk times from as low as 2 hours per day to as high as 4 hours per day. It’s not enough to just make 100 calls and hang up. Recruiters actually have to do some talking with their candidates.

To help their recruiters hit these mile stones and increase their efficiency, many travel nursing agencies use sophisticated telephone systems. At a minimum, most agencies are able to at least generate reports that detail the number for calls and the talk time. But a lot of agencies uses systems that auto dial and even robo-call.

With these systems, agencies can load a bunch of profiles with telephone numbers into the system and the system will automatically dial the numbers. The systems can detect whether a live person or voicemail picks up the call. When a live person answers the phone, the call is transferred to a recruiter and the phone system’s software program, which is synced up with the phone system, pops up the candidate’s profile on the recruiter’s computer screen so the recruiter knows wo they’re calling. If voicemail is detected, the system can be programmed to play a pre-recorded message.

If an agency doesn’t employ a system like this, then their recruiters are stuck dialing numbers the old fashioned way. And let me tell you, it can take a while to dial 100 numbers and wait for an answer, so this can take a significant amount of the recruiter’s time.

I think it’s also important to point out that this system results in some things that travelers typically don’t like, or wonder about. For example, many travelers wonder why the agency never calls them by their preferred name. So, your full name might be Patricia, but you prefer to be called Patty and you’ve told the agency that a thousand times. Well, the recruiter needs to dial through those numbers so fast that they aren’t really able to look that up before calling…or the auto-dialer software pops the profile up at the last second leaving the recruiter to blurt out the first name they see.

This can also result in travelers receiving calls from multiple recruiters at the same agency, which is another thing that many travelers wonder about. The recruiters just don’t have the time to look through the notes in the profile to see the candidate is working with someone else.

Why Do Travel Nursing Agencies Love Telephone Calls?

Now, hearing that agencies prefer telephone calls is probably making all of you pretty angry. I mean, I saw a poll recently in which 77% of travel nurses said they preferred email. Less than 5% said they preferred phone calls and there were tons of people expressing their frustration with telephone calls. Agencies know this too, so why so they keep calling?

Well, there are several reasons. First, the telephone is the most efficient way to communicate. The can make calls faster than they can type out emails. They can also address all the questions or concerns right there on the spot. With email, you send an email and you may not hear back for several hours, or several days. Finally, agencies think that candidates who answer their calls are more serious about their intent to work with the agencies. And that’s probably true…I mean, you might have 10 to 20 agencies calling you on a regular basis, but you only speak with agencies that you’re actually interested in working with.

Now, that said, agencies also communicate with email, text messaging and social media. And they may even consider these methods in their Key Performance Indicators. However, these are difficult for agencies to measure, especially when it comes to text messaging and social media. However, agencies may measure the number outbound emails their recruiters send.

In any case, these aspects of communicating are a big part of the recruiters’ Key Performance Indicators. Of course, it’s not enough to just communicate; the recruiter actually has to get some results. So there are other key performance indicators that often get measured by the agency.

The Importance of Travel Nursing Submission Profiles

For example, the agency might track the number of new submission profiles that a recruiter gets ready to go. A submission profile is the minimum set of documents that the agency needs in order to submit a candidate for job consideration. This includes a job application, resume, a skills checklist and verified references. Some agencies may require a few more documents to consider it a completed submission profile, like a license verification printed from the state board of nursing’s website.

Either way, submissions profiles are another action that must be taken or completed on the road to success as a recruiter. Recruiters might spend a significant amount of time getting these ready to go. This is because everything needs to be perfect. There can’t be any misspellings, all of the required information must present and so on.

Moreover, candidates rarely fill out the online job applications in their entirety. And the resumes that recruiters receive often require additional work. Details are often left off, or additional details need to be added. So recruiters step in and take care of all that. And this can take a significant amount of the recruiter’s time.

Measuring The Rest Of The Recruitment Process

Now, getting profiles ready to go is good, but recruiters also need to get candidates to agree to being submitted for jobs. So, agencies might also track the number of submissions their recruiters get. And the Next step is the interview, so agencies might track the number of interviews the recruiter gets per week. Offers are the next step, so the agency might track the number of offers that the recruiter receives per week. Contract acceptances are the next step, so the agency might track the number of signed contracts the recruiter receives per week. Of course, the traveler needs to start the contract, so the agency will also track the number of new starts the recruiter has each week. And agencies always want their travelers to complete contracts, so the agency might track completions and cancellations. Perhaps most importantly, the agency wants to make sure that the travelers are working all their hours, so they’ll track this too.

So basically what we’re seeing here is that all of these steps in the process are items that agencies might consider as key performance indicators for their travel nursing recruiters. They’re items that can be quantified and tracked on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.

Now when it comes to these steps, agencies obviously know that they need to submit profiles in order to get interviews, and they need to get interviews in order to get job offers and so on. I mean, that’s obvious. But agencies also have an idea of what it takes in terms of numbers to be successful. For example, they might know that for every 5 profiles they submit for jobs, they’re going to get 2 interviews and for every 2 interviews they’ll get 1 offer and for every 4 offers they’ll get 3 starts. Now those numbers aren’t exact, they’re just an example, but you get the idea. So these would be the numbers that they would use to set goals for their recruiters. For example, the agency might set a goal of at least 5 total submissions per week with at least 3 unique candidates. So

Now, at each of these steps throughout the process from the submission to the actual start of the contract, the recruiter will obviously be required to do varying levels of work. So this is where we get into the details of what the recruiters are actually doing to get these things done. For example, before the recruiter can submit a candidate, they need to discuss the jobs with them. They should also discuss pay. In order to get a contract back, the recruiter might have to generate the contract and receive approval from a manager before sending it out to the candidate. The recruiter might need to get the housing together, make the travel arrangements, and get all the credentialing documentation together before the candidate can actually start the assignment.

