Understanding The Life Of A Travel Nurse With Lesley Hamilton

The height of COVID-19 saw the drastic increase in the demand for hiring a travel nurse. Dr. Diane Hamilton delves into the many aspects of this job with her sister, Lesley Hamilton of Code Green Travelers. She explains how she guides nurses in securing thirteen-week contracts at different hospitals across the country. Lesley talks about the opportunities this job offers, not just in earning money but also in building your resume and immersing yourself in various cultures. She also dispels misconceptions surrounding the role of a travel nurse, the challenges that come with it, and the best ways to pick a recruitment agency.

 

I’m so glad you joined us because my guest is Lesley Hamilton, who is a travel nurse, recruiter, account manager, and director. She has enjoyed enormous success at both small and industry giants, such as Supplemental Health, Robert Half, and AMN. It is nice to have you here. Welcome.

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Watch the episode here

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Understanding The Life Of A Travel Nurse With Lesley Hamilton

Thank you. I’m happy to be here.

I’m looking forward to doing this. We should probably mention this right off the bat. Lesley is my sister. I know a lot about your background because I have lived it, but people reading may not know it. Why don’t you give us your backstory so we can find out how you reached this level of success?

In the professional sense, I have been a recruiter for several years. I have been around the block a little bit. Most of that staffing experience has been in the RN travel recruiting arena, which is a highly competitive and lucrative industry. It has been for some time. I have been in the recruiter role, account management role, and director role. I have started agencies from scratch. I have trained, mentored, and enjoyed about every position there is regarding travel nurse recruiting.

A lot of people don’t know a lot about the nurse travel and staffing industry information. It is different from some of the other industries. A lot of people could learn from what it is and how it is different from those other industries.

Travel nurse recruiting is generally a thirteen-week contract for nurses across the country. I have only worked in the United States states, not internationally. What I do is place nurses on thirteen-week contracts at different hospitals in different states around the country, depending on the needs of the hospitals. This is highly desirable for nurses who are able to travel. They are paid well. It has become a booming industry for all types of demographics.

I had a guy on my show who was part of Thinkers50, who was in the nursing industry, and he shared a story. It was fascinating how they do nursing in some of the European countries. They don’t even have bosses. They decide how to work together. They join these groups of nobody being the boss. It is a fascinating story.

I want to talk about your industry because this is something that comes up a lot when I interview on GMN.net. I interviewed a lot of CHROs. These companies are all worried about how COVID has impacted their business and what the trends are. It is probably similar for a lot of industries that there are a lot of issues out there. What issues or trends have you had to deal with since COVID?

A lot of what we are experiencing right now is a post-COVID hangover in the travel nursing field. During COVID, there is a huge demand for travelers. Travelers are requested when there are more patients, or they call it a higher census. The demand was sky-high. The travel nursing business thrived. There was such a demand for COVID nurses. Therefore, the rates for the nurses went way up. The hospitals pay the rates and the agencies pay the nurses.

What they typically have made in the past is anywhere from $2,500 to $5,000 a week. During COVID, they are making anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 a week. That was during the COVID heyday for travelers. It is not a positive connotation for COVID, but the nurses did make quite a bit of money on the travel side. A lot of permanent nurses left their regular permanent staff jobs to become travelers. Now, the demand for nurses has gone way down. The rates have gone way down, but the travel industry still survives.

I was working during the 2008 downsizing, and still, travel nursing is a strong business in that hospitals need nurses to fill in when perm nurses are on maternity, take vacations, or the patient count or census is not up. It is a lucrative choice for the hospitals to fill in their needs with the travelers rather than spend the money on permanent nurses when they only need them for vacations, leaves, or seasonal needs. To answer your question, the trends for travel are still high. Not as high, anywhere near as high as it was during COVID but about the same as it was pre-COVID. It is hard for nurses to get used to those pre-COVID rates.

As I’m thinking about who would be a travel nurse, Meet The Fockers or Meet the Parents, and that comes to mind when he was a male nurse. What are the demographics of your nurses? Do you get a lot of men? Are they mostly women?

There are a lot of male nurse travelers. Percentage-wise, I have worked with 80% of women and 20% of men. I love working with male nurses. That’s about the right percentage in any of the agencies I have worked in, large and small. Age groups differ. It could be a younger nurse in their 30s or late-20s. I have a nurse working that is 75 years old. She is working in med surg, which is one of the toughest units. She got 7 patients to 1, and she is still traveling.

