What does it take to stand out in the competitive world of nursing recruitment? According to today’s guest, it starts with authenticity, strategy, and building a brand people trust. In this episode of The Staffing Show, we are joined by the founder and president of Nurse Recruitment Experts, Adam Chambers, to discuss recruitment in the nursing industry. To kick off, Adam tells us about his recruitment career, why he built a lifestyle brand, and how that has affected how he runs his business. We then delve into some tactics that work in nurse recruitment marketing; learn about Adam’s podcast, Nurse Recruitment Secrets; and discuss what’s next for nursing recruitment and how the staffing industry is evolving. Thanks for listening in!
[0:01:14] David Folwell: Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us for another episode of The Staffing Show. Today, I am super excited to be joined by Adam Chambers, who is the President and Founder of Nurse Recruitment Experts, and also the host of one of the most popular healthcare staffing podcasts, Nurse Recruitment Secrets. Adam, super excited to have you on the show today and hear your story and a little bit about what you’re doing. Thanks so much for joining.
[0:01:42] Adam Chambers: Oh, thanks for inviting me. I’m really excited to share it with you and your listeners. And I love your plants, by the way. I need to show you mine after.
[0:01:51] David Folwell: Awesome, thanks. Thanks, I appreciate it. To kick things off, we’d love to know how you got into the staffing industry, a little bit about your background, and then we can jump into some nurse recruiting, marketing secrets, and a few other key topics.
[0:02:08] Adam Chambers: Okay, so I’m from a family of nurses. My aunt worked in the UK’s oldest hospital. It’s called St. Barth’s, and it was founded in the 12th century. And my cousin worked in the UK’s biggest children’s hospital, which is called Great Ormond Street. And growing up, I heard stories from them by being nurses. I didn’t really appreciate what a nurse really did and how the job looked like until I was in my teenage years. The same themes kept coming up from them that things were getting hard in terms of staffing, they were feeling more burned out, and life was just getting more difficult as a nurse.
I graduated from university in 2018. I studied history, which is probably why I mentioned history and a lot of things, but I had always been really interested in marketing, on the other hand, just communication, ideas. During school, I kind of traded faux stocks. They were like virtual trading cards in a soccer game. And whenever I left, I was kind of filled with the desire to start my own business. And that issue, which my family members had mentioned to me, it kept ringing in my head, and they kept talking about it.
We kind of started out by falling in the teacher recruitment, based on a bit of previous experience I had. But again, that was ringing on my head, like, “Nurses are facing a crisis. We need help. We need your skills,” is what they’re saying to me. Around 2019, started a company called Applichat Healthcare. We rebranded it as Nurse Recruitment Experts a couple of years ago. Really to help my family members and every nurse across the world find jobs easier, apply to jobs easier, and really raise the standards that hospitals and other healthcare providers have when it comes to recruiting, staffing, or attention so that we can chip away, even if it’s just a little bit, the nursing shortage and the nursing burnout crisis. That’s how we got into it. COVID happened about a year after. And we could talk more about how that changed things, but it was quite dramatic.
[0:04:17] David Folwell: That’s awesome. I know one of the things you and I had talked about previously is that your approach to growing nurse recruitment experts has been a bit different than some. There’s a lot of agencies out there that are PE-backed and a lot that are kind of on the “we’re trying to grow as fast as we possibly can.” And you mentioned early on when we were talking that you’ve been purposely building kind of a lifestyle brand. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about the decisions behind that, what that means to you?
[0:04:43] Adam Chambers: Yeah. I’ve been really influenced by mentors throughout my career. My first job was an internship with an entrepreneur based in Bristol. He had a horse recruitment marketing company, like for the equine industry.
[0:05:02] David Folwell: That’s the first I’ve heard that.
[0:05:04] Adam Chambers: All right. It wasn’t just the recruitment. Actually, it was about marketing, too. But that first boss was – I love horses. I love marketing, not as much, but a little bit in terms of careers. I’m not going to be a horse rider, unfortunately. I’m going to use my skill in marketing to be in the area that I love. And she went to horse shows, she owned her own horse, and she was able to mingle and mix with clients in the field. That was really her hobby.
