Portland, OR?

NedRN · Jan 16, 2014

There will be lots of agencies that place in Portland and I can't suggest a particular one. However, you can work back the other direction. Take your list of hospitals and call HR to find out who their preferred agencies are. You can ask HR (it might be nurse staffing not HR) how many travelers they use in your specialty to get a good idea of how easy it will be to get a travel assignment there, and importantly, if they use a vendor manager and what the name is. A large hospital that uses a lot of travelers is more likely to have a vendor manager.

A vendor manager handles all the agencies directly, taking a huge workload off of hospital HR in managing dozens of agencies and related contracts and travelers. There is generally a master contract with uniform bill rates for all subcontracting agencies. One benefit of this for the traveler is that you will find out which agency really pays travelers the best percentage of the bill rate.

Some vendor managers also have their own agency, rather confusingly. Vendor management contracts are often supposed to be vendor neutral (all about the best traveler profile, not the agency brand), but obviously there is incentive to get the 20-40% margin for supplying the traveler, rather than the 4-5% fee for paper shuffling. In any case, often an agency owned vendor manager will give priority to their own travelers, so that can be a benefit to working directly for them. You might think you can make more money working direct, but for several reasons I won't go into now, that is not always the case - you will be getting your own competitive quotes anyway.

If there are any HCA hospitals in Portland, you don't need to ask who the vendor manager is, it is Parallon (formerly All About Staffing). They are actually owned by HCA, and virtually every agency is a subcontractor. Other agency owned VMs to be aware of are Cross Country, American Mobile, and MSN/Intelistaf.

Now you can call agencies for your preferred hospital(s) and see which ones you like the best.