Healthcare staffing firms are under pressure to do three things at once: fill faster, operate leaner, and keep healthcare professionals engaged in a market where loyalty is fluid and options are everywhere. Most agencies are trying to solve that equation with a mix of tighter budgets, new tools, and the same legacy workflows they’ve always used, all while sitting on mountains of data they’re not really using to drive decisions.
Opus Match exists to bridge that gap between “we have the data” and “we’re actually using it.” VP of Sales & Marketing Corey Grissom and Head of Product Adam Butera to help agencies turn messy profiles, job feeds, and engagement signals into something much sharper: intent-driven matching, redeployment, and a smoother experience for both clinicians and recruiters. Their platform plugs into existing ATS/CRMs, layers in AI matching and behavioral data, and gives candidates a mobile-first way to manage profiles, credentials, and opportunities, while handing recruiters back hours a week they used to spend on manual work.
In this conversation at Healthcare Staffing Summit, Corey and Adam talk about the shift from “just add more recruiters” to “do more with the team you have,” how smarter use of data changes where executives invest, what clinicians actually want from an agency, and why the next generation of staffing leaders will need to think like ecosystem designers with an AI strategy that moves in weeks and months, not years.
Q. You spend a lot of time with healthcare staffing leaders who are trying to stay ahead in a changing market. What’s the biggest shift you’ve seen in how firms are thinking about growth and operational strategy?
Corey Grissom: I think from a trend standpoint, it’s nothing new: a lot of agencies are trying to do a lot more with less, whether that’s through technology or through their people.
We all know that bill rates are a lot different in 2025 than they were in 2020,2021. So to keep the same margins and keep everything intact, you’ve got to deploy technology, you’ve got to deploy automation, and you’ve also got to be keeping your travelers on assignment and getting paid.
Anything you can do to remove friction in the candidate experience is huge right now — but it’s also about internally removing friction for your recruitment team and account management.
We’re seeing a lot more emphasis there in the last 18 months. Everyone was very, very candidate-driven when the pandemic phase first started kicking off. Now we’re starting to see people think about desk level and back office as the new frontier on the agency side.
Adam Butera: I’d agree. There’s a lot more focus on these operational elements that are really the backbone of the business — and they have to kind of reorganize how that backbone shapes itself in the new world, using technology and using AI.
Those areas have always been the backbone, but how they link to the rest of the business operationally has been a bit disconnected. Having a good connection for those throughout the organization is really the next frontier — making sure they work smoothly as well.
Q. What separates the businesses who get real value from their data from those who are just collecting it?
AB: There are a lot of elements that come into play — not just data hygiene, but also the reality that even if your data is “perfect” and you’re getting all the right data back, it can still be overwhelming.
You’ve got all of these elements and points coming back to you, and you’re trying to figure out how to make sense of it. The ones who are most successful can hone in on what elements were proving success — how they were measuring success before the technology — and then stay focused in those areas when they look at the data.
That really helps you get in and start to open your eyes to how you can drive better processes or drive more revenue. Narrow the focus a bit before you try to drink from the fire hose.
Q. As firms use data differently and collect it more efficiently, how are you seeing recruiter time and resources being allocated differently?
AB: This is where there’s a ton of change — and not just for recruiters. It’s all aspects of the business, including back office versus front office.
Creating time and efficiencies is about finally accepting that five minutes here, one minute there, really do compound into a much greater number at the end. You’ve got to embrace that and look for opportunities to have flexibility so that each person, who operates a little differently, can engage without hitting a huge wall to climb.
You don’t want to create a barrier to entry where someone has to change everything overnight. You want tools that are flexible and account for different levels of adoption — people who are hungry for it and people who are more reluctant but can still start to gain traction and drive some success.
CG: And with OpusMatch, what we’ve seen that’s been really cool — especially early on in our journey — is that the time savings and the return back to the recruiter are about more than just the placements coming through the app.
On average, we’re able to give a recruiter back potentially four to five hours in a week, which is a major piece of their time. In a world that’s so metric- and KPI-driven, when you’re pushing individual producers to hit certain numbers by a certain time, if you can give them that additional time back to focus on the metrics that are working, that’s a huge win.
It almost allows recruiters to use systems to become more human in their process, and to be a lot more effective for the agency at the end of the day.
AB: The automation — if it’s built and implemented effectively — targets the things that are already a drain on their time, not things you should have a human doing. It lets them focus on the things a human should be doing, that only a human can do, at the right times when they actually want to do it.
That’s the north star: people interacting when they need to, where they need to, with people who want to be interacting in that moment as well.
Q. Beyond sourcing speed and productivity, what new metrics are emerging as most valuable for healthcare staffing executives?
AB: Just like the granularity we talked about in time savings, I think the same applies to metrics. For me, I really want to be looking at the funnel and each piece of the funnel — what’s happening at each phase. Instead of just asking how many placements they’re making, look at how fast people are moving through each stage. What phases are they getting stuck in? Where does human interaction make the most difference?