Ever since I worked with her, I’ve always been kind of drawn to mentors that prioritized lifestyle. One, he’s called Mike Eames. He’s based in the UK. He sold a couple of recruiting companies, and he’s a coach. And he always said to me that around 3% to 5% of recruiting companies in the UK at least ever end in a sale, or it’s called a liquidity event, where the founder walks off into the sunset. And he said to me that if you’re young, if you don’t have a lot of familiar wealth or personal wealth behind you, and if you only have fun with your business while you’re in your 20s, then you don’t have to be throwing all of the profits back into the business, working 60 hours a week, just dying for this business in order to be successful with it. And that really stuck with me.
I still do work 60 hours a week sometimes, sometimes it’s 40, sometimes it’s 20. And since we started really, I’ve always kept that in mind that, for me and for our team, this business should really enable and improve our life outside of the business as well as being fun and successful within the business. And I acknowledge that that’s not going to make me a billionaire with this business, but it does have the potential for me to travel, enjoy life while I’m young, and create myself an estate that I could fall back on if I do choose to create something that is more investment and capital-heavy. That’s my philosophy.
Obviously, it won’t work for everyone, but I think most recruitment owners don’t really have an end goal in mind. They’re like, “Eventually, I might sell it, or eventually I’ll just keep going.” And my message, I suppose, would be there doesn’t have to be an end goal where it’s the period, the full stop. You can achieve the things in your personal life that you want to achieve while you’re still running the business. You just have to make a few compromises on either way. But compromise isn’t as big as losing time for your loved ones or having some regrets. That’s my philosophy.
[0:08:09] David Folwell: Love it. And how has that changed your approach? What is your – I know you’re in Mexico right now. How has that changed your approach to running your business, and where you’ve lived, and the lifestyle elements of it?
[0:08:23] Adam Chambers: Yeah. There’s probably three ones to say in terms of the strategy, the operations, and personal life. As I mentioned, strategy is let’s aim for a 60% gross profit margin and then 40% net profit of which I can choose to invest that into the business again, which is what I’ve been doing with most of it recently. I can take it out of the business and put it in another investment. I have stocks or another business, or I can just pay it myself and spend it.
Having that kind of set gross and that profit goal has been quite helpful to managing operations and understanding, “All right, we have this 40% at the end of the year. This is our growth target for this year. This is my personal target. Here’s how I’m going to achieve both or achieve one and set aside the other.”
In terms of the operations, I think it’s resulted in a much lower overhead. Not having a physical office. Having a team who are based in different countries, working from home themselves. It’s created some challenges, of course. Building in-person relationships with clients, getting out to a lot of conferences, those things definitely lack. In this model of business, that hinders growth fundamentally.
On the flip side, I think for team retention, employee satisfaction and recruitment, it makes it a lot easier than it would be if we were a much more kind of in-office pressure cooker environment. There’s pros and cons, of course. Finally, personal one, I think at the end of the year, I would take more days off, of course, than most business owners. But it’s never massive money. It’s never like six months at a time. But I wouldn’t sweat about taking a Friday or Monday off. As you know, I live in Mexico. My wife’s from here. I’ve been here for a few years on and off. I think being able to travel is facilitated by having this model. Not for everyone. But for me, it works.
[0:10:41] David Folwell: That’s great. I love it. And jumping into a topic that I think is definitely top of mind for a lot of the listeners. Let’s talk about what are some of the strategies and tactics that you’re seeing work when it comes to nurse recruitment marketing? I know that that is something that everybody’s trying to figure out how to attract more nurses, how to get away from job boards. What’s working? What are you seeing in the market right now?
[0:11:11] Adam Chambers: The first one that springs to mind is breaking free of the constraints of brand. Getting marketing on board. These are two things that weigh against each other, but I think you have to get both of them right to be effective nurse recruitment. Obviously, there’s Indeed job boards, and everyone puts a job on Indeed. Everyone’s using it and that’s fair enough. There’s ways you can optimize your jobs. You can use a programmatic provider, you can write better job ads. All of those things help. But at the end of the day, you’re still fishing in the same puddle. Not puddle. Sorry. It is the biggest job in the world. The same seed for candidates.
What I say to people is that you need to be going outside of Indeed, getting to people where they spend time when they’re not looking for jobs, which is most of their time. That includes social media, it includes non-social media websites, time spent online in general, and then just kind of physical advertisements.
