Better Manage Your VMS Business for Healthcare

vms business

VMS can be very polarizing. Do you use it, or do you not? Only 22% of respondents of the 2022 Staffing and Recruiting Trends Report are automating the VMS process. Yes, VMS might have some challenges, like increased competition and a potential drop in client communication. But allow me to play devil’s advocate. If you’re not prioritizing a strategy to manage your VMS business, you absolutely should be, especially in today’s tight talent market, where providers are at a premium for healthcare staffing firms. Here are three reasons why.

Your VMS clients require it

VMS business is by nature highly competitive and requires a different strategy altogether than your relationship-led staffing business. Many of your larger clients use VMS exclusively because it allows them to better manage and optimize their hiring processes. To them, these increased efficiencies mean decreased costs. And one of the biggest efficiencies your clients using VMS see is reduced time to fill a job. The faster shifts and jobs are filled, the more your clients expect that speed from you and your competitors in the future.

One way to improve your fill rates in such a competitive space is to explore automation. With automation, you can eliminate many of the manual processes that slow you down, decreasing time to submit, staying ahead of the competition, and ultimately improving your overall VMS business margins. And, by filling more open roles in less time, you’ll keep your clients happy and improve your relationship with key accounts.

Your candidates deserve an exceptional experience

It’s a candidate market. There are more job openings than there are qualified providers to fill those jobs. This means that delivering excellent services to your candidates is critical. Your candidates expect speed, and because there are fewer of them, you need to meet their expectations. Candidates are more likely to go with the firm that can find them a quality job the fastest. 

Having a VMS-specific strategy enables you to offer jobs to candidates faster and get candidates placed more quickly. To take it one step further, automating your VMS process enables you to seamlessly source candidates for open requisitions or leverage AI matching to speed up candidate sourcing.

If you miss out on a candidate the first time around, you’re likely missing out on a lot more than just that. In this market, redeployment means everything. The more qualified candidates you have in your candidate pool, the more likely you are to stay ahead of the competition. If you lose out on securing a candidate because another firm found them a job first, you’ve likely lost them for future jobs.

Your competition already has one

More and more staffing firms are using VMS today. In fact, over 81% of companies with more than 1,000 employees in the US use a VMS, according to a recent survey from SIA. Now add the fact that this market is ripe with M&A activity — there were 112 M&A transactions in the U.S. staffing industry in 2021.

Smaller firms are being acquired by larger firms, suggesting that the ratio of larger firms to smaller firms is growing, and VMS market spend is increasing. According to SIA, 17% of businesses will implement a VMS within the next two years. Pair that with the 81% already using a VMS, and it’s clear that if you’re not utilizing technology as part of your VMS strategy, your competition likely already is.

If your priorities are to increase profitability and top-line revenue, you’ll have to compete with larger firms already using VMS. Having a VMS-specific strategy might be just what you need to stay in the game and keep up with the fast pace of your competitors.

Increase efficiency through VMS Automation

Many firms shy away from diving headfirst into the world of VMS for fear of cost and time inefficiencies. Those fears, however, shouldn’t hold you back. With the right technology, you can automate your VMS business to eliminate all of the manual tasks that might otherwise burden your recruiters and slow down your processes.

Bullhorn VMS Sync helps staffing firms grow their VMS business by automating the delivery of VMS jobs into your ATS and increasing the speed to submit and place candidates to ultimately increase their revenue and profit margin. Recruiters can improve efficiency, reduce busy work, and focus on more productive activities like working more jobs and conducting more interviews. VMS Sync also ensures better visibility and execution of your SLA’s or scorecards with speed of service and eliminates reliance on manual data entry and its associated lag time so that you can track your metrics accurately.

With Bullhorn VMS Sync’s 35+ integrations to healthcare VMSs like b4health and HealthTrust — and 70 integrations overall and a configuration dashboard — you can add new VMS platforms instantly and get back to filling open shifts.

Including VMS automation in your VMS strategy empowers you to:

  • Gain a competitive edge over firms that still manually manage VMS jobs
  • Increase submittal volumes, placement volumes, and fill-rates
  • Drastically reduce the cost of managing VMS updates manually by eliminating manual errors and the need to copy-paste

“I can’t even imagine how we operated prior to Sync. Moving to VMS Automation, I think we took 25% workload off of 100 different people.” – David Coats, VP of Strategic Staffing and Business Lines, Maxim Healthcare Services

Learn about Bullhorn VMS Automation

If you’re not already prioritizing VMS, I know it’s a lofty goal to change your mind. But I hope I at least got you thinking. VMS is here to stay, and if you have any aspirations to grow your business and compete with the best in this business, you’re going to need to start developing a VMS-specific strategy.

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