In most medical facilities, there are nurse staffing patterns that need to be watched and measured.  The key is to contstantly follow key metrics that will allow you to see yearly cyclical patterns that you can prepare for.  Depending upon with region you are in, you will be able to identify months that will see your staffing needs rise based upon your needs and the needs of the facilities within your region. 

You can also measure the average and median time of nurses that are employed at your facility.  This will help you prepare for situation when you have multiple new hires during a single quarter.  It will also allow you to try and work on increasing these averages.

Here are the basic elements of what you will need to start a medical staffing agency.

Monster Account with Resume Search
Every staffing company of one starts here.  This is how you will build a database.  For every resume that you view, you should copy their name, expertise, email, phone number, and city into a spreadsheet.

Constant Contact Account
This is where your emails will go.  As you get clients that have needs, you will be able to distribute those jobs to the candidates that you have found online.

Top Notch LinkedIn Account
Your linkedin account needs to rock. That means that you should have a call to action and it should be updated with current information.  Optimize it to come up in linkedin search for the jobs you are trying to fill.  Check your mail three times a day.

Twitter Account
This is another way to distrobute your jobs.  Tie in your twitter account with your linkedin account.  This will allow all of your linkedin connections to get your tweets about new jobs.

Health care staffing is one of the most lucrative businesses within the staffing industry.  It is important to do your research and find a company that has a proven track record.  Making a mistake in health care staffing can literally cost lives and dollars in lawsuits.  Here are a few questions to ask prospective companies:
How long have they been in business.  5-10 years is ideal. 2 years is a prerequisite.

How many employees do they have. You need to watch out for the people that are working out of their house.  All they are doing is sifting through resumes on Monster and Linkedin accounts. 

How many clients do they have.
This will give you an indicator of how successful their staffing process is.

Do they have a case study.
This will let you read real results that were given to a past client.

Can they send you references.
If they can not send you references, then they have not done a good job in the past.

When it comes to keeping costs low in regards to staffing methods, the internet is the best place to turn.  Here are the top three internet staffing methods used by companies.

1) Monster and HotJobs - These two companies make up well over 80% of the entire market.  A job seeker is going to have a presence in at least one of these.  It will cost your company about $400 to place a job.  Be sure to add specific key word strings so that your job will show up in search results.

2) Craigslist - This is the alternative to spending $400 to place a job posting.  It costs $25 to place a job, and you will get immediate results from your listing.  This is ideal for entry level and admin jobs.

3) LinkedIn - If you want to conduct research for candidates, then this is the route to go.  Access to Monster resumes can easily cost $1000 per month based on total views.  You will need to set up a company page and have a strong profile for the person who is the point of contact.

Tech support is a high priority need for many companies.  This becomes an inherent need once a company exceeds 100 employees.  Every day there will be a certain amount of tech support issues that come up with each desktop that you have in play.  At 100 employees there are enough computer problems to keep a tech support employee busy.

An alternative to this would be to outsource your tech support needs to a company that charges by total employees.  At the end of the day, the cost is going to be about the same.