I’m actually doing a webinar on this. It’ll probably be out by the time this comes out. It’s on SSM Health, which are based in the Midwest, I believe. And what they do is they seem to have created a strong bond between their recruitment team or the recruitment mission and the marketing team. They have a YouTube channel called SSM Health Jobs. And they just post fun kind of 20 to 60-second clips of their staff at work, but also at play at the same time.
There’s one video that’s racked up three million views. There’s one that’s running two million views. And collectively, they have nine million views in all their short videos. It’s funny because if you go over under the normal videos tab YouTube, you see the more standard operation that healthcare providers have, which is kind of corporate-style video, heavily edited. You have leadership speaking. Everyone’s saying how much they love the place. They have like hundreds of views. Flip over, they have millions of views on what’s called user-generated content, which is people being relatable, having fun, really showing what it’s like to actually work at the location. That is only possible, I believe, because their marketing team are on board with it.
Too often, we see providers constrained by having to be tightly on-brand, appeal to brand guidelines for a function that people don’t really relate to if it is on-brand in the same way where they could if it was relatable. It’s about showing behind the scenes. Not just pumping out content that looks like it’s being done by an external videography firm, and really polished. And finding ways to say, “Here’s my brand guidelines, but also here’s the type of messaging that people relate to that is going to be a bit fun, maybe a bit different, and can actually catch nurses’ attention.” Because so many people try to recruit the same nurse, their attention is being pulled various ways. To break through the noise, you do have to be different. That’s really it.
[0:14:32] David Folwell: Yeah, I mean, I think that makes sense. And having run marketing for so many different companies over the years, it’s really funny when everybody’s like, “Oh, we want to get all this attention. We want to go viral. We want to get –” and then you start talking about what does that mean? And it rarely means doing what they’ve been doing or sticking within the brand guidelines.
When you’re working with organizations, especially with hospital systems, how are you approaching that? Because I feel like hospital systems as a whole are less likely to be willing to break free of that or to allow for free reign kind of influence or traditional influence or marketing.
[0:15:12] Adam Chambers: Yeah. Definitely, it’s difficult, especially if you’re in a corporate system with lots of layers of decision-making. There’s trying to challenge that politically through the organization, and then there’s going around it, bypassing it. For a client right now, we are bypassing by doing an unbranded campaign. We’ve made a new social media page. Let’s say the client is in New Jersey, okay? It’s called “ICU nurse jobs in New Jersey,” and we’re trying to get nurses to relocate from across the country into New Jersey.
We’re making our content related to what it’s like to live in that area. The pros, the cons. Talking about what the winter’s like, what summer’s like. Attracting nurses from California who want to be near New York. Attracting nurses from Florida who don’t want to sweat so much in the summer. How do you communicate that in a fun and interesting way? And by being unbranded, we’ve been given kind of free rein by the client to output the type of content that we think works. And for that client, it’s going pretty well. That’s one.
Another one to go around it is working with external advertisers, like influencers. Generally, I think marketing teams are more willing if it’s an influencer, he has like an established identity, he can explain through my identity, this works. There’s not really a way to get the TikToker to be dressed in your logo or in your brand voice. By saying through this, yeah, there’s no other way.
And then there’s the internal part, just explaining to leadership and showing them the numbers. And you’d be surprised that a lot of recruitment or HR teams, they haven’t actually reached out to marketing, say, “Can we have a meeting about how we can do better recruitment marketing? We’d love for your buy-in, and we’d love for you to help us with this.” But for the marketing teams, it’s about holding on to what they own and not giving up control. And you really need to bring them in. It’s all about, “I’m doing this with marketing. But I bring in marketing into recruitment, and we’re both doing it together.”
You have to be thoughtful about how you get buy-in in order to listen to the brand a bit and then also hear from them how they think that the brand could be used and could be useful. And they’ll probably give you some new ideas as well, because most recruitment teams aren’t well-versed in marketing.
[0:18:03] David Folwell: When you’re working with hospitals on how to do this, you’re kind of getting to know the brand, getting to know the audience, where the audience sits. Kind of the traditional – some of the traditional marketing elements. What are any unique things or approaches that you think would be relevant for staffing agency owners that are trying to kind of unlock their marketing strategy? I know you’re probably sharing on your webinar, but is there anything that you kind of tease in terms of best practices?