Now, it’s important to point out that different agencies might handle all of these tasks in different ways. And again, it boils down to how much support the agency provides to their recruiters. For example, when it comes to pay packages, some agencies give their recruiters full responsibility over negotiating pay packages. Other agencies have their pay packages preset by either a manager or some other system. Remember in episode 23 we discussed how Fastaff was a company that published the pay rates for their travel nursing jobs and what you see is what you get. So it’s fair to say that their recruiters aren’t spending as much time on developing and negotiating pay packages as recruiter at other agencies are.

Either way, given the tasks and how they’re measured, a lot of questions that travel nurses have about their recruiter’s job or why recruiters do certain things can be answered. Why does a recruiter submit you without your approval? Well, maybe they needed to pad their submission stats and they thought it wouldn’t be possible for you to get an interview because the job had been open for so long. Or, you might wonder why you didn’t get a particular job interview. The recruiter may have had a difficult time getting your profile together and during the delay a bunch of candidates were submitted from other agencies. There are all kinds of scenarios to consider here.

Measuring The Service That Recruiters Provide

Finally, I think it’s also important to note that agencies might track their recruiters’ retention rates. This is the rate that travelers stay on with the agency for an additional contract. Different agencies will have different averages when it comes to their retention rates. This is because some agencies have more job opportunities than others and therefore more options for their travelers’ next assignments. But, if measured against the agency’s own average, then retention rate could tell the agency about how good a job the recruiter is doing with the rest of the service.

Remember, once the traveler has an assignment, the recruiter is typically responsible for servicing the traveler’s needs throughout the contract. This can include resolving payroll issues, taking care of timecards, ensuring that credentials don’t expire while working the contract and so on. Of course, it also includes helping the traveler find their next assignment.

As every experienced traveler knows, all of these issues are very important. They’re important aspects of what keeps a traveler working with a recruiter. They’re an important part of the relationship that is so important between travelers and their recruiters.

Does This Mean Travel Nurses Are Treated Like Numbers?

Okay, all of this gives you an idea of what recruiters do with their time and how they’re job performance is potentially measured. Now, I have a feeling that the measurement aspect of this discussion most likely made you concerned that agencies treat you like you’re just a number as opposed to real human being. This is one of the biggest complaints that travelers have about the agencies that they don’t like working with. They routinely say that they felt like a number with those agencies.

And I’m sure that there are many recruiters out there who would say the same thing about the measurement aspect of this discussion. In fact, we’ve published a couple of blog posts on this topic and we’ve heard from many recruiters via social media and in the blog comments that this isn’t how their company works…no, their company treats travelers like they’re human beings not numbers.

Well, to those recruiters, I always ask, “How does your company determine if their recruiters are doing a good job? And if you’re not doing a good job, what advice does your agency provide to help you improve?” There are no other answers…every agency has the same goals. The same actions are required everywhere to achieve those goals.

More importantly, at the end of the day, whether or not an agency treats their travelers like numbers depends on the company’s culture. Some companies just do a better job at institutionalizing a humanizing culture for their travelers, and it has nothing to do with how they measure their recruiters’ performance.

I worked at an agency that was and is revered for the service they provide. They have been on Highway Hypodermics top 10 for many years as well as Travel Nursing Central’s top companies list. That company is Valley Healthcare Staffing. When I was there, we loved measuring recruiter performance this way. But we provided amazing service.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that measuring recruiter performance this actually helps an agency provide better service. And from a traveler’s perspective, it’s probably better in many respects to work with an agency that measures performance this way.

I mean, as a traveler, you want to make sure that your recruiters are on it; that they aren’t lagging on getting your profile together, because that could cost you a job. You want to make sure that they know their stuff and can tell you the good things as well as the bad things about assignments. You want to make sure that they’re keeping in contact with you throughout the process so that you’re not left in the dark. You want to make sure that they’re hounding the facility for that interview or job offer. All these things will help you be successful.

And they same goes for recruiters. I mean, if you’re failing at your job, isn’t great to have an employer who can analyze things and pinpoint exactly where in the breakdown is in the process. That’s an employer that can truly help you succeed and become great.

And again, this really doesn’t have anything to do with whether or not travelers are treated like numbers. You’ll find agencies, like my old agency, that do a lot of measuring and provide world class service. And you’ll find agencies that do no measuring but treat their travelers like numbers.

Okay, so that’s probably a good point to wrap up this episode. We’ve covered a lot of information about what travel nursing recruiters do on a day to day basis and how their job performance is measured. I hope this helps you gain more insight into what’s going on behind the scenes so you have more confidence working with agencies and recruiters and deeper understanding of the industry. We can also use this information to help us figure out what steps can be taken to get the most out of your travel nursing recruiters. But that’s a subject for a future episode.

As always, we’ll have the transcript of this episode along with useful links and more information on the show notes page. The show notes for this episode can be found at blog.bluepipes.com/episode24.

Again, I greatly appreciate your listening to the podcast. If you’ve been enjoying it, then please provide us with a review on whatever platform you’re listening on whether it be stitcher or itunes or anything else. It really does go a long way in helping us get the word out so that more people can benefit from the information and we can keep the show going.

Okay, so until next time have a safe and prosperous travel healthcare adventure.

Links:

4 Reasons Travel Nurses Dislike Phone Calls and 6 Reasons Recruiters Love Them

14 Ways Recruiters Betray the Trust of Travel Nurses

What You Should Know about Your Travel Nursing Recruiter’s Job

7 Services Travel Nursing Recruiters Provide

5 Tips to Get the Most Out of Your Travel Nursing Recruiters

Travel Nursing Recruiters – Finding the Best