That’s the best way to respond to how is this being accepted, and where do people need the most help? Then you can say, “Okay, this part of the process fares better with human interaction and human involvement. So we shouldn’t judge this purely on speed; there’s flexibility here.”
You want to judge the speed before and after those human moments. So you really have to break it down more than people have in the past. While I said start simple in terms of what you measure success with, how you judge an individual’s success is a different question.
CG: The other thing we’re seeing is around retention and redeployment.
At the tail end of the big rise in healthcare staffing a couple of years ago, it was all about time to fill, speed to fill, and how fast we could credential someone. Now we’re starting to see more focus on retention — both for candidates and for internal teams.
Leaders are looking at redeployment rates, and asking: when I redeploy someone a second, third, fourth time, are we using fewer internal resources every time?
We’re seeing people use our machine learning and our mobile app to allow candidates to self-service themselves into those redeployments and into the metrics they care about.
Ultimately, a big metric we see is: how much are you spending to acquire a candidate? If we can reduce your job-board spend because you’re redeploying the same candidates over time with the data you already have, that’s a massive win.
We’ve seen firms leave other platforms and talent marketplaces and massively reduce their dependency on sourcing new candidates every day. The concept around redeployment and “ad spend per candidate” is super important as everything’s constricted right now — especially for marketers who are under the magnifying glass.
If we can show that a lead you’ve already purchased, that’s sitting in your database, can be redeployed over and over, that’s a much more cost-effective placement over time for the whole agency.
AB: And historically, healthcare staffing has been pretty difficult for clinicians to jump from agency to agency. There’s a big onboarding curve at each one, and depending on the tech they interact with, it can be difficult. Change is hard; the status quo is easy.
So if the status quo — your brand — can make it even easier and more compelling, that stickiness has a huge reward for minimal effort and change. You can get away with really minimal automations and still have a dramatic impact on revenue and cost for your agency.
As you build on that, you create a stickier experience: more people interact with the brand, they feel like the brand is providing value between placements, and all of that becomes really important. Historically, those things were hard to do; now you’re automatically tailoring them.
Q. Healthcare professionals today have more choices than ever. What are they looking for in a staffing partner now?
AB: There are a few elements.
First, when they first engage with your agency, they want to know you’re a good fit — that it’s not just going to be “going through the motions” that leads nowhere. They don’t want the black-hole experience.
If you implement technology in the right ways, you can check off some boxes before you both invest a lot of time, and give them the opportunity to check boxes for themselves — to drive their own success and express their own level of intent.
We’ve seen success in other platforms that do that, and of course ours does it too — in a way that lets us speed up what comes later, especially the parts that traditionally slow down post-offer, by doing more up front.
The big theme is: give them the opportunity. Let the clinician or candidate drive their own success, and express their intent by how much information they’re willing to provide at each stage.
They’ve been through this before. They know what’s at the end of the tunnel. They know when it’s painful somewhere versus somewhere else. The brands that make it frictionless — or at least less friction than what else is out there — stand out.
I’ve done a lot of direct interactions with healthcare professionals to get feedback on the tech that’s out there. A big takeaway is there’s often a big barrier to entry — so the brands that shine bright with a super-easy, streamlined, unified process really stand out. The bar is fairly low in some cases, so if you put real energy into making it work in a positive way, you’ll see a great reaction and a great return pretty quickly.
CG: On top of that, with all the options candidates have, they search based on what they want for their career and their next job. Platforms and companies that have the most jobs do have an advantage right now.
We’re going to see players in the top five continue to have influence, because it’s very easy to find Kaiser jobs on Aya. It’s very easy to find certain per diem roles on AMN. If I’m a traveling physician, I know CHG probably has the right opportunity for me.
Not every agency can go out and take all the jobs from those larger players. So when you do have the candidate, you’ve got to be frictionless. You’ve got to give that overall experience so that when they’re ready to reach out to you — when they’ve shown intent — you’re not slowing the process down collecting documents or doing things that a marketplace like Vivian makes very easy.
We talk to hundreds of healthcare professionals and agencies about this. We’ve seen multiple situations where someone is on assignment with an agency, and when it’s time to extend, they go back to Vivian to extend rather than going back to the agency — because that’s where they originally came through, that’s where they created their profile, and they don’t want to rebuild it.
If you can provide that level of self-service and make extension and redeployment frictionless, you keep the candidate you’ve already paid for in your bucket. That drives redeployment and better ROI on that candidate investment.
AB: And they have to feel it from the human side too. They need to feel like they’re engaging with a real person on the other end. As much as we talk about the brand, is the brand really holding up its end — giving them a recognizable face and human connection?
The sweet spot is: self-service when they want it, and an omnichannel environment where they know there are key moments in their career when they will want to talk to someone. Maybe a particular assignment can be on autopilot for six to eight months — great. But at the end of it, they’re going to want guidance.
That guidance is what keeps and builds the relationship, and that’s ultimately what brands should be driving.
Q. Is there internal data that’s helping healthcare staffing firms predict who is likely to redeploy — and when?
AB: Yes — this is where behavioral data really comes into play.
