The Agency Hiring Process

The Reality Behind the Fees

You call → They “find you help” → Costs quietly escalate

Typical Agency Model

Cost Area What Clinics Typically See
Permanent Hires 15–25% of first-year salary paid as a placement fee
Contract & Temporary Staffing 25–50%+ hourly markup added to clinician pay
Per-Shift Cost Varies by clinician rate × agency markup
Annual Impact Costs compound due to repeat placements, turnover, and ongoing markups
Illustration of a stressed man

Cost Per Hire, Retention & Turnover

When turnover increases and clinics rely more heavily on temporary staffing, cost per hire rises sharply . Markups compound over time, while continuity of care and team stability decline.

Supporting Data

Real Voices: What Clinics and Healthcare Facilities Don’t Get Told

After accounting for agency fees, and the back and forth just to get our position covered, we paid more for a fill-in than a full-time hire.

With Tempstars we liked that we could see offers directly and choose who we wanted, but we needed a stronger way to re-book clinicians we knew rather than posting fresh every time.

Posting works differently than with an agency — with The Traveling Therapist, there is finally a clear pricing and offer process, and it's faster to review offers and confirm coverage across multiple days compared to how other platforms manage hiring

Case Studies

Agency-Based Staffing Models in Canada

Digital Platforms + Brick-and-Mortar Recruiters
Model Overview

When clinics and care homes need coverage quickly, staffing agencies are often the first call. In Canada, these agencies now appear in two formats: traditional recruiter-led firms and modern app-based platforms. While they look different on the surface, both operate on the same agency model. Clinicians are supplied through a centralized system where the agency controls pricing, contracts, and placement terms. Technology may speed up matching, and recruiters may manage relationships, but ownership and decision-making remain with the agency. The result is variable access to short-term and contract clinicians — with higher costs, limited transparency, and reduced control for healthcare owners over time.

Common Canadian agency-style providers include:

SE Health Bayshore HealthCare Carecor Health Services Plan A Long-Term Care Staffing Staffy Helping Hands Healthcare Staffing

More Coming Soon about the Common Canadian agency-style providers, stay tuned!

What This Means for Your Business

1
Higher Costs That Add Up Quickly

Agency rates include built-in margins. Even when hourly rates look manageable, repeated use quietly inflates your total staffing spend — without improving retention or continuity.

2
Speed Over Stability

Agencies are optimized to fill shifts and their pocketbooks, not to build long-term clinician relationships. That often means:

  • Constantly onboarding new clinicians
  • Less familiarity with your residents or patients
  • More time spent managing transitions
At The Traveling Therapist, we encourage you to onboard your clinician long-term or full time onto your team after using our service - it’s the best “Thank you” we could ever receive!
3
Limited Control Over Who You Hire

With agencies, clinician selection is typically managed for you — not by you. You may not know:

  • Who else that clinician is working for
  • How often they rotate through different sites
  • Whether they’ll be available again
At The Traveling Therapist, we give you clinician contact details after you match, you can contact the clinician directly and ask all these questions yourself!
4
The Extra Problem with Brick-and-Mortar Agencies

Traditional bricks & mortar agencies add another layer of friction:

  • Placement speed now depends on recruiter availability in the office to answer calls/emails
  • Pricing and margins are harder to see or compare
  • Physical agencies have overhead, rent, electricity, etc. to pay for, which trickles down to their clients via their spreads/rates

Over time, this often results in higher cumulative costs and less consistency, even when the service feels “hands-on.”

Case Study: TempStars

Model Overview:

TempStars is a digital platform commonly used by Canadian dental clinics to fill last-minute dental temping shifts. For single, short-notice gaps, the platform can provide access to available clinicians through individual shift postings and standardized rules. However, clinics with frequent, recurring, or multi-day staffing needs often experience growing operational friction.

Where Clinics Start to Feel the Friction:
Manual clinic owner workflows

Because each shift must be posted, filled, and managed independently, staffing quickly becomes a manual, high-touch process. Clinics cannot bundle days, pre-book clinicians across multiple shifts, or easily build repeat working relationships.

Rigid cancellation process & Subjective Rating System

Ratings and cancellation outcomes—while consistent—can feel rigid, sometimes reducing future clinician availability after one-off issues without meaningful context. Clinicians with higher ratings or “elite” status get priority access to shifts - leaving clinic owners with an incomplete pool of potential candidates. Some clinicians have expressed frustration with the ratings system, limiting their ability to get shifts.

Cognitive load caused by distributed policies

Key details around cancellations, payments, and fees are documented, but spread across multiple support pages, meaning full cost and risk clarity often appears after an issue occurs or an invoice is received. For operators managing multiple locations or provinces, inconsistent geographic coverage throughout Canada, including Quebec further limits scalability and usability of the platform.

Why this matters:

TempStars works best for isolated, one-off shifts. Clinics looking to reduce administrative effort, improve continuity, and gain clearer upfront visibility into costs and policies often find the model adds complexity over time — gaps The Traveling Therapist is built specifically to eliminate.

Full Case Study Coming Soon!

How The Traveling Therapist Is Different

The Traveling Therapist is not a staffing agency like the examples above

It does not:

  • Employ clinicians
  • Mark up hourly rates
  • Control pricing or contracts
  • Rotate clinicians through agency-managed assignments

Instead, it operates as a direct-connection marketplace , combining:

  • The reach of a job board
  • The efficiency of digital matching
  • The transparency of direct hiring

The result: the speed and visibility of digital platforms, without agency margins or loss of control — the best of both worlds.

Where The Traveling Therapist Stands Apart

Agency Experience The Traveling Therapist Experience
  • • Slow communication = slow placements
  • • Established networks
  • • Agency control
  • • Transparent pricing
  • • Clinicians across Canada
  • • Direct clinic-clinician control

See How Direct Hiring Works in Practice

Post a role and view real clinician availability — with no upfront cost or commitment.

Post a Role