[0:18:30] Adam Chambers: Yeah. For staffing agency owners to get nurses to apply to their travel nurse opens, for example?
[0:18:39] David Folwell: Yeah, yeah.
[0:18:40] Adam Chambers: I think it’s about doing market research and listen to what nurses are talking about, and then adopting their voice in their topics. I spend some time on nurse Subreddits. Reddit is like a forum website. You go on the [inaudible 0:18:57] Reddit travel nursing or Reddit nursing. You’ll see a large community of nurses are posting about their problems and their pain points each day.
There’s one. It’s called r/nursing. It’s got a million viewers, a million members, sorry, which are all nurses. I have posted on there once a week with bringing news and stories on staffing. There was one, the CNO of a hospital got a 24 million payout for being silenced around raising concerns about staffing facilities. And from the comments there, I can really read what nurses care about today and how they feel on certain issues.
I think once you get your finger on the pulse, you can bring that to a wider audience, like becoming a thought leader that brings news to nurses, but also the opinions of your team. And then just maximizing really an ability to the nurses that you’re trying to engage. Many staffing agencies are offering quite an identical service of picking up a contract with that agency and then you go and you work at the hospital. And just adding a layer of knowing what that is like, that experience for the nurse to not only apply to you, but then work at the hospital. I think it shows that you know them and you’re part of them almost. And that’s how you get kind of that stickiness and that loyalty.
[0:20:26] David Folwell: Yeah, that’s great. That makes a ton of sense. I’ve also spent some time on that. Reddit is such a great place to just explore and kind of get the feel of what people are thinking and how people are feeling about different industries. There’s one on the recruitment market and recruiting industry as well. I think it’s called recruiting hell. That is an interesting – it’s interesting to listen to.
[0:20:49] Adam Chambers: Yeah. To highlight, sorry that it’s very youth – weighted towards young people and weighted towards people who are more liberal politically, if that matters for you, or your company, or your hospital. Well, for anything, any data set, you need to take into account what the people on it think. Yeah, just be aware of what its user base is before you start using it for data analysis purposes.
[0:21:14] David Folwell: Yeah. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense, because it definitely leans one direction, which has got some great content, great insights in there, and I think that’s a good idea for understanding what people are saying about the market. One of the things that I know you and I had talked about is you got your podcast. What has been the impact of having your own podcast? What are some of the topics that you guys go over on the Nurse Recruitment Secrets?
[0:21:39] Adam Chambers: Yeah, thanks for asking. The topics are really formulated around the idea of creating a podcast or a webinar series that advises in-house healthcare recruitment teams and staffing agencies how to recruit nurses better. We’ve covered everything from how to write better job ads, case studies of different hospital systems. How they’re saving money? How they’re cutting temporary stuff, or decreasing temporary stuff, or they’re cutting permanent stuff or basic permanent stuff.
There was one in PeaceHealth in Oregon, in Washington. Their vice president of acquisition told us about how they cut costs. I think it was by – they save $14 million dollars through some cost-cutting measures. That kind of content where it’s really bringing in highlighting stories of organizations that are doing nurse recruitment well, and occasionally bringing in thought leaders on kind of topics that people know are important but don’t know a lot about. We had someone in from – I’m going to butcher this acronym, but CFSGN, I think, which accredited international nurses. And back then, he was talking about visa-freeze and waiting lists from certain countries, and it was really enlightening. You can really go through the podcast and Nurse Recruitment Secrets on YouTube, or Spotify, or wherever to get your podcasts. And just look at old episodes, and there’ll probably be a topic that will help you if you’re in nurse recruitment.
[0:23:22] David Folwell: Love it. Where do you see – I mean, the industry’s been changing quite a bit, because the last five years in healthcare staffing and nurse recruiting, there’s been drastic shifts from the COVID days to the MSP world that we live in now. What are some of the trends that you see? What do you see the next kind of one to three years looking like in nurse recruiting?
[0:23:48] Adam Chambers: I’ve got into it just before COVID. As we all know, billions extra pumped into nurse recruitment, more so on nurse temporary staffing around that period. Traveling nursing companies boomed. And I went to this Staffing Industry Analyst Healthcare Conference in 2021, and it was berserk. In the Casino – I didn’t really go to the casino. I didn’t have a lot of money to spend. But everyone was thinking that that’s going to last forever. And, yeah, there was a lot of kind of jubilant born energy. Two years later, I went back, and the mood had changed quite a lot.
