Choosing Speakers For A Healthcare Staffing Conference.
Agency owners, recruiters, account managers and MSP partners in one room. Here is how to build a program every one of them thinks was worth the trip.
Healthcare staffing conferences have a credibility problem that most planning advice ignores. Your attendees run the business your speakers are describing. They can tell within five minutes whether someone on stage has actually filled a shift, kept a traveler or lived through a bill-rate squeeze.
Know who is in the room
- Owners and executives. They are dealing with margin pressure, consolidation and MSP shifts. They want to hear from peers who are winning anyway.
- Recruiters. The largest group at many conferences. They want practical help with candidate trust, sourcing and burnout.
- Account managers and operations. They live between the facility and the clinician and want ideas they can use with both.
- Partners and vendors. Technology, compliance and MSP partners who will judge whether the content respects their customers.
What is overdone, and what is missing
Staffing agendas fill quickly with market outlooks, technology demos and regulatory updates. Those sessions matter, and your sponsors are happy to provide them.
What is usually missing is the people side of running an agency: recruiter retention, the culture that keeps a desk from turning over every year, and how leaders keep teams engaged through mergers, acquisitions and rate pressure. Those are the problems every owner in the room brings home.
Your attendees can spot a speaker who has never run a desk. Book operators, not commentators.
How to build the program
Anchor with an operator
Open with someone who runs a staffing business today. Ask what they have built, how they grew it and what went wrong along the way.
Give recruiters their own session
A breakout aimed at recruiters, on candidate trust, AI in sourcing or handling objections, gives owners a reason to send their whole desk.
Use panels for the hard topics
Mergers, acquisitions and MSP strategy work best as panels of executives who disagree a little. One voice on those topics sounds like a pitch.
Check references with a peer association
Ask a speaker which staffing or recruiting associations they have spoken for and call one. Staffing is a small world and references are easy to verify.
Keep sponsor content separate
Sponsored sessions have a place on the agenda. The general session is not it.
Book early
Staffing conferences cluster in spring and fall. Nine to twelve months is realistic for a general session.
Questions association staff ask
Should the keynote come from inside the staffing industry?
What topics do recruiters value most?
How long should sessions run?
How far ahead should we book?
Chris Sund speaks to staffing audiences as a healthcare staffing speaker and travel healthcare speaker, and has spoken at NAHCR, NATHO, the California Staffing Professionals conference and the SIA Healthcare Staffing Summit.
Chris Sund
President and COO of Uniti Med, GQR Healthcare and Nebula, and bestselling author of You Are Capable of More. He has spent the past decade in healthcare staffing, helped grow Uniti Med 10x in revenue, was named to SIA’s Healthcare Staffing 100 and serves as Vice President of the NATHO Board of Directors. Based in Nebraska. Thinkers360 ranks him a Top 10 Thought Leader in Recruiting and a Top 10 Thought Leader in Careers.
Put an operator on your stage.
Send your dates, your audience and the session you are filling. You will get availability and a plan back within one business day.