How to Source Travel Nurses Faster

This year, the healthcare staffing market has swung back and forth in response to an unpredictable economy. 

The most successful staffing firms have been agile, by providing an immediate influx of med-surg nurses to cover COVID-19 wards, negotiating responsive contracts for hospitals struggling with revenue losses, and adapting their strategies to the market’s — and the world’s — changing needs. These firms have met the challenge 2020 has presented to us all, of building the airplane as we’re flying it.

This year may be unique, but your firm always needs a responsive process that caters to both clients and candidates. And one of the most effective ways to remain agile is to diversify your sourcing strategies. 

Here are some outside-the-box sourcing tools you can use to place travel nurses quickly. 

1. Programmatic recruiting with Clickcast

Programmatic recruiting is the emerging practice of buying job ads across multiple channels simultaneously. Rather than working with individual job boards, you can leverage technology like Clickcast, which uses data to optimize job ads and distribute them across hundreds of job boards. This allows you to identify and scale the best channels to reach your ideal candidates. This not only helps you grow your pipeline and meet client needs faster — it also gives you valuable insight into which sites are the best fit for you and to maximize your job ad spend. 

The hitch is that there’s a pretty steep barrier to entry to setup and purchase Clickcast directly that would outsize the resources of most firms. To access the same tools at half the cost and avoid the complicated onboarding process, partner with a recruiting marketing agency like Torch Growth.

Customer review: I like that it gives you the ability to set bid prices for candidates on a job-level basis. This is helpful as you can make dynamic decisions on how to spend your budget.

2. Referral automation with Staffing Referrals

You already know that, as soon as a travel nurse starts looking for a new position, the clock starts ticking. They’re immediately inundated with offers from your competitors. What’s more, hospitals often give you an extremely short lead time, which tightens your timetables even further.

One way to manage this short placement window is to recruit via employee referrals. Over 65% of recruiters said sourcing via referrals shortens the recruiting process. 

But that still raises the question: if your competitors are all sourcing referrals, too, how do you set yourself apart? The answer is: with automation.

Staffing Referrals, the first Automated Referral Management system built for staffing, helps you edge out the competition by growing your referral pipeline faster. By automating referral outreach and offloading repetitive tasks, your recruiters can source more referrals from your network and fill open positions with more qualified candidates faster. 

Customer review: “Staffing Referrals took our referral program to the next level,” said Matt Telmanik, President of CCS Construction Staffing. “Referrals are our most profitable source of leads, but the value of the software goes beyond increased placements. Staffing Referrals simplified our program from top to bottom. That’s more than just money in the bank — it’s also more productive recruiters and more satisfied candidates.”

3. Targeted sourcing with specialized job boards

In-the-know job seekers often use specialized job boards to focus their job searches. When you post to these industry-specific job boards, qualified nurses who know what they want are more likely to see your req. Below are a few of the most effective travel nursing job sites.

BluePipes

BluePipes is a healthcare industry network that runs its own travel nursing job board. Along with candidate profiles and easy-to-search resumes, BluePipes offers time-saving resources like skills checklists and clinical records. 

Candidate review: I used www.bluepipes.com resume builder! A new recruiter I hooked up with was really impressed with the information it provided!

Gypsy Nurse

With over 38,000 visitors per month and 350,000 social media followers, The Gypsy Nurse is one of the most well-known travel nurse communities. Covering your bases by advertising on the site is a no-brainer. They also offer annual lists of staffing firms, honoring the most loyal, the best career accelerator, and more. Getting featured on these lists can go far in helping you grow your pipeline.

Customer review: The Gypsy Nurse is one of our biggest allies.

Vivian Health

Vivian Health is another popular travel nurse community. Travel nurses can use the site to find a job, compare salaries based on job locations, and access agency reviews. Recruiters can also create accounts to post jobs and connect with qualified applicants.

Customer review: As a healthcare recruiter, I use Vivian daily in my work life. It has proved invaluable to my company in connecting healthcare professionals with jobs that offer them the best pay, benefits and location to match their experience and desires.

If there’s one thing that travel nurses hate, it’s being in the dark about their salary. 

Wanderly helps you bring transparency to the recruiting process. You post your job offerings with detailed salary packages, benefits, shifts, and more. By putting all your cards on the table, you ensure that you’ll get responses from serious candidates who are looking for exactly what you’re offering. 

It also solves a major slowdown on the recruiting side. Wanderly requires all applicant nurses to provide their paperwork when creating a profile, so you can sail through the credentialing process.

Customer review: I am the Director at Destination Travelcare and we love using Wanderly because we want to be transparent in our pay and benefits. Wanderly allows us to do that by placing us in a marketplace created for healthcare travelers. My first thought was, “why wouldn’t we do this?”

4. Optimized outreach through Facebook

You already know how active the travel nursing community is on Facebook. But there’s more to sourcing from Facebook than posting on your company’s site and fielding Messenger inquiries. To optimize Facebook as a sourcing tool requires investing some time and money. Here are a few places to start:

Post job ads in relevant Facebook groups 

Posting open positions in Facebook groups can be a great way to get your job in front of specific affinity groups. Travel nurses are voracious in Facebook groups, answering each other’s questions, sharing advice, and commiserating. While many groups prohibit recruiting, select few have open doors. Groups like The Gypsy Nurse’s Travel Nurse Network and Travel Nursing Newbies allow job posting as long as recruiters follow posting rules.

Use Facebook advertising with job title targeting

Facebook’s Ad Center gives you the option to create custom audiences for different campaigns. Once you’ve built out your qualified audience, you can create a company ad to target viewers based on your specifications.

By targeting based on job title, you can up your chances of reaching qualified candidates. And by keeping an eye on Facebook’s audience meter along the way, you’ll be better able to retool your strategy to make the most of your ads.

Use Facebook chatbots to drive applications

You can use bots on your careers page or integrate bots with the Jobs on Facebook platform to speed up your hiring process in several ways. These bots can:

• Collect and store candidate information
• Ask screening questions and record answers
• Schedule interviews with qualified candidates
• Answer candidate questions about the application and hiring process in real-time