HCB News: What about from the nurses’ perspective—what would nurses need to stay in the profession? What are they asking for?
JR: Actually, in this respect the hospitals and the nurses are aligned. According to Nurse.org’s 2022 State of Nursing survey, the chief reason nurses are leaving the bedside is unsafe staffing ratios. It’s gotten so bad that many nurses have even asked the government to declare the shortage a national crisis.

That is the single biggest pain point we hear from frontline nurses. The single biggest request we hear is for greater flexibility. More than anything else, nurses want flexibility over their schedule and safe nurse-to-patient ratios. They want to be paid what they feel they're worth, of course. But getting some control over when, where, and how much they work is actually more important to nurses than pay.
HCB News: How are staffing agencies satisfying that desire for flexibility?
JR: Legacy staffing agencies deliver that flexibility for nurses with 13-week travel contracts–but those are based on an antiquated transactional model that is largely, if not entirely, offline. The old model, where recruiters place calls to individual nurses when hospitals have openings, or text a bunch of opportunities to their list of nurses, is too costly and inefficient and essentially unsustainable going forward. And still, during COVID, those same agencies were successful because of the massive demand for nurses—so they’re really not motivated to change.

The future of healthcare staffing will be delivered by a platform model that is fully integrated into the facility HRIS, time and attendance, and payroll systems. The flexibility that nurses want has to be delivered through technology that embraces a total workforce solution for internal and external staffing.

Our company has developed technology that uses algorithms to match what clinicians want with what facilities need. Over the past two years we grew 146,000% by delivering clinicians to all over the country. The only way that type of growth is possible is through a platform. You cannot scale that quickly with phone calls and texts. Yet most legacy agencies are still not changing their behavior. What nurses want is something between LinkedIn and Amazon, where you log in, set up your account or profile, and then have access to everything. They don't want to be limited by what one office has, or what the one person calling them on the phone is offering.

HCB News: Isn’t there an advantage to the expert-based model of recruitment and staffing?

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