What Do Nurse Recruiter’s Do?

In the world of recruiting, nurse recruiters are a very special sector. Nurse recruiters tend to work in nurse staffing agencies, or medical staffing companies. Sometimes they work in hospitals (this is a much different role than an agency recruiter and we’ll explain in more details later).

Because nurses are in such high demand and they are notoriously difficult to work with, there are entire nurse recruiter agencies built to find them, credential them, and on-board them for assignments both local and travel.

At the heart of nurse recruiting is the ability to work with nurses: which means working with their hectic schedules, multiple jobs, their problems with communication, and the enormous amount of credentialing required to work as a nurse, which includes background checks, criminals checks, and license verifications.

Contacting and Verifying Nurses: A Recruiters Main Role

The main work that a nurse recruiter will do is contact nurses. This means scouring through resumes on nursing sites, nurse databases, and job posting sites.

Nurses are notoriously hard to contact, even if they are looking for extra work. This is due to numerous factors, including the fact that they work non-traditional hours, and often work multiple jobs (per diem in many cases).

So, it might take multiple calls, email, and texts to even reach a nurse. In normal jobs, this would be unacceptable and no employer would ever deal with them.

A nurse recruiter is tasked with vetting nurse resumes. Many nursing roles in a hospital will require a specific specialty such as PACU or NICU and not all nurses can work these roles. If the job is posted on a hospital website or job posting site such as Indeed-then there will be hundreds of applicants (including anyone with an RN degree). Most of these applicants are unqualified, so it’s the job of the nurse recruiter to find the right resume.

Once the right resume is found, the next step, and probably the hardest step is to contact and discuss the role with the nurse. Many nurses have their resumes on dozens of job posting sites and because of this receive calls every day for work. Therefore it’s common for nurses to never answer their phone.

After a nurse has actually been contacted, the next steps involve discussing the nurses available schedule, what the hourly rate is at the hospital, and the benefits package. For per diem and travelers, other steps are involved due to conflicting schedules and out of town locations.

Once a nurse has expressed interest in the role, the nurse recruiter will connect that nurse with a medical official at the hospital (normally a nurse manager) who will conduct a phone interview (nurses are almost never required to visit a hospital in person to interview, they are allowed to interview over the phone or via Zoom).

The final step involves connecting the nurse with a credentialer. This is the person who is designated to check nursing licenses, and running background checks. There are other things required for nurses such as complete blood work (drug tests to make sure the nurse is using on illegal drugs) and references.

It’s important to verify nursing degrees and licenses, there have been instances of nurses with fake degrees and no license finding work in hospitals.

Where’s The Money? How Nurse Recruiters Make Money

The topic of how nurse recruiters make money is a popular topic. Everyone from nurses, to recruiters in other industries are interested. We have a whole article on it: How do nurse recruiters make money, but I want to cover it quickly here in case you don’t have the time to read that article.

The quick and dirty of it is this:

Hospitals need nurses, but it’s incredibly hard to staff them because they are in such high demand. This is especially true of nurses that are working on “travel assignments”. Hospitals and nursing agencies all over the country are vying for nurses, so the average nurse is inundated with calls, texts, and emails for jobs.

Nursing agencies are paid to find nurses and credential them for the hospital. The recruiters are paid to search for nurses, discuss the role and hourly rate with them, and then get them ready for the assignment. Most nurse recruiters are paid a flat salary or hourly rate from their agency, and then a small commission (1-5%) of what the agency makes on a nurse.

Here’s a quick example:

A hospital is seeking a ICU nurse for a 13 Week Contract. They will pay an agency $150 and hour for that nurse. The agency then is tasked to go out and find a nurse. The agency has to cover the payroll expenses and employment taxes, and then pay the nurse. So, a nurse can be paid $120 an hour to work in the hospital.

The cost of payroll taxes, workers comp, FICA and other expenses are then taken out of the expense for the agency. The recruiter than makes a percentage of what is left: anywhere from $10 to $20hr. The recruiter will then receive a percentage of that, with the agency owners making 95% of the profit.

The nurse makes the bulk of the money, the agency makes a small fee for handling the nurses payroll, taxes, and insurance and what is left is paid out to the recruiter.

These numbers of course vary depending on how much the hospital is able to budget for nursing agencies.

