Email for travel nurses and recruiters, does it work? - Atlas All Access #90

Rich Smith: On this episode, we talk about emails. Are emails the new snail mail?

Adam: Snail mail.

Rich Smith: Or are they still relevant in our industry? Atlas All Access starts now. Adam Collette, welcome back.

Adam: Welcome.

Rich Smith: So I thought this would be a good topic for you as I kind of wrote through some of these questions, because you've been doing this now for five years?

Adam: Five years coming up.

Rich Smith: Five years now.

Adam: It seems like yesterday.

Rich Smith: It does seem like yesterday. As you think about your day-to-day process during recruiting, maybe how you started, how it evolved where you are now-

Adam: Yep.

Rich Smith: Are emails still useful?

Adam: Yeah, I would say ... I think the answer I would say is yes, and two fold on that. One, if I need something right away or I need an answer right away, I'm sending a text.

Rich Smith: Right.

Adam: Text or a phone call.

Rich Smith: Yep.

Adam: Most likely a text. A lot of people are working nights-

Rich Smith: Is your to be done?

Adam: Yeah.

Rich Smith: Yeah, whatever. Did you do that skills checklist?

Adam: Is this payroll question correct?

Rich Smith: Absolutely.

Adam: Can you confirm or deny this question?. I'm taking a screenshot of an email and I'm sending it as a text message. Now if it's something, "Hey, what are your plans for your next assignment? Can you kind of give me some thoughts on what you're going to do? Are you, you know, if you're going to extend, can you write down some dates, get back to me?" No big deal, I'll ask about it later in the week. So I think those are kind of my two timeframes of do I need it now or can I wait for an answer as if I'm going to send a text or an email, but I still use email a ton.

Rich Smith: What about like jobs? I know you talked about like maybe extension or whatever. Are you emailing like, "Hey, I have hot jobs in North Carolina", or whatever. I mean, does that happen any more?

Adam: Yeah. So essentially all my jobs, the way I do job searching for people is I send out an email list of jobs every single day, sometimes twice a day if there's a hot job. So I have a NICU PICU group, I have an ER group, I have an ICU group and it's got all my ICU people on it. There might be 50 people on that list. There could be five people on the list. But every day I open up those emails that are already pre-made. I snip all the jobs out of there, every single new job that Atlas has, and I send them out. So I would be a wreck if I wouldn't be able to do that.

Adam: I think the evolution of a recruiter is, if you're just working with 10 people, it's easy to job search for people, you can send jobs specifically. But once you get to five years down the line and you're not working directly with a hundred people, but you might have 300 people in your pipeline that have done an assignment with you now, maybe do one and two years from now. I have people on that list and so I would be lost without being able to do that. I couldn't physically job search for every single person that I'm talking with.

Rich Smith: Do you think there's a world that maybe we could come to eventually where that doesn't exist anymore? Like what would replace that?

Adam: I don't know, like replace email in general at all?

Rich Smith: Or, yeah, maybe.

Adam: I don't think so. I don't think so. I mean they haven't got rid of the post office yet, so I mean people are, you know, every day I go to my mailbox I'm like, "Why do they still send this stuff? You're wasting paper and wasting a lot of stuff." But there's some stuff that just has to come through that way.

Rich Smith: Which is interesting to be because I wrote down the question, "When was the last time you responded to an email?" But then I think I just responded to an email. I mean like any kind of email solicitation type of thing, not like, yes, I'm coming to the party or whatever that is, whatever, email, not text. But then I actually responded to a direct mail piece not too long ago.

Adam: Really?

Rich Smith: Yeah. And you think, well, direct mail is dead like that isn't a thing anymore.

Adam: Yup. But you just did recently.

Rich Smith: But I just did.

Adam: Yeah.

Rich Smith: So do you foresee, I mean, is it ... here, can I mute this so it doesn't talk? Okay. Is there a day someday were you say, "Alexa, tell me about Adam Collette's open jobs at Atlas MedStaff", and it spits back all of the, Oh, look, now Siri thinks it's-

Adam: Siri wants to respond to that.

Rich Smith: Is that possible?

Adam: Yeah, I wouldn't say it's not possible. I mean, I think there's definitely AI out there that's going on that could do that. I mean, obviously we have some stuff in building better websites and stuff of job searching so people don't have to do that. But also, as a recruiter, those are my touch points of obviously contacting people on a daily basis to let them know that we're still there and still available and can see that.

Adam: So I don't think as a recruiter you could ever get away from it. There's just too many moving parts in this business and our business that I could think of a different platform where you completely get rid of that. You could use some sort of like Skype for business or something. But I still think having an email and an email log of some sort going back. Plus it just stores so much data. We were joking about my email box being full, I need to delete some stuff out of there. But I mean I have stuff that goes back five years that, granted I'll search for something and it'll be in there. What platform is going to house all that data-

Rich Smith: True.

Adam: ... of some sort on there.

Rich Smith: Have you tried to search text messages before? It is not an easy task.

Adam: No, it is definitely hard.

Rich Smith: I found it, eventually and luckily iOS 13, there is a search text function now, but it is super raw and not very user friendly. Yeah, like quotations don't work and like normal email tricks or search tricks just aren't working yet. It's getting there but it's not working there yet. Okay. So is there ever a place and as a recruiter, because this is as we kind of evolve and you work and you work and maybe not you necessarily, but just in general, is there a place for maybe email takes the place of phone calls, because phone calls took the place of maybe direct mail at some point and there's an evolution. Have you ever just placed somebody from emails, text messages and not spoken to them on the phone?

