We Don’t Have Recruiters. Here’s Why That Matters.

By Denise Velasquez and JC Muhammad

If you’ve spent any time staffing an OR, you’ve probably dealt with a recruiter who disappeared the moment the placement was made. Or called three times in one week while you had an open position, then went silent when you needed to talk through a concern. Or, and this one stings, called back six months later to introduce themselves as your new point of contact, the third one this year.

This is the norm in staffing for healthcare. It doesn’t have to be.

At Advantage Support Services, Inc. (ASSI), we made a deliberate decision a long time ago: no recruiters. Not because we can’t. Because we don’t believe that traditional recruiting models truly serve the people we’re responsible for, the facilities we partner with, or the clinical professionals who represent us. We believe staffing for healthcare should be built on relationships, expertise, and accountability—not transactions.

Here’s what we do instead, and why it works.

The Person Who Places You Is the Person Who Knows You

When a hospital calls ASSI, they’re not routed to a recruiter who skims a resume database and sends over whoever seems to fit the job description. They’re talking to someone who has been in this industry for over 20 years, who knows the difference between a strong circulator for a total joint team and one who’d be better suited for general surgery, and who understands that those are not interchangeable.

Jenny and Denise have worked together for 30 years. They’ve been building ASSI together for 23 of those years. That stability is not incidental to how we operate; it’s the foundation of it. When a Surgical Services Director calls us, they know who they’re going to reach. When a clinical staff member has a question at 5 a.m. because their flight was cancelled and they don’t know what to do, they know who to call. Almost every client we work with has a personal cell number for someone on our team.

That is not how most companies approach staffing for healthcare. And it shows.

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See How Long-Term Partnerships Deliver Better Results

ASSI has spent more than 25 years helping healthcare organizations strengthen surgical services through staffing, consulting, leadership, and education.

→ Explore Our Success Stories

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We Go Further on Vetting Than You’d Expect

Most agencies will confirm that a candidate is licensed and send over a resume. ASSI starts there and then keeps going.

Every candidate goes through a comprehensive onboarding process: immunization verification (MMR, Varicella, Tdap, COVID, and more), a full background check going back seven years, reference checks with a genuine effort to reach supervisors and peers, and an 11-panel drug screen. We deliberately do more than most hospitals require because Joint Commission standards are a floor, not a ceiling.

We also think about fit before we ever submit someone to a client. If a facility runs a high-volume orthopedic program and a candidate’s experience is primarily in GYN, they don’t go to that facility. This seems obvious. But it requires someone who actually knows what to ask: What cases does your OR typically run? What does a normal day look like for your scrub techs? What’s the personality of the team in Room 4?

If you don’t ask those questions, you can’t make the right match—and great staffing for healthcare depends on making the right match the first time.

Why Personality Fit Is Not a Soft Metric

OR teams are some of the most cohesive and high-pressure work environments in healthcare. When the team works, it really works. When it doesn’t, everyone feels it, and patients feel it too.

This is why we prioritize personality fit as seriously as technical qualifications. When candidates are local, we encourage them to visit the facility in person to meet the OR manager, meet team members, and sometimes shadow in the room before accepting an assignment. Very few organizations providing staffing for healthcare take this extra step. We do because we’ve learned that a placement that fails due to culture fit costs everyone more than taking a few extra days to get it right.

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Wondering If Your Staffing Challenges Are Really System Challenges?

Many staffing issues begin long before a position is posted. ASSI’s Clinical Assessments identify workflow gaps, leadership opportunities, and operational barriers affecting surgical performance.

→ Learn About ASSI Clinical Assessments

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Why Our Full-Time Employee Model Changes Everything

ASSI staffs hospitals with full-time employees. This is not standard in the industry.

Most staffing agencies think in terms of PRN; a person here for a day, a person there for a shift. That model is fine for filling isolated gaps, but it doesn’t build anything. It doesn’t give a surgeon a reliable team member who knows their preferences. It doesn’t give a facility the consistency they need to train and trust someone. And it doesn’t give the clinical staff member the stability, benefits, and career continuity that comes with being truly employed.

Our OR staff receive vacation time. They’re eligible for benefits. They’re placed on consistent schedules so facilities can invest in training them, and surgeons can build working relationships with them. When a surgeon takes privileges at a second hospital, those team members can follow—still under ASSI, still with the same continuity, simply credentialed at the new site.

Several of our Nashville hospital partners have been with us for more than 20 years. It took time for some of them to trust our model. Once they did and experienced the quality of our people and the support behind every placement, the relationship deepened. Some facilities now send candidates directly to their departments without an additional interview because they trust the vetting process that has already taken place.

That trust takes years to build. That’s why we’re not trying to be the biggest name in staffing for healthcare.

What We’re Really Building

We’re trying to be the best.

That’s a different goal than being the largest, and it leads to different decisions.

We don’t throw bodies at an opening and hope something sticks. We don’t rotate account managers so frequently that facilities have to start over every few months. We don’t chase placement bonuses that reward speed over quality.

Instead, we think about the patient in that OR. The person under anesthesia, trusting every member of that surgical team with their life, deserves clinicians who were carefully selected, properly prepared, and placed in an environment where they can succeed.

That’s the standard we work backward from.

It’s why we’ve been serving hospitals for nearly 30 years. And it’s why our approach to staffing for healthcare continues to build long-term partnerships instead of short-term placements.

Continue the Conversation

This article is part of the ongoing leadership discussions featured in The Executive Edge—ASSI’s LinkedIn newsletter for perioperative and sterile processing leaders focused on performance, compliance, and sustainable systems.
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