[0:24:36] David Folwell: It certainly has.
[0:24:36] Adam Chambers: Dipping. And I actually bought some stock, not a lot, in AMN Healthcare after that 2021 conference because I was one of those people that thought it would last forever. If you look at their stock now, it’s something like 90%, I think, or 80%. Anyway, where we are now, I think it’s kind of like correction energy where the problem margin got so suppressed during COVID because of the expansion of travel nursing and other things, obviously, but inflation. But when they look at staffing now, it is about how do they do a bit more in-house? How do they retain staff better? And generally, how can they manage this towards profitability?
The way I see nurse recruitment in the future, we know the nursing shortage is going to continue to exist. Immigration isn’t going to fix it, particularly with recent administration changes. The blockage in the education system seems to be persistent. Last year, 81,000 applicants to nursing courses were turned away. The big blackout. And that included several thousand master’s and doctorate students who would be appropriate to be educators. And the big block is in the educator pipeline. Get paid 30% less to teach isn’t that attractive for a lot of nurses in this economy. Those core factors are still going to persist.
Obviously, there’s some states that are going to alleviate their shortage, and there’s some states it’s going to get worse, like California. In terms of what I say, if I get my crystal ball out, it’s going to be important for organizations still to recruit nurses. They’re going to want to do it in a cost-efficient way. When you look at changes to Medicaid, coming up with the new bill from President Trump. And you look at the kind of the competitive nature of a lot of facilities.
What I would say is, though, I’ve seen more of a consolidation in the market of recruiting and staffing providers. A lot of the recruitment marketing space, at least, have converted into being more of like a tech platform approach. TMP was the biggest one. They rebranded to Radancy. There’s a few others that have done something similar. And I think we’re seeing, at least, clients do want more of a tech-focused cost-cutting solution. I think it’s up to staffing issues and recruitment providers to consider how we can bring in tech tools. They don’t have to reposition ourselves to become a technology company, but really staying on top of what’s out there and how can we use it to differentiate ourselves.
You and I were talking about AI tools. We’ve been working on lovable.dev, which is a site that seems to be put in a prompt like ChatGPT and it can make your web page. Creating individual versions of that for individual jobs, for example, or even just individual roles and organizations. It can create kind of a new offering for us when it comes to selling as well. We can make a sales page directly focused to a particular client and their needs just with one or two prompts in five minutes. We, as vendors, are still really important. And what we need to do is listen to our clients and adapt our services to meet their own changing needs.
[0:28:34] David Folwell: Yeah, absolutely. And you’re in a vibe coding world, and so am I. It’s such a fun – the AI world and what we can create. And I completely agree, when that comes to listening to clients, that sounds like future is going to be tech-oriented and a lot of changes coming our way. With that, we’re going to jump to the speed round. I’ve got a couple of last questions for you, and then we’ll do some closing comments. What are the book or books that you’ve given most as a gift or that have been most influential in your life?
[0:29:04] Adam Chambers: Okay. I wasn’t expecting that one. I asked this to people during interviews because I want to see that they have actually read a book before. And if they don’t know what to say, then –
[0:29:15] David Folwell: I ask it out of personal gain because I’m a heavy reader. And I was like knowing what’s out there, what are people learning from?
[0:29:23] Adam Chambers: Yeah. Okay. Well, I’m a Christian. I haven’t read the Bible cover to cover before. And I’ve started doing it. So I would say the Bible first and foremost. It’s quite enlightening to learn about that. When it comes to business, the first business book I can remember reading was The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss.
[0:29:44] David Folwell: Oh, yeah.
[0:29:45] Adam Chambers: And that kind of relates back to the start of –
[0:29:47] David Folwell: So influential. Influential for me, too.
[0:29:48] Adam Chambers: Yeah. Oh, yeah? Well, his thing is about the four-hour workweek is kind of a salesy title about having many vacations from the company that you own. And putting someone else in charge, and then being able to – he would I think do like jiu-jitsu and just travel and such. My life doesn’t turn out exactly like that. I live in the same place. And I think for most people, they take the ethos of that and merge it around their own life and business. But I think that that opened just a new horizon for me. Because growing up, everyone I knew who was an adult was working a full-time job. And I didn’t have that perception of business owner didn’t equal being in it full-time all the time. That was an interesting one.