With travel nursing, the demand that all the hospitals ask for the travel nurse is they have two years of experience already in the hospital. It excludes new graduates and nurses that have not had a year or two in the hospital under their belt. They are not considered good resources for travel nursing. The hospitals are our clients. They pay the bills. They pay a premium hourly rate for nurses. They pay that rate for a nurse that can hit the ground running. They don’t want someone to train. They want someone that can adapt and fit in and that is flexible. Not all nurses fit into that.

There are many nurses that have become professional nurses that go from one thirteen-week contract to another. They may jump across the country, or they may keep extending those thirteen-week contracts. Another lure for the nurse is that they get paid taxable and non-taxable money. If they are a true traveler, they will receive meals, incidentals non-taxed, housing non-taxed, and travel non-taxed. One of the biggest lures is the money because they are netting more with that non-taxed money averaged in.

 

The second biggest lure for the nurse would be that they don’t have to deal with the politics of the hospital. They are at thirteen weeks. I hear that more than anything. Once a nurse makes the leap, sometimes they are tentative about leaving a staff job and the stability of getting a travel job after a travel job and stringing them together. Once they have taken that travel position, not once have I heard a nurse say, “I wish I hadn’t left my perm job.”

They may have travel assignments they don’t like. They may have recruiters or agencies they don’t like, but not once have they said, “I wish I hadn’t gone into traveling.” They typically can go back into perm, and they sometimes do. Sometimes they will go into perm, travel, and perm, but not once has there been remorse. Moreover, they get the travel bag and don’t want to go back.”

I ran into a travel nurse not that long ago at a small town here in Arizona, and he loved it. He was telling me he does it all the time. I watched a new Amsterdam television show. They had a travel nurse on it. I’m like, “This is everywhere.”

If you go to the hospital to visit a friend or relative, most of them are travel nurses. They are everywhere.

I would imagine it would help with burnout. You get tired of doing the same old things. It shakes things up. You mentioned a lot of the pros. I don’t know if there are other pros you want to mention, but are there cons that come up at all?

You are traveling away from home. You are thrown into different realities of different cultures, cliques, and equipment. Not everybody can do that. Some of the nurses feel like they can. Once they get there, they get homesick. Some of the younger nurses or newer nurses don’t realize what it takes. They have to be adaptable. There are new protocols and demands that they are not used to. The flip side of that is a lot of the younger nurses desire that. They build their resume. They get more experience with the new and different charting systems and protocols.

[bctt tweet=”Young travel nurses must be adaptable to new protocols and demands of the job. But it is a highly desirable position because it builds their resume and lets them experience different charting systems.” username=””]

The travel nurse is working hard away from home and staying in housing that is not their home. They are working long hours. Not that they don’t do that in the perm arena, but in the travel arena, a lot of times, they will pick up extra shifts. They usually work three 12-hour shifts or 36 hours, but a lot of them will work 48 hours and may have originally taken the travel assignment for adventure, let’s say Hawaii or some exotic Virgin Islands.

They learned that it is a lot of work and they are tired. On their day off, they want to stay off and sleep. Those are some of the cons. Sometimes the travelers feel like they are the fall guy if there are any issues that arise in hospitals. The perm nurses may not want to take responsibility. That happens a lot, but I have heard nurses complain about that situation.

When I interview CHROs, they talk about the flattening of organizations and how it is changed promotions. It used to be that we would have the latter. You can be promoted and go to the next level. Now that they are flatter organizations, there are not all these promotions that people can get. We are seeing that people are being promoted more in terms of experience there. It is more of a snake-like movement throughout the company that you are learning over here. That is how you are building your resume. That is what you described for nurses. You guys are ahead of the game for what other industries are doing because the nurses now, instead of having titles so much, you are getting experience as your title. That is what is happening in Corporate America. I found that interesting.

That is a great point because it is part of the attraction for the nurses to gain experience. Therefore, leveraging their resume in a quick, short amount of time, they can increase their income by a thirteen-week assignment. They are hired for ICU, but they will let them float to another unit. They won’t do it without training. It is a way for them to climb to a higher income in a short period of time, much shorter than being in a permanent position.

In any industry, there are challenges with getting people the experience and getting them prepared for the next assignment or whatever they are going to do. In this industry, there are some misconceptions about how it works or what to expect. Every industry is that way. Are there any misconceptions that you hear come up a lot? I imagine that is a yes.

