How to Pick a Travel Nurse Recruiter You Can Actually Trust

ScrubHood is built by travel nurses, not a staffing agency, and we're never going to be influenced by a recruiter's relationship with a facility. No agency can pay us to make a hospital look better than it is.

Your recruiter is going to be one of the most important relationships in your travel nursing career, and it will make your overall traveler experience better in the long run if you spend some time upfront asking the right questions. We completely understand, when you're excited to start your first contract, the recruiter who calls you back fastest can feel like the obvious choice. But the wrong recruiter can cost you money, put you in a bad contract, or leave you on your own when something goes wrong on assignment. We've worked with great recruiters. And had some challenges with others. Here's what we think.

Remember what a recruiter's job actually is

A recruiter works for a staffing agency, and they get paid a commission when you take an assignment. That doesn't automatically make them untrustworthy, plenty of recruiters are great at their jobs and care about placing you well. But it does mean their incentive is to get you placed, not necessarily to get you placed in the best possible situation for you. That's your job.

Red flags to watch for

• Pressure to decide fast. A good recruiter gives you room to think it over. Someone pushing you to sign today, before you've had a chance to compare it to anything else, is prioritizing their close over your decision.
• Vague or dodged pay questions. If you ask for an itemized breakdown (taxable rate, housing stipend, M&IE, bonuses) and get a single blended number instead, or get talked around the question, that's probably a red flag.
• Blind submissions. A recruiter should never submit your resume or personal info to a facility without your explicit yes first. If you find out you were submitted somewhere you never agreed to, that's a serious breach of trust, not a small thing.
• Scripted, generic answers. If every answer sounds like it's coming off a form and they can't speak specifically to your situation, they're probably inexperienced or juggling way too many nurses to actually know you.
• They go quiet once you're on assignment. The real test of a recruiter isn't how fast they called you back before you signed, it's whether they're still responsive once you're miles from home and something goes wrong.
• An exclusivity push. Most experienced travelers work with two or three recruiters at once to compare what's actually available. A recruiter who asks you to sign an exclusivity agreement or gets weird about you talking to other recruiters is looking out for themselves, not your best options.

Questions worth asking before you commit

• How long have you been recruiting specifically for travel nurses, and how long have you been with this agency?
• Can you send me the full pay breakdown in writing, not just the blended rate?
• What happens if I get cancelled for low census, and is that in the contract?
• How do you communicate on assignment, and what's your availability if something goes wrong on a weekend?
• What makes you different from other recruiters I might work with?

Good recruiters answer these questions with no issues. If you get evasiveness or attitude on any of them, that might not be the right recruiter for you.

Work with more than one

Having options is always good. Working with two or three recruiters means you get to compare pay packages for the same or similar jobs side by side, you get a feel for who actually communicates well, and you're not stuck if one recruiter goes quiet or turns out to be a bad fit. It's a bit more juggling, but worth it in the end.

Where ScrubHood fits in

In the end, recruiters work for an agency, and their information about a hospital is filtered through that. We built ScrubHood because travel nurses needed somewhere to check facts about a hospital or unit that didn't come from someone with a placement to make. We're travel nurses, not a staffing agency, and we're never going to be influenced by a recruiter's relationship with a facility. No agency is paying us to make a hospital look better than it is.

So use your recruiter for what they're actually good for: pay negotiation, contract logistics, and getting you placed. Use ScrubHood for the stuff you want a straight answer on before you commit, like what the ratios are actually like, what EMR the unit runs, safety information, and what other travelers who've worked there have to say. Your recruiter wants the placement. We just want you to have the real picture before you sign.

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