At the moment, I’m rereading Peter Thiel’s Zero to One. Yeah, it’s very kind of popular. People always refer back to it. It’s one of the principles of how can you start a business that – he’s all about creating a monopoly, but provides something new and different. And it’s so good that it’s unmatchable. I think that ambition, I think, has been quite – each time I read it, it fills me up with new energy and kind of new ideas about what I need to do and what I might be I’m doing wrong at the moment.
There’s the final one I’ll tell you about, I haven’t read in a while, so I can’t actually remember the title. But there’s a book called Good to Great, which is quite successful in business consultant. But SIA, Staffing Industry Analysts. I don’t know his first name. Mr. Aspen. Whoever the kind of CEO president of his, him and the consultant released a book, but it was for staffing. And it was talking about like the biggest staffing companies and how they grew, and the five points that each staffing company needs to have in order to be scalable to that kind of 100 million revenue and above. I haven’t read it in a while, but I’m sure – I think he’s Barry Aspen perhaps. You can look it up and find that one out, too.
[0:32:09] David Folwell: That’s great. Great recommendations. I second all of those. The majority of them are in my wheelhouse, the business side of it. The last question I’ve got for you is what major habit has changed in the last three to five years that has had the biggest impact on your life?
[0:32:25] Adam Chambers: It’s very simple, but really plays some value on going outside and not sitting down all day.
[0:32:31] David Folwell: Yeah. Great answer.
[0:32:34] Adam Chambers: Yeah. Think of it like you’re in the schooling condition – sorry. The schooling system conditions uses that in a lot of way. And you’re kind of accustomed to sitting down for 30 minutes, and then you stand up and you go to the next class. In my school, at least, we didn’t really go outside a lot unless we have the breaks. And because I was in Northern Ireland where it was raining all the time. The kind of corridor, it was just move to the next class, and then go inside during your break.
I find if I’m not kind of experiencing the outside, then whenever I’m inside working, I can’t be as productive. And just whenever I feel like you’re getting up and walking outside and bringing a pen and paper has been quite big for me. It helps me get a new surrounding for every idea I’m trying to figure out at the time. And you bump into people, and you realize, kind of appreciation for the real world. I must say I don’t like staring at a computer all day, which is what I mostly do. That’s kind of my crutch to try and remain human is going outside whenever I feel like I have the urge to do it.
[0:33:53] David Folwell: That’s great. That’s great. And any closing comments for the audience?
[0:33:59] Adam Chambers: Yeah. I mean, if your agency is struggling at the moment, a lot of staffing agencies are. It’s not the easiest market to work in. Don’t despair. Recognize the clients that you have and the value that you provide to them, and find a meaning and purpose of that, and your candidates and staff too. And then reflect back on how you felt whenever you were going and things are going great. But you can’t get that feeling again. You just need to adapt. The needs of organizations are changing. And try and stay on top of your client’s top of mind, so to speak. Engage with them, ask them what they’re doing, what their problems are. And always be adapting your service, even if that means doing something different.
We opened up a completely different area last year in government contracting. It started out of a nurse recruitment contract, which is pretty adjacent. But then we expanded to do marketing for organizations serving people with intellectual development disabilities, promoting Colorado State’s telehealth program. And that’s just kind of stripping off this element of our business, which was marketing from the kind of bigger piece of recruitment. Staffing agencies are so dynamic that we have so many kind of portions to your businesses that are valuable in themselves, be it the sales component, the recruiter element, marketing element, even the HR element, that if it’s not working, don’t be close-minded and think, “I have to be doing staffing and have a hundred people there working today.” Think about different net revenue streams go inside. Yeah, just kind of be open to how your staffing company and staffing in general needs to change to adapt to this market. And don’t just keep it rigid from what it was in the past.
[0:36:06] David Folwell: Great advice. Well, Adam, I really appreciate having you on the show with some great insights into recruitment marketing. If you guys don’t listen to his podcast, check it out. And thanks so much for joining me.
[0:36:16] Adam Chambers: Thank you. It’s good to see you.
[0:36:17] David Folwell: All right. Thanks.