The industry is filled with misconceptions. It is complicated for owners and recruiters who know the business well that have been in it for a long time. The state and compliance rules change. A lot of times, the nurse will be confused, especially a new traveler. She will be deluged if her resume is on the free side. She gets 20 to 30 calls a day. Each recruiter will represent a job order in a different fashion. They have different ways of paying. They have different ways of setting up the tax and the non-tax money. It becomes confusing to the nurses. They get so confused, a lot of times, they don’t even want to go forward because there is too much information.

What I would say to them is to pick possibly three recruiters that have the experience that you can trust. Don’t get overloaded. A lot of nurses will start talking to 10 to 20 people and forget whom they are talking to. Narrow it down to recruiters and companies that have good marks on social media sites. Find recruiters that you can trust and have them explain it carefully to you so the nurse understands the package because they are varied in their presentation.

Another that a nurse has is that the recruiter’s making a whole lot of money off of them. I’m not saying that being a recruiter for many years, you can make a lot of money, but you have to have a lot of nurses on assignment. I hear a lot of times once they hear what the bill rate is, that is what the hospital pays, and they hear what the agency has to pay them. They feel that the recruiter is making a lot more money than they are making when you factor in all the business burdens and hidden costs. It’s a business like anything else. That is one of the biggest. However, it is a good and lucrative career for recruiters who have been in it for a long time.

It sounds similar to when I was in the mortgage industry. You hear numbers and you think all this, but the salespeople don’t get what that first number is. You realize it does take a lot of volume in that industry. You have a lot of funds to make a living. As you were saying that, I was listening to the news. They were talking about the gig economy and how everybody is 1099 to get all these different jobs. I work for many universities. They will send me 1099 or W-2s. I get many different things. Does it get confusing for nurses when it comes to tax time that they have all these different forms of whom they have worked for? I combine them all together.

The tax portion of it is confusing as to how many miles they have to be from the facility. They hear different variations of that rule. There is an industry standard that says 50 miles away from your permanent residence has to be. When it boils down to it, and if you talk to travel nurse tax specialists, and that’s what you need to talk to as a nurse, their bottom line is you qualify as a traveler if you are paying and you can show you are paying duplicate money for your houses.

It is like a second home. Your second home has to be a certain distance away. It’s interesting. It is similar to that.

In addition to that, the government IRS says, “The nurse has to leave that assignment for whatever tax reasons.” That is the rule. They have to leave. There is a certain amount of time that they have to be away. I don’t have that because it changes. I always say, “Refer to your tax attorney.” As recruiters, we tell them, “After a year, they have to leave the facility. They can go back after a certain number of months. They have to leave for tax reasons.” The tax issues are many. I try to stay away from giving advice and try to steer the nurses to talk to tax specialists who know travel nursing because there are many different rules.

You got to think these tax specialists now because of everybody’s gig economy, are up on this stuff. I bet it is not hard to find that.

It didn’t use to be. Several years ago, they didn’t know. They were telling them all kinds of things.

I imagine now it is getting better. We focused a lot on the nurse. I want to change the focus a little bit to your part of your job and how challenging it is for you to do what you do. How is it? Is this a tough job?

I used to teach high school English. That was a tough job but a terrific springboard for punishment. It is punishing. I wouldn’t have stayed in it this long. It has its rewards, but it is full-time. It is not 8:00 to 5:00. The hospitals are 24 hours. They may have the night shift, 7:00 PM to 7:00 AM. They have issues in the middle of the night. They hit up my cell phone. They have questions on the weekends before they start on Monday. They need first-day instructions. They feel slighted by maybe cultural cliques that aren’t treating them well. Finding nurses is a competitive process. There are hundreds of agencies and thousands of recruiters competing for the same nurses and job orders. It is cutthroat competitive frenzied, crazy work.

[bctt tweet=”Finding nurses is a competitive process. There are hundreds of agencies and thousands of recruiters competing for the same nurses and job orders. It is cutthroat competitive, frenzied, crazy work.” via=”no”]

I have seen your work. I have seen how busy you can be. I’m thinking about this, as you mentioned earlier, about nurses getting overwhelmed by people coming after them. Do they tend to avoid putting their profile on LinkedIn? Do they have any comments on their LinkedIn saying, “Don’t bother me with this or that?” I’m wondering if they have any special thing they avoid there.

Within the last several years, I have been dealing with more of the ICU, ER, and what they call rubber glove type of nurses. They don’t use LinkedIn as much as directors, managers, and leaders, but it is becoming more. They use sites like Indeed, Vivian, and a slew of others. To your questions, yes. Once they post on any site, they are bombarded. I will call them, and typically the nurses don’t answer. You try to text and email. You try to get in. It is an art. Persistence is key. They are not going to answer unless they see a valid job order and what the money pays. Even then, they may have been called for that same position ten other times before you even have a chance to call them. That is why I will get up at 2:00 in the morning and call a nurse.