In many cases the hospital uses internal nurse recruiters who are union employees of the hospital. These people receive a salary and no commission, but they are also fully insured with retirement plants and have stable jobs. These hospital employee recruiters only work on easy to find roles (full time union nurse roles) and outsource the hard work to nursing agencies.

One of the reasons nurses make so much money is that it’s so hard for hospitals to find nurses who will work in their unit. There is a huge need for nurses, especially in large cities, that hospitals need to always hire nursing staff. Travel nurses are used when there are union nurse strikes, or when the nurse to patient ratio becomes too large.

Let’s Talk About Money

As we just discussed, recruiters make money off of the people they find work for. Again, we’re specifically talking about agency recruiters–recruiters who work for a company and hire internally (called Talent Acquisition sometimes) are paid a salary or hourly rate plus benefits.

Nurse recruiters –the agency ones– work on commission structures. They make more or less depending on how many nurses they are able to get to work. This can depend on a number of variables: what city they are located in, the amount of contracts that their company has with hospitals, as well as the type of facility.

Nurses who work in nursing homes or re-hab centers make considerably less money than nurses who work private duty or in hospitals. So, if the nursing agency staffs mostly hospitals then there will be a higher commission.

If you want to know how much money do nurse recruiters make, then it depends. If a nurse recruiter is working for a agency that has a contract with a hospital network and many open jobs, with a high pay rate for the nurses, then the recruiter stands to make quite a lot. They could make close to 100k if they are placing a dozen nurses in ICU and other specialty roles.

However, if the recruiter doesn’t work with an agency that has many openings, then they might make 40k. The more nurse job openings, the more they can make.

Work Life Balance

Recruiters who work in-house, such as hospital recruiters, have set hours and guaranteed pay raises plus union benefits in most cases. They show up to work at a set time, clock in using a time keeping system, and then clock out and leave. Hospital recruiters do not have to “take work home with them”, and never have to check emails or contact people off hours.

On the other hand, recruiters who work in an agency have to be more flexible. This is because they work on the more urgent and hard to fill job openings. The roles that hospital staff are unable to fill are the roles that agency nurses normally work on.

Nurse recruiters don’t have to work weekends, but they will often times have to if they are working on an urgent role. Many nurses simply don’t work normal hours, and if you want to reach them you have to work on their time and with their schedule. If a nurse is only available to speak with you after 7pm (when they finish their 12 hour shift) or on a weekend, then a nurse recruiter might have to do this.

Nurses are in such high demand that they have constant job offers. It’s unlike any other sort of employment. With most jobs, people must search for a job and apply and go through multiple interviews. With nursing, the nurse is in demand and has their pick of jobs. So, it is up to the nurse recruiter to find them and contact them when they are available.

What Does It Take To Be A Nurse Recruiter

When it comes to discussing the qualities that make a good recruiter, it’s important to differentiate between executive recruiting, white collar recruiting, and medical recruiting–particularly nurse recruiting.

Some might think that nurses make the best recruiters, simply because they are nurses themselves. But the truth is that they rarely do. In fact, we have a whole article here that discusses this: Nurses don’t make good nurse recruiters.

There are a few reasons why this is the case, but chief amongst them is that recruiting is a much different job than medical work–and in particular nursing.

Nurses are trained to work in a medical setting. Recruiters, on the other hand, work in a completely corporate environment–emails, analysis, fast paced environment, and a keen awareness of personality types. Nurses are forced due to their line of work to deal with and handle extreme events (violent patients, bodily fluids, cleaning people and dealing with bodily functions).

The problem with nurses working as recruiters has mostly to do with two things: pay and personality. Nurses are know to demand a high pay–and it is not contingent upon other people. If a nurse is working at a hospital, they are paid a hourly rate ($100hr, for example) and it is not dependent upon other people.

When you are a recruiter, you only make money if other people end up working. The indefinite nature of the work is unattractive to most nurses.

Also, when you work as a recruiter, especially in the nursing and medical space–it’s common for people to be rude to you–hang up on you, not take a call even thought it was confirmed ahead of time, not show up for a Zoom call, accept a job and no show, etc….

While it’s commonly known that nurses have bad attitudes, a lot of that reputation comes from other nurses. Patients and regular people are not normally in work situations with nurses. However, it does go to the point that nurses will have less patience than other recruiters if they are treated with disrespect by fellow nurses.