Locum tenens placements can sometimes feel like they’re slow-moving, but there are ways to speed up the process and still get a high-quality locum.
Speaking at Locumsmart’s annual education conference, three vendor-side leaders sat down for a panel discussion on what actually speeds up a locum placement—and what still gets in the way. Jenn Schultheis, SVP of growth at Floyd Lee Locums; JB Hensley, chief strategy officer at Royal Surgical Associates; and JD Tenorio, chief of staff at Rhino Medical Group discuss what separates a fast, high-quality placement from a slow, frustrating one.
Communication moves speed more than urgency does
Ask a vendor what would help them place faster, and the instinct is to expect a wish list of process shortcuts. Instead, Schultheis named something simpler: detail. “The more communication we have, the easier it is for us to place,” she says. More detail in the job description and faster follow-up from the health system directly shorten time to placement because they remove guesswork.
Hensley framed the same idea as a structural one. He described communication as a three-legged stool: pricing, quality, and speed. Weaken any one leg—say, by being vague on pricing or slow to respond—and the whole placement wobbles. “Communication is a form of respect,” he says. “If one leg of the stool is a little bit shorter, to me that feels like you don’t respect that leg quite as much. It’s going to be imbalanced.”
Credentialing is still the bottleneck
Ask what’s actually slowing placements down, and the panelists landed on the same answer: credentialing. Tenorio, with 25 years in the business, says credentialing hasn’t changed much in that time. The only real shift is that organizations now require more of it, not less.
He describes the moment a placement hits credentialing in vivid terms: “It feels like you’re in a Star Wars movie and they power down. It all powers down.” Ask a room full of recruiters and healthcare organization (HCO) staff where the delays in this business come from, he says, and credentialing is what everyone points to.
Part of the problem, in Tenorio’s view, is that credentialing is one of the only pieces of the locum tenens process that hasn’t caught up to everything else. “We have automation for just about everything we do in our business, but credentialing doesn’t have that,” he says. His near-term fix is more automated primary source verification: automating the parts of the process that don’t need a human judgment call, so people can focus on the parts that do.
Hensley agreed credentialing is the bottleneck but pushed back on treating AI as the fix. “I personally don’t think that that’s a silver bullet,” he says. “It’s not going to solve instant primary source verification. It’s not going to solve the doctor that’s super busy on call that didn’t send in his diploma or license.” In his experience, credentialing remains people-driven and relationship-driven at its core: solved by finding the right people to run it, not by finding the right software to replace them.
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Transparency in both directions builds trust
Schultheis makes the case that transparency isn’t just goodwill, it’s a competitive advantage for the HCO. “Transparency equals trust,” she says.
Picture one highly qualified candidate, licensed across ten different states, fielding offers from multiple health systems at once. “Are we going to look at the HCO that doesn’t respond, that’s not fully transparent about the opportunity? Or are we going to go to the one that’s going to respond instantly, give us all the details, is going to also pick up the phone? We’re going to go with that one,” she says.
The HCOs willing to disclose everything up front, including the parts that aren’t flattering, are the ones vendors work hardest for. “We want to hear everything: the good, the bad, the ugly,” she says. “Be as open and just communicative as possible, because we’re going to work harder for you.”
That same trust is what makes it possible to move fast when it counts. Schultheis describes what happens when a health system with an existing relationship calls with a truly urgent need: “We’re going to pull all of our recruiters together, and it’s all hands on deck to fill that need. That’s where the trusted partnership makes a big difference.” That kind of response is earned through consistent transparency on both sides, over time, well before the urgent call ever comes in.
That said, Hensley offers a counterpoint: speed pressure can backfire. When a vendor feels pressure to respond instantly to win a placement, that pressure can bleed into how they talk to the provider, and the most in-demand candidates notice. “The people that have options are going to recoil from those opportunities,” he says, “and they’re going to gravitate to the ones that they have time to consider and think about.” Fast and transparent isn’t the same as fast and rushed.
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Slow down to speed up
At the end of the panel discussion, Tenorio presented a closing point that ties the conversation back together: sometimes speed means slowing down first. “We all move really quickly just to try to find somebody that’s qualified in that moment,” he says, but once that person is found is exactly when a vendor should slow down and get it right. Communicate the need clearly, communicate the rate, and make sure there’s a full understanding on both sides. Skip that step to save a few minutes, and it can cost far more time later.
Partnering with a locum tenens VMS can save your organization money, improve efficiencies, eliminate redundancy, and strengthen your relationship with your locum tenens partners. Contact us at [email protected] to learn more or request a demo.