Somebody is taking your call at 2:00 in the morning. You are not calling them.

I wouldn’t call them to wake them up. I would call them if I saw that they answered my job ad because they may be at work and they may be getting off of work. If they are on and they have sent me a message, yes.

That is commitment. You have different agencies, colleagues, and nurses. They get bombarded. Are the agencies any different? Do they differ? I know you have worked for a couple of different ones, and I mentioned a few of them at the beginning. How do they differ if they do?

They are different business models. The main difference in agencies is that smaller to medium or startup companies work more in a full desk business model. That is where the recruiter, who talks directly to the nurse, also submits them to the client, which is usually a middleman. They work with the nurse and the client. That is what they call a full desk. The big giants like AMN and American Mobile, because they are gigantic, they have recruiters who talk to the nurses. They have a separate division of account managers who deal directly with the hospitals or vendors.

There is a big difference in business models in agencies. Sometimes there is a hybrid mix of those two models. A lot of it does seem the same with a lot of the agencies that I have worked with. The personalities of your immediate supervisor become important. Like any other job, you want to respect and like. If you are working your life for them, you want to have someone that respect and are devoted to not only making money for yourself but improving the brand name of the company.

 

With that being said, I have changed agencies a few times. The grass isn’t always greener. Why would I change? It is the age. You feel you are appreciated when you first start in a company or an agency and when you feel that you are not. That goes for the nurses. That is one of the main reasons why nurses or recruiters change companies.

People don’t leave companies. They leave their bosses.

I hope my last owner doesn’t watch this because he is terrific, and I love him.

You have always had good experiences, and you have been good at doing all the things that some people find challenging in jobs. You are not quite as big a nerd on this stuff as I am. I’m a paperwork freak. I love to do paperwork, and they used to make fun of me for that. There is a ton of paperwork in what you do. Isn’t this a big, long process to get a travel assignment? Is it not that long of a process? Is it just more paperwork?

It is a get-the-nerve submitted by a professional with a tight profile, which includes references, skills checklists, and an updated resume. Sometimes application information is transferred over to there to gather the paperwork from the nurses who are working and busy and don’t want to fill. They hate to fill out another application. That is one of their pet peeves. I hear it over and over.

Submit them and get the ball rolling. To get them compliant is sometimes an act of Congress, not to mention the medical docs and all the employment verifications, background tests, and drug tests. There are modules that different hospitals require. Sometimes their technical issues and time restraints. To have them get from accepting the job to starting the job to finishing the job is quite a challenge. Everyone is working hard, not just the recruiter.

They need a good team. They need a top-notch compliance officer and payroll, which I have had. The payroll, inevitably, in every single agency I have worked in, from the mom-and-pop to the AMNs to the supplementals. Inevitably, there are going to be some mistakes. The difference between a good agency, in my opinion, and nurses’ opinion, is how quickly they rectify it and pay their nurses.

The two things you don’t do with nurses are you do not mess with their money, and you do not give them any surprises. They don’t want to find out after they are on the assignment, “You have to float over to med surg. Your shifts aren’t clustered like you had asked or blocked.” Those come up. It is a killer for a recruiter and the nurses hate it. Sometimes the nurses think the recruiters aren’t honest with them. Sometimes they are not. I have run across recruiters that are sketchy. Tell them anything.

The recruiting business has almost a salesman or car salesman type of reputation because there is such a turnover with recruiters. Agencies are dying for recruiters. They hire 5 or 10 at a time and hope the two stick. Those recruiters have to have five submissions. They will say unique or different submissions a week. If they don’t meet those criteria, they are fired. That lends itself to them submitting nurses that aren’t exactly great fits for the position to keep their job. It goes off.

 

You mentioned the length of time it takes to get some paperwork to the end of the assignment, but how long is the assignment? Can the nurse decide he or she wants to leave in the middle? What happens if that happens?

I received a job from one of the contracted hospitals that my agency has contracted with. They will submit a job need at ICU at hospital X. I get that job need. I work in a frenzy to fill it before the thousands of other recruiters that may have that job. Once I find someone that’s interested, they will interview within 1 to 2 days, sometimes a week after I have submitted the nurse. I have to get the profile from the nurse and scramble to do that if I don’t already have it. Once she submits it, they will interview them. It is a ten-minute phone call interview. It is not like a perm interview.

