Travel nursing agencies are known for being an all-inclusive place for travelers looking for their ideal travel nursing assignment options and then narrowing them down to the right one. Agencies also help with other one-offs that travel nurses deal with regularly, like insurance, housing, and other questions that come up while traveling.

However, automation in recruiting has become popular lately. Recruiterless models have cropped up everywhere, offering a world of streamlined nurse recruiting. As the healthcare infrastructure gets more complex, finding ways to include automation in managing systems can improve ROI and diminish wasted resources. Research shows that the healthcare automation market is expected to reach $58.98 billion by 2025.

Sure, that’s a big number and auto-recruiting systems seem shiny and promising—they boast faster, more cost-effective hiring and accuracy, but what goes up must come down, and there are still problems with a strictly recruiterless model.

Why Recruiters Are Still Essential In a Recruiterless Business Model

Re-humanizing the recruiting process.

So, what’s missing from a recruiterless model? Obviously …a recruiter. And this is an essential missed opportunity, because while recruiterless companies brag about efficiency and cost-effective hiring, they’re still missing important parts of the travel nurse experience: a sense of trust and empowering the traveler to make informed decisions about their career path.

What recruiters have established with their travelers over the years can’t be replaced by big tech automations. Tech doesn’t have the human capacity solve the very real, very specific issues that travelers deal with on a day-to-day basis, and tech doesn’t serve as a teammate to go to bat for their travelers in a sticky situation.

Recruiters are the pinnacle of transparency and the ultimate go-to resource for negotiation when it comes to their travelers next career move. At the end of the day, it’s not about a B to B model, or a B to C model, it’s an H to H solution…. Human to human.

Automating the repeat tasks.

Recruiters aren’t just focused on the important details of a traveler-recruiter relationship. They are tasked with repetitive, time-stealing responsibilities. In fact, a lot of the healthcare industry is—it’s paperwork, cold calls, phone tag, documentation organization, keeping track of credentials, and so on. Some of these healthcare workflows could easily be farmed out to tech automation, reducing human error. Repetitive and mundane-but-necessary tasks are often the first to slip up. In fact, 86% of mistakes made in the healthcare industry are administrative. Healthcare workflows that are automated also free up more time for recruiters to focus on their travelers on a more personal level. It costs nearly $250 billion to process 30 billion healthcare transactions each year, and it’s estimated that automation could improve productivity on a global level by 1.4% over the next few years.

For example, utilizing automation in network security and data backup and recovery can give healthcare tech staff more hours to focus on growing the network instead of simply maintaining it. Making it manageable should be the goal, and a large part of these workflow tasks can be automated and maintained by a team to weed out inefficiencies and streamline the process. Currently, 91% of healthcare practices are using cloud-based services, yet 47% are not confident in their ability to keep data secure due to manual workflow processes.

Workflow automation and tech can absolutely help with streamlining the small tasks and will most certainly propel the healthcare industry forward, but at the end of the day, that human interaction and understanding is a missing puzzle piece between traveler and recruiter. Bottom line: Recruiters are still essential to the process. Adaptability needs to have a voice too, so combining both automation and recruiter-based models into one is the ideal solution. Having an automation model with quality recruiters as the backbone will be the answer to successful travel agencies in the future. There’s a better way to hire travelers.