Because we take an omnichannel approach, you’ve got to be tracking the data on all sides: mobile app, website, SMS, email — all of it.
We look at it as: this candidate or clinician is engaging with a brand. When you put those engagement points together, you start to understand their “buying habits.” It’s all about intent.
You get to know, for each candidate on assignment, what’s the key time they tend to re-engage and start looking at new jobs? Then you can serve up the right opportunity at the right time and make it really easy for them to request an extension or raise their hand for a new assignment somewhere else. There’s a lot of opportunity there.
CG: Our engagement score brings recency bias into the match, and that’s massive.
I could take the same resume from five years ago and run it against the same job today. The system will show me the same match. But that person might have been managing a Wendy’s in Dublin, Ohio, for the last three years and not even be in nursing anymore — and the technology will still tell me it’s a good match.
Where we see real value is in adding recency bias: bidirectional communication, visits back to your website, sending a referral, uploading a credential document. Those are high-intent signals.
Not all senior-level accounting or finance leaders can see that those activities are happening. We want to let them know they are happening — and we want to let recruiters know where to focus. Focus on this set of candidates. Focus your time here.
We want to give them time savings back, so they can make the right 60 to 100 dials in a day based on intent and engagement — based on “are they really that into me? Sometimes the solution isn’t more calls, more candidates, more emails. It’s the right calls and emails to the right candidates.
AB: There’s also a timing element. It’s easy to misinterpret. Maybe you did a great job with your outreach, but they were on vacation and taking a break. Three weeks later, they’re suddenly engaging with your platform again.
Maybe they never opened the email, but they remembered your name, your marketing, your touch points — and now they’re back on your website. That engagement tells you: you didn’t miss your opportunity; the timing just wasn’t right yet.
Engagement and recency help you judge that timing a lot better.
Q. As data and automation reshape workflows, what new skills or roles will define the next generation of staffing leaders?
AB: One big shift I talk about a lot is how technology spend has moved. Ten or fifteen years ago, in staffing, tech adoption lined up more directly with marketing spend. Now it’s shifted into operational and IT spend. So you need someone at the hub of that — someone who truly understands the brand’s ecosystem.
It’s never going to be one player that does everything. Even if some platforms do a lot of things, it’s always going to be a bit of a Frankenstein: you’ll have key players that do referrals really well, others that do references really well, your ATS as the hub, something for matching and mobile engagement — all plugged together.
You need someone who truly understands how all of that interacts operationally and can make it a cohesive force. That role or department is going to separate the firms that succeed with emerging tech and AI from those that don’t.
The big shift is operational: how they’re thinking about recruiting departments and back-office departments, and the operational changes they have to make. Someone who understands those interactions — the good, the bad, and the ugly — is incredibly valuable right now.
CG: And as automation evolves, I think CIOs and CTOs are going to have a lot more say in hiring plans, budgets, and operational plans — based on where you can deploy technology in the stack to save on operations.
Once they’ve really flushed out those systems and can show the returns over time, they can lean on those numbers to forecast on the labor side. So instead of, “We want to double revenue next year, let’s double our floor,” it becomes how much automation do we need to get a recruiter from making 20 placements to making 22 by the end of the year? Those will be the decisions, rather than, “Should we hire 100 more recruiters?”
AB: Adding headcount isn’t the default strategy anymore. It’s not necessarily eliminating, but it’s about not adding just for the sake of growth.
The other important piece is expectations. Change takes time; it happens incrementally. How can you continue to grow from what’s working and what’s not, as you change?
The “20 to 22 placements” analogy is a good one. Don’t expect to double productivity overnight without breaking more than you improve. Managing and tempering expectations around that is important.
And we’re all learning together. That’s where partnerships come in. Vendors and agencies are figuring this out side by side.
Q. What’s one decision a healthcare staffing CEO should make right now to future-proof their business?
CG: The quick, easy answer we all keep hearing — and it’s true — is: you’ve got to have an AI strategy, or you’re behind. You’ve at least got to be dabbling. Start building the pipelines in your organization for how you’re going to execute with AI and automation.
But honestly, the simplest advice is just get started. Right now you’ve got some agencies diving in almost too deep, and others stuck in indecision. The best thing you can do is rip off the band-aid and add AI to your workflow somewhere meaningful.
The reality is, the technology you leverage today is going to be outdated in three months. If your decision-making process is in quarters and years instead of weeks and months, your AI strategy is probably going to be outdated by the time you make a decision.
AB: For me, the other key is flexibility. I know that’s difficult, because you don’t want to be non-committal. You’ve got to throw some chips in, take the gamble, and commit if you really want to affect change.
But you also need enough flexibility to recognize we’re all in an evaluation process. Some of this is new. You may not even know the right questions to ask yet. Jumping in and working with these tools starts to get you thinking the right way.
So I’d say: be flexible on purpose — not so flexible that it stops you from making real progress, but flexible enough to allow for learning as you go.
With all the emerging tech that’s out there, some people are doing some things really well, and there are probably questions we’re not even asking yet. Jump in, be open-minded, and keep moving forward.