During COVID, they will give the offer off the profile and not even talk to the nurse, which some nurses don’t like but the recruiters love. The nurse after that offer is given and accepted by the nurse. They typically start within two weeks. They are hustling during that 2 to 3 weeks. Sometimes you can start in 3 or 4 days on quick starts, but I’m not even going to go into that. Let’s say two weeks for the average.

Once they start, there is a thirteen-week contract. That is the timeline. After that thirteen-week contract, more than 60%, sometimes more than 70% of the time, they will extend the nurse or ask them to extend. If everybody is happy, that is everybody’s joy. You don’t have to go through that whole compliance seat process again.

Can they all of a sudden say, “I don’t want to do this?” They walk out.

They don’t say it like that. They will say they have a death in the family. Not to say they don’t get those because nurses are the first to get all the tragic issues. I have to hand it to them firstly for what they are going through, and they are dependent upon family members. They will leave a contract if there is a health issue or family death, they feel their license is in jeopardy, and they are asked to do things they feel will jeopardize their license. They do leave. Some agencies will find them. I have never been in an agency that has been successful in doing that. I have never found a nurse for leaving. On the flip side of that, the rub with travel nursing is they can cancel their contract.

Does that happen often?

One a year is often enough. I have sometimes worked with a nurse who traveled from Florida to California on her first assignment. That happened to me years ago. It doesn’t happen a lot. These are things that I remember. They can’t pull her if she is somewhere in Nebraska.

It is the same thing in the lending industry. If somebody decides to back out of their loan or pay it off in a couple of days, it is all over. You lost the deal and that is frustrating.

If that happens, I would do, and any good recruiter. I consider myself one. I should be, after many years. I will do everything they can to redirect and get them somewhere because they have already gone through all of that. They have left their job. It is something that where I don’t sleep until I get that.

I can relate to that. We have that in common. We talked a little about their pay at the beginning, but is it different from a permanent position? How is it different?

It is because there are non-taxed monies and it is complicated, but you will hear different pay. I will say, “How much money are you making?” She will say, “$50 an hour.” I will say, “I have got a travel job for you. It’s $50 an hour, but $30 of that is non-taxed.” It makes a big difference.

Why is it non-taxed?

If they are over 50 miles or paid, they are entitled to non-taxed. That is the fetching piece of it, but also you have to factor in. If they are traveling, they are spending money. If they are traveling to California, the travel money that they are given is meant to pay for the housing.

Can’t you write that off?

I don’t know how much they can and can’t write off. They will be spending that non-taxed money on housing, travel, and meals incidentals. Many nurses are savvy. Professional travel nurses, a lot of times, will buddy up. They travel together. They split the housing costs with 3 or 4 others. They divide the housing costs. They get all those money. They work at family friend’s locations. They are receiving those monies.

 

A lot of times, they do get a lot of non-taxed money, and it is all governed by a site called the GSA site and IRS site that lists the capped amount they are allowed to receive per day per ZIP code. That is how we ascertain how much to pay them. We give them as much non-taxed money as we can and lower the non-taxed so that they net more.

If a nurse was reading this and she or he is trying to find a recruiter or an agency, what would you tell him or her as to how you pick one? If ten of you have the same job you are offering, how do you know which one to go with?

I would look on the sites and find the job that I would be interested in as a nurse and apply to that job from that agency. You get a good feel within a first minute of a recruiter whom you can bond with. Maybe they can’t. That is why I would say, “Call 3, 4, or 5.” You don’t even have to call them. If you have your resume posted on Indeed, you are going to be getting calls. Sometimes, when I get ahold of a new nurse, I will say, “How many calls have you gotten now?” She said, “I got 20 or 30. I’m about ready to take my resume.”

This goes to another question here. She was like, “I’m about ready to take it off in Indeed. I can’t take it anymore. I have got enough.” My question would be, “Why did you call me back?” She said, “I could tell from the message that you left that you knew what you were doing.” The recruiter will establish a rapport. If the nurse doesn’t feel they are connecting, there are 20 to 30 others waiting. Find 2 or 3 that you do feel that you have connected with. There are some good recruiters out there.

Are there any instances where they would go directly to the hospital and not talk to a recruiter? Do they all go through recruiters?

