At a whopping $158 billion, the U.S. recruitment and staffing industry is only growing, but at what cost?
With an agency that collects a 20+ percent fee of your salary along with analmost 50-day wait to fill a position, the industry is continuing to look for ways to reduce the time to hire as well as lowering the costs associated with bringing on new talent.
Welcome to the new age of health-tech. While home to the heart of country music, Nashville, Tennessee plays host to what will hopefully soon be the heart of health-tech when it comes to healthcare staffing.
Headquartered in Nashville, TN, Relode offers a solution. Relode crowd-sources technology to connect healthcare employers directly to healthcare professionals, eliminating the need for a third-party agency. Relode connects agents and their networks directly to permanent and temporary healthcare-job opportunities, rewarding those agents with financial commissions similar to a recruiter, absent agency overhead.
As a result, Relode says that it is saving its clients nearly 50 percent on permanent hires and ten percent or more on temporary staffing. That ultimately frees up more resources to re-invest in patient care.
“We created Relode as a healthier approach to healthcare employment,” said Matthew Tant, Relode’s founder and CEO. “It’s simple: We reward good people to assist in finding other good people for the best jobs in healthcare. This saves time and money while optimizing employment opportunities. It’s one platform that works equally well for employers, employees — and ultimately the patients they care for.”
How It Works
As a client, if you post a job, Relode activates its user network, alerting them to the newly opened role, and after recommendations pour in, Relode’s system utilizes machine learning and artificial intelligence to quickly screen candidates, allowing the client to review only the top, qualified candidates. More importantly, Relode saves clients 50% over traditional staffing agencies.
“[This] simple yet disruptive approach, easily connects employers to the people looking for those types of jobs,” added Senator Bill Frist of Frist Cressey Ventures, a Relode investor.
Additionally, giving back to the community is something the company takes to heart. Like Toms or Warby Parker, Relode is extremely socially conscious, allocating a percentage of every dollar made to Mercy Ships, which has been offering free surgical care in underserved African countries.
But don't think they are strangers to the competition. In fact, Relode faces some seriously stiff competition. At one end of the spectrum, there are the many general job search and recruitment websites, such as Indeed, Monster.com, and/or ZipRecruiter.com.
At the other end, there are numerous niche recruiting and talent agencies that focus specifically on the medical field.
What's Wrong With The Current Market Players?
For recruiting sites such as Indeed, Monster, and ZipRecruiter, offering lower prices to a huge audience is extremely attractive and appealing to applicants.
However, the lack of a niche focus makes the website less appealing for highly-trained specialists. Meanwhile, medical recruiters can leverage their vast experience and personal relationships.
It's Time for Professionals to Join Together
From the outside, it seems that Relode’s best chance to break into the market is to leverage the existing relationships already built by medical professionals. This is certainly a compelling angle but there’s a serious challenge: many medical professionals are already working long hours and may not feel like moonlighting as recruiters.
Still, with potential rewards reaching five-figure sums, even busy doctors will find it worth their time to refer their colleagues to opportunities. And so long as there remains a shortage of medical staff, there will be a lot of churn and job openings. This means hospitals are going to have to offer generous rewards and pay for expensive recruiting services.
Of course, if conditions change in the future and the shortage abates, Relode could find itself in a tough position. Their model depends on hospitals being willing to pay a lot of money for quality referrals and recruits.
Who knows what the medical professional will look like sixty years from now, but by 2032, the United States alone is projected to suffer from a shortage of roughly 122,000 doctors. This will result in burdens for patients and practitioners alike, but for medical recruiting firms, it creates opportunity.