The healthcare staffing industry continues to face challenges in 2025 — navigating new legislation and policies, finding candidates amid a rising physician shortage, and securing their place as an essential partner while hospitals cut costs. Staffing firms will have to evolve to stay competitive in this environment, exploring innovative technologies like AI and working towards building a culture of excellence. Agencies that aren’t able to adapt may be looking at mergers or closures.
These are just some of the insights from RefAssured’s 2025 Healthcare Staffing Predictions report, a collection of down-to-earth perspectives from healthcare staffing executives on what to expect in the year ahead.
To take a deeper look at how the report came about and explore its key takeaways and expert insights, we spoke with Vinda Souza, Chief Marketing Officer at RefAssured.
Predictions from those who “walk the walk”
As a CMO with a background in PR and content marketing, Souza noticed some concerning trends in staffing industry content — many reports were oversimplified “snackable” pieces that lacked substance, while others provided simple, optimistic views on trends to avoid scaring off potential customers.
Souza wanted RefAssured’s report to stand out as an honest, unvarnished assessment of future trends that helps healthcare staffing companies with scenario planning. To accomplish this, she set out to exclusively interview operating executives with direct experience running healthcare staffing agencies, rather than general industry experts. Because who better to predict the future than those who deal with the challenges every day?
“For this piece, I really wanted to identify people who can walk the walk and who have been in the position of the people who would be reading,” Souza says. “[Those] who can say, ‘I went through this. I came out the other side. And this is what I think will happen, based on this day-to-day life that I’m living.’ ”
This approach, while potentially less comfortable than sanitized content and general predictions, better serves the industry by providing real, actionable insights from industry veterans who’ve been there.
Evolving value props to stay relevant
Staffing leaders in RefAssured’s report observed that healthcare organizations are building float pools and reducing dependence on staffing agencies to curb spending.
“Relying on staffing agencies or third party providers of temporary labor is expensive,” Souza says. “Hospitals who are incentivized to reduce costs, and who are also being pressured considerably financially, are going to want to reduce their reliance on anything they can’t directly control. If they can figure out a way to do it themselves, they’re going to try to do it themselves, even if staffing agencies are much better at it.”
However, while hospitals are motivated to reduce costs by bringing staffing in-house, they face significant challenges. Drawing from her experience on a major Boston hospital’s leadership board, Souza notes that hospitals struggle to build internal talent pools because:
- High-quality healthcare talent remains in short supply
- Healthcare workers increasingly prioritize flexibility and work-life balance over institutional loyalty
- The industry faces a widespread burnout crisis
“While logically it would make sense to bring hiring in-house as much as possible, the reason external agencies are still popular and thriving is because that’s very difficult to do, and extraordinarily difficult to do well.”
To stay competitive in this environment, staffing agencies need to evolve beyond just providing talent. They should consider:
- Offering consulting services on optimal talent mix
- Providing career guidance to healthcare practitioners
- Expanding into healthcare IT and tech consulting, especially as it relates to digital transformation
- Focus on delivering practical, immediate efficiency improvements rather than theoretical solutions
Souza emphasizes the importance of delivering real, practical value rather than chasing buzzwords or implementing solutions (like certain AI tools) that might promise efficiency but actually create more work. This practical approach informed the selection of contributors for RefAssured’s report — they sought experts who could distinguish between truly significant industry shifts and temporary hype.
AI’s role in healthcare staffing
Souza and many of the healthcare staffing leaders featured in the report identified AI applications as a key area of opportunity, particularly for resource allocation, talent pool management, and addressing critical skill shortages. AI could also support basic nursing tasks like discharge instructions and post-clinical care, though Souza emphasizes this should always include human oversight.
But while acknowledging AI’s potential, Souza takes a measured stance on its role in recruiting, noting that technology should create more opportunities for human joy and connection, not encroach upon it.
AI’s best use is eliminating mundane tasks and busywork, the aspects of the role recruiters enjoy least. It can help scale human connections by handling basic queries, like chatbots for after-hours support. Above all, it can free up recruiters to focus on what they do best — “executing their experienced judgment, their sixth sense, their instinct on knowing what’s an ideal match between talent and job and employer.”
“Their ability to matchmake is really not something I see being replaced,” Souza says. “Because when done right, it is an art form, not a science.”
A telehealth boom is on the horizon
This is expected to be an “explosive year” for telehealth, due to several factors including:
- The widespread acceptance of virtual care since the pandemic
- Increasing demand for preventative care and disease management
- Rising concerns about loneliness and social media-related mental health issues
Souza sees telehealth as a powerful tool for improving healthcare equity by providing services to underserved areas and creating a more level playing field for care access. The technology’s ability to enable efficient communication regardless of physical location could transform healthcare delivery, particularly in addressing current societal challenges around healthcare access and mental health support.
“This is what things like Zoom were made for,” she says, “this ability to be efficient in how we communicate with other human beings, and not to let physical separation prevent us from pursuing and accessing the care that we need and deserve.”
Collaboration for the greater good
The 2025 Healthcare Staffing Predictions report brings together high-ranking healthcare staffing executives, who generously shared their insights despite busy schedules, with a shared commitment to improving healthcare delivery. They embodied the “rising tide lifts all ships” philosophy to create a valuable resource for healthcare staffing professionals involved in strategic planning for the year ahead.
Download the report and follow RefAssured for more healthcare staffing insights.