They would go directly to the hospital for perm jobs. New grads go directly to the hospital because they don’t qualify. They don’t have two years experience. This is in the same vein. Sometimes when they are traveling on assignment, the hospital approaches them and asks them to come aboard and let’s get rid of the agency. That happens to us a lot. A lot of hospitals use travel devices to recruit instead of paying a recruiter. Whatever that salary is, an internal recruiter will use travelers and try to lure them to perm jobs.

It happens. Some agencies charge for that. I don’t, but some agencies do charge the facility to pay them extra money for that nurse, but the thing is, I hear this all the time. The nurses tell me, they will say, “They are trying to get me to come perm. They are trying to go behind your back.” They say, “I’m not going to do it.” The reason I left is I’m making more money and I don’t want politics. It is in vain most of the time if that answers your question.

One of my first jobs was with Kelly Services. They used to be called Kelly Girl. It was the thing you went to work with, and they hired you, but that company would owe a fee if they tried to hire you. It always worked that way. If you want to be a travel nurse, that is not usually going to work. If somebody is reading this and they are thinking of becoming a travel nurse, what would you recommend to them? What would make them make the decision? How can they make it as lucrative and satisfying?

There are enormous amounts of travel nurse sites that they can Google. They have changed over the years. There are travel nurse sites that are for travel nurses only. It is easy for them to get on. It is free, and it is a tremendous networking support resource. They can ask them, “Who are your favorite recruiters? What are the great hospitals? What agencies should I stay away from?”

That is another selling point I give to my new travelers who are tentative about getting into the travel agency. You are going to have the most support that you have ever had. The travel nurses all support each other. They ultimately know each other, even if they live across the country because they stick together. They will inform the nurse what to do and what to ask. Who are their favorite recruiters, agencies, hospitals, or specific units in hospitals to stay away from? They have support. Once they are in the comradery amongst the travelers, it is unbelievable. They support each other. That is another reason why nurses start. They make strong bonds. They start traveling with their buddies, and they refer their buddies. This is a big referral business.

[bctt tweet=”Travel nurses make strong bonds. They travel with their buddies and refer them as well.” via=”no”]

We covered a lot. I want to make sure I ask you everything you want to tell everybody. Is there anything I didn’t ask you that you like to touch on?

A lot of nurses get a bad case or get confused, especially from agencies that sprung up during COVID and hired inexperienced recruiters. Those situations happened a lot because there was a lot of money to be made. I know the money is important, but connect with a recruiter and establish a business relationship where you feel that there is trust, you are not going to get any surprises, and your money is not going to be messed with.

How do you know that? You can do research. You can look on the nursing support group websites. A lot of it is the gut feeling. The nurses I talk to say, “Lesley, I feel I can trust you.” It is because I have been doing this for so long that I’m familiar. They say, “I worked at this hospital.” I will say, “You survived that.” They know that I have been through the wringer, and I would never want to put a nurse that is not qualified into a high acuity situation that they would not be a fit for. Those would be my last words of advice. Find an old recruiter.

There is an advantage to experience. In this time, when people are working in a hybrid or virtual setting, the age of people is not a factor like it used to be. I have noticed that, especially in my industry in education. I have worked with people that are close to 80 years old, and we got plenty of decades left until we get there. We are good.

Since I’m much younger than you are, I do feel for you.

On that happy note, we are going to say, “Thank you so much for being on the show.”

Thank you. I appreciate it. You have been nothing but a great resource for me. I appreciate it.

This was a lot of fun. I hope everybody takes some time to check out your site. Do you want to name your site so we can do a little link to it?

It is Code Green Travelers. I checked with a lot of my nurses about Code Green because I was afraid it had hidden slang meanings within different units in hospitals. I didn’t want to say something that was counter to that. What I was thinking about it is money. What the nurses are looking for is the highest-paid position. All the factors that I mentioned do weigh heavily into it as well.

I thought it also meant they need extra help, “Code Green.”

It does. One of the conditions does say we need extra help. That is where Code Green would come in as well.

I hope everybody takes some time to check out your site. This is a wrap for another episode of the show.

 

Important Links

• Lesley Hamilton
• GMN.net
• Kelly Services
• Code Green Travelers

 

About Lesley Hamilton

Lesley Hamilton is a travel nurse recruiter, account manager, and director. She has enjoyed enormous success at both small and industry giants such as Supplemental Health and AMN. She received the title of Top Performer of Highest Continuous Producer of nurses on assignment and was also recognized as highest in attaining new hospitals and vendors. Additionally, she was named Top Producer at AMN for placing the most nurses for strikes and EMR Conversions. She has won multiple Reach for the Stars awards at Robert Half International.

 

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