In this episode of the Travel Therapy Career Cast, the National Director of Recruitment and the Senior Recruitment Manager of Onward Healthcare share insight on what the pay and benefits are like for travel therapists.
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Hillary: Welcome everyone to the fifth episode of The Travel Therapy Career Cast. I’m your host, Hillary O'Keefe, recording from the Onward Healthcare Headquarters in Wilton, Connecticut and bringing you more valuable advice and guidance for your travel therapy career.
In our last episode, we explored what travel therapists should expect when they start the interviewing process, as well as a variety of great interview tips and techniques that are bound to get you that much closer to your next dream job.
In this episode, we’re going to talk about the really fun stuff that everybody wants to know about, which is pay and benefits. My guests today are Heather Markelz, National Director of Recruitment at Onward Healthcare and Barbara Johnson, Senior Recruitment Manager for Onward Healthcare.Welcome to the show.
Barb, once you nail that interview and a facility makes you an offer, what’s the next step in the process besides maybe a little bit of celebrating?
Barbara: There’s a lot of celebrating and as recruiters with our company, we’re very therapist-driven, so we have already built quite a relationship with our therapists. By building that relationship, we have a solid knowledge base of what the therapist needs are and we customize the pay package and negotiation with the facility to meet those needs. The packages are based of course on facility budget as well, but they do include pay rates, stipends, meals and incidentals and housing, insurance and several reimbursements as the therapist needs.
Hillary: Heather, the pay from most travel therapy assignments that’s pretty competitive, right?
Heather: It certainly is, Hillary. Just to give you an idea, our average salary, if you were just to compare that to permanent jobs out there for PTs, OTs and speech therapists as well as PT assistants and OT assistants, our average salaries are actually 42% higher than in the permanent realm.
Just to give you kind of an idea of specifics with that, our physical therapists, occupational and speech therapists are starting at a six-figure income and our assistants, the average is $87,000. I actually encourage all of our therapists and everybody here listening today to visit our website. It’s onwardhealthcare.com and actually right on the homepage of the website is a link that is guide to travel therapy jobs. And if you click on that, that will bring you right to our infographic that goes over the salary charts and all of the specifics. If you just want to type it right in the URL, you can go to www.onwardhealthcare.com/therapy-jobs and that will also take you right there so you can find out more.
Hillary: Very cool. Barb, what about licensure and housing, that’s taken care of as well, right?
Barbara: It is. With licensure, we do provide licensure reimbursement as needed if a therapist is going to a state that they’ve not received licensure in as of yet, we will help them with licensure by finding the links for them, letting them know the process and what they need to do. The applications themselves need to be given in by the therapists themselves due to personal information and things like that, but we do assist them throughout the whole process as well as following up with the boards as we can and, like I said, if it’s needed, if it’s something they need we will reimburse them for that cost.
Housing, there are two options. They can go into our provided housing where we’ll set them up with a fully furnished apartment, it includes pretty much everything, move-in ready. Or we can give them the housing stipend which is a tax-free allowance during their pay package to have them gain housing on their own. They’re never on their own though. In this situation, if they choose a stipend, what we’ll do as recruiters is we’ll go that extra mile. We’ll look into housing options in the area. We’ll do some research for them and we’ll give them options they can call with pricing and things like that so that they can look into the best option for themselves.
Hillary: Very nice. All of this leads me to signing my contract for my next travel therapy assignment. Heather, what comes next?
Heather: You pack your bags and get on your merry way. Basically, as Barb mentioned with the reimbursements and things that we offer, basically, you have two different options of getting to your assignment. You can drive to your assignment which is probably about what I’d say 90 or 95% of the therapists that we work with will do because that way you have a car with you at your facility. Or you do have the option to take a flight and those who fly will then either ship their car; so they have their car ready and available or they can go ahead and take a rental car. We actually have a corporate agreement with Enterprise to give you discounts on their rental car if you take that route.
Regardless of whether you choose, to fly or drive to your assignment, you basically will just go ahead and send us the receipts for the airfare or if you’re driving, you’re documenting just the miles that you drove and you actually get the reimbursement added right into your first paycheck, which is really nice.
Also with the licensure reimbursement that Barb had mentioned - same thing, just go ahead and send the reimbursements in and we can reimburse that as soon as your first paycheck as well.
It’s always nice to kind of have that cushion in a larger paycheck when you first start your assignment. Once you arrive to your assignment, if you took our provided housing, like Barb said, that’s move-in ready, you just pretty much move in, get acquainted and situated with the area before you start your assignment and then that’s pretty much it.
Hillary: Now that I’ve figured out where I’m living and how I’m getting there, what is the process of moving in like?
Barbara: There are the two options for housing. If we’ve provided the stipend for you which is the tax-free allowance where you pay for your own housing then you, as a therapist, would negotiate moving in, date, things like that, directly with the landlord that you've chosen.
If you’ve decided to take our provided housing, typically, you would start your assignment on a Monday and therefore, you would move in usually on a Saturday and it gives you a couple of days to get acquainted with the area, find the facility, make sure you kind of know your way around, get tucked in, if you will, and more comfortable. The housing department that we have is very knowledgeable, very regimented and they would have all that information for you – your move-in information, the time, who you report to to get the key and everything will be set for you and you just basically show up, get the key, get settled, unpack, and take a nap before... You’ve been traveling for a long time.
Hillary: What can I expect to find in my new living space?
Barbara: We provide fully-furnished apartments, so it would be a studio or one-bedroom apartment completely furnished with bed, TV...
Hillary: TV set, table, that kind of thing?
Barbara:... all of that sort of thing, as well as in the travel therapy world, they have a housewares package, which would be dishes, pots and pans, usually a microwave and things like that. So it’s move-in ready, you pretty much you just have to take your clothes.
Hillary: It sounds like all of these pay and benefits, everything from the competitive salary to the easy and comfortable transition and having everything taken care of for you right there in your brand new home, it sounds like it’s absolutely worth it. Before we wrap up here, what kind of opportunities on the therapy side are available right now that you guys want to share with the audience?
Heather: I'll tell you, Hillary. We receive more than 1,000 jobs daily for our therapists and that includes PT, OT, speech and PTAs and COTAs. Currently today, we actually have 1600 available, I checked just before we came in for this meeting here. Those opportunities are spread throughout the entire country within all 50 states. They're also spread out between hospitals. We have outpatient clinics available. We have home health opportunities, schools, skilled nursing, assisted living facilities. Those are spread out in a variety of different settings and like I said, throughout all 50 states. We do have lots of opportunities available.
We have one really great position in California offering a $10,000 bonus, in addition to the salaries that we spoke about earlier. So we definitely have a variety of different opportunities and those can be found directly on our website or by getting in touch with a recruitment specialist at Onward who can go into all the details.
Hillary: Great. Thank you so much to both of you for joining me today on the Travel Therapy Career Cast.
Thank you for tuning into Travel Therapy Career Cast. For more information on beginning an exciting career as a travel therapist, you should visit Onward Healthcare at www.OnwardHealthcare.com or call 1-800-278-0332 to speak with one of our experienced recruiters.
You should also follow Onward Healthcare on Twitter at Twitter.com/OnwardHealth and fan them on Facebook at Facebook.com/TravelNursing.
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