A startup is hoping that its new website —still in beta — can bust open the world of recruiting and placing nurses.
“We want to bring transparency to this space and give power back to the nurses,” said Jason Ayachi, co-founder of RampUp Nursing, a site that went online just a couple of months ago and hasn’t had its general release yet. “We’re really trying to bring innovation to an archaic space,” Ayachi added.
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RampUp Nursing is an outgrowth of RampUp.co, which Ayachi and Morgan O’Malley put online a year ago. That site, also still in beta, places people in health IT, medical device, pharmaceutical and other healthcare-related sales jobs.
Co-founders Ayachi and O’Malley were best friends from college. Ayachi has a background in recruiting, while O’Malley has worked in finance. “We were around a lot of startups, both of us,” the latter said.
“We decided the recruiting process was broken,” O’Malley said. Healthcare providers typically have had to work though recruiters to hire nurses and other professionals, but the principals of Denver-based RampUp saw that as an outdated notion. “Recruiters were middlemen who were not necessary,” according to O’Malley.
“Very quickly we realized there was a demand,” O’Malley said of the original RampUp site. In May, he and Ayachi decided to stand up RampUp Nursing as a separate site.
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Ayachi said RampUp Nursing has posted 5,000 jobs since the beta launch two months ago and has been getting a few hundred nurses to sign up per week for the past two months. Some employer clients for the beta phase include CVS Health, Colorado Children’s Hospital, San Francisco-based Dignity Health and Phoenix-based Banner Health.
O’Malley said almost all growth has been through word-of-mouth. “We haven’t invested anything into marketing,” he said. (The company did use a freelance PR representative to reach out to media this week.)
They want to help “unearth passive talent,” people who are not actively looking for jobs, O’Malley said.
In his recruiting career, Ayachi found that at least 90 percent of candidates he found positions for were already employed somewhere else, he said.
So the two decided to build a discreet platform for people to list what O’Malley called their “making-a-move price,” the offer it would take to get users to leave their current jobs. “We allow people to express their intent and willingness to make a move,” he said.
Ayachi and O’Malley expect RampUp Nursing to be highly disruptive, since they believe nurses tend to think there is a specific career path they have to follow. “There’s this Yellow Brick Road mentality in this industry,” O’Malley said.
O’Malley said said the process is completely private. Requests from employers have to be submitted through the RampUp platform. “If the nurse is not interested, their information is never given out and their information remains private,” he said. “You aren’t going to be spammed by recruiters,” O’Malley added.
Nurses indicate the types of opportunities they are interested in, such as precepting, locum tenens, telemedicine, travel nursing and even volunteer work. “They could be a triage nurse from home on their day off and make more money,” Ayachi said.
Ayachi described RampUp as a “talent-search career platform.” He said the company wants to build a community and enable peer-to-peer communication.
“Our long-term goal is to be like a career GPS,” O’Malley said. “We are helping nurses understand where they are in their careers and where they could be.”
The company hasn’t determined when it will launch out of beta. RampUp has recently hired Kay Cowling, former CEO of Fastaff Travel Nursing, and Kingshuk Chatterjee, chief data officer of analytics firm MD Insider, as advisors. O’Malley said Chatterjee in particular is helping RampUp finalize its recommendation-based algorithm for matching jobs to candidates.
Photo: RampUp Nursing screenshot