Adam: Yeah, absolutely. I would say so. It doesn't happen very often. I know I've talked about it before of actually having that physical conversation, at least one time. So you know, you as a nurse can feel out the recruiter, use the recruiter, you can answer some questions. But yeah, I mean, I've placed people, but I think those people are also referrals of people that I've already worked with. So somebody else has laid the groundwork of, "Hey, you can trust this guy, you can trust this company. You know, here's the information." They might have a couple of questions or they've talked to other recruiters or worked for other companies in the past, and they don't need a hand held of some sort.

Rich Smith: For sure.

Adam: That sounds bad, but it's not meant to be that way. But yeah, I've placed people that way, but I think there's always that, there's always that time where you got to pick up the phone and you've got to get on there.

Adam: I'm a texter by nature. You know, I think text is very formal but informal where you know, you can ask questions and get answers and you can do it in real time. The same as a phone call. You know, I think a lot of people like that also because you have documentation and you can go back, "Hey, I asked that question. I don't remember it, but I can", you know where if you're on a phone call that you can do that as well. But I still think that personalization of it on a phone call at some point in time still needs to be there.

Rich Smith: So last question. Because you've helped do some training then for new recruiters here. Where does email fall in the hierarchy of maybe communication as you go through that training process?

Adam: Yeah, I think more of if you are trying to cold call recruit people, I think email would be last on the list on there. I think people in our day-to-day, especially in my email, if I don't know the person's name that the email is coming from, I'm less likely to have that be the first thing that I'm going to look at or whatever. But if I'm getting a phone call or a text, I'm calling that person back right away.

Rich Smith: Right.

Adam: I'm more likely to miss something in my email if I don't know the people's name that it's coming from. You know, payroll from Atlas has come in or compliance or something from you. You know, that's obviously going to come up on top of my list of, "Hey, I need to get back to this person." Where if I see some random name, I think it's just some service trying to sell me more health care needs out there.

Rich Smith: Yeah. Would you like to buy a list of doctors?

Adam: Yeah, whatever.

Rich Smith: Locum tenens.

Adam: So I think it's probably the least of importance on there. If I'm cold calling or trying to build my desk, I'm going to be talking about phone calls and texts to get started on there for sure.

Rich Smith: Until you get to that point where you can build maybe that group that you have in each one of those and then-

Adam: Correct.

Rich Smith: What was, and I guess, okay, so this is my last question. Out of those groups that you have that you consistently send emails about open jobs. Do you get a lot of good feedback on those? I mean, have you gotten placements from those before?

Adam: Yeah, absolutely. And the crazy thing is, like I said, there's people that I've met in Vegas three, four years ago that I've never worked with, but you know, once a year, twice a year, I'll actually get an email back of, "Hey, I've been looking for this job. I can't believe guy's have it, will you pitch me a pay package?" They've really never given me the time of day. They've got a great recruiter or a great company, but it always touches them, once a week, twice a week.

Adam: I got a text message from a girl that worked for us just about an hour ago and she's getting married. She settled down, she's got a perm job, and she sent me a picture of the open needs and says, "I still look at these every day."

Rich Smith: Nice.

Adam: You know, she's probably not going to take another travel job in her life. She's going to get married, have some beautiful babies and everything. But she still looks at it because the travel world still entices her and still interests her.

Rich Smith: You never know. I mean, Jake just had that story not too long ago of the nurse that he started talking to her maybe two years ago, got married, had a baby and now the baby's two years old and she took a travel contract. Like it worked out just perfect. Like weekends and whatever. It's super close and it's something that she could go do with a baby. But two years later. So I guess you never know.

Adam: Absolutely.

Rich Smith: Not the direction I thought this was going to go.

Adam: No, you think it's going away?

Rich Smith: I don't know. Maybe a little bit. I think maybe a little bit, but then again, I just responded to a direct mail piece.

Adam: Yeah. You know, I don't see another platform out there that can do the same things that an email does. You know, Twitter doesn't have something like that. I mean you're talking about storing documents, you're talking about being able to put stuff in folders and save different things. I mean there's a lot that would go into that.

Rich Smith: True.

Adam: You know, I even think phone system-wise, I mean our phones are really a computer now and so it does the same thing, but could you have a different sort of box on there that keeps information that you store back and forth? I don't think you do it. But I do see travelers that still have like AOL accounts and stuff and it's like, I mean AOL was the big thing back in the 90s and now you don't hear about it very often.

Rich Smith: I actually saw a Hotmail email address not too long ago, whether or not it actually works. My wife still has an old MSN email address. So I guess you'd go way back, I still have a Yahoo email address that I use for fantasy football and things like that.

Adam: Yep, totally makes sense.

Rich Smith: All right, well if there's a topic that you want us to discuss, I've got a list of them, we work through it every week. Please comment here in the comments section. Send us an email. This one right here is, Dolan's telling me to look at this camera when I say it. Send me an email. My email, they'll put it right here. You can find it. You can direct message me on Facebook. Either one of us, actually.

Adam: Absolutely. I'd love to hear from you.

Rich Smith: Just anything you want us to talk about. Nothing's off limits. We'll talk about pretty much anything, quite honestly. So send us a message. Let us know what you want us to talk about. Adam, welcome back.

Adam: Absolutely. Have a good week guys.

Rich Smith: All right, see you next week.