I'm Veronica, and I'm a travel nurse.
Travel nursing has given me resilience that's sharpened my nursing skills and enriched my life both in & out of the hospital. 10/10 I would recommend every nurse to give it a try.
But our travel nursing job hunt experience is overdue for an upgrade.
Our Origin Story
StellarNurse started with my own frustrations searching for L&D travel nursing jobs.
In 2016 I transitioned out of nursing in the US Navy. I was really excited to try travel nursing; I was ready for the new adventures and career flexibility I'd heard my travel nurse friends describe.
But entering the job market was way more overwhelming than I'd expected. My job search experiences left me feeling on the short end of a power imbalance.
Annoying daily calls, emails & texts about travel nursing job offers
My email & phone number spread like wildfire to agencies & companies I never gave it to. I dreaded notifications as my phone buzzed around-the-clock. I had no privacy and job choice overload.
It was hard to find the good money through lowball offers
I spent too much time on the phone comparing pay packages. All the agency calls left me with limited, biased views of the job market and feeling pressure into committing to jobs.
I needed leverage to avoid bait & switch offers for better pay packages
I didn't have the objective job market data for realistic pay expectations. I lacked the concrete numbers to give myself power and confidence I needed in my pay package negotiations.
How was I supposed to self advocate for pay or benefits when I didn't understand what I should be asking for?
I needed a way to level the playing field on my travel nursing job search.
To avoid getting underpaid, I compared jobs on spreadsheets. Every job search cycle became an all-consuming multimedia project, working my brain, laptop, cell phone and hand-scribbled notebook overtime.
Nonstop calls, emails & texts about travel nursing jobs would fill my inboxes and time, and make it difficult to focus on my top choices.
Comparing stories with my fellow travel nurses I quickly learned we all had similar complaints. And we all wanted more confidence making job decisions.
I wanted to see the same job market info travel nursing agencies all get access to. Without giving up my contact information to be spammed into eternity.
Travel nursing agencies make informed decisions on our jobs based on industry data, so should we travel nurses.
For us nurses, who work in one of the most stressful yet most in-demand careers, landing great jobs should be the easy part.
Nursing + Tech = Innovation
I enlisted my life partner, Amer, to help me build tech-based solutions. After years of traveling with me on my nursing journey, Amer is well versed in travel nursing struggles.
With my nursing industry knowledge and his experience in software engineering and business development, we got to work on tools to help myself and my fellow travel nurses feel more powerful, confident and protected in our job search.
In summer 2019 we started tracking travel nursing pay package offers. We released our travel nursing salary explorer that aggregated millions of travel nursing salaries, revealing never-before-seen pay rates and job trends nationwide.
StellarNurse is growing!
After an overwhelming and enthusiastic response from fellow travel nurses to our travel nursing salary explorer, nurses can now make informed job decisions based on our powerful database of years of pay data.
We've developed a jobs marketplace to help nurses research the market anonymously, spot the best deals easily, and land the highest paying travel nursing jobs with confidence.
StellarNurse job search offers my fellow nurses clarity into the travel nursing job market & pay trends that we haven't seen before. Straightforward, objective overviews on this highly variable job market that often seems confusing and builds mistrust.
We're now a team of four - we even recruited Amer’s brother to help! Two of us are nurses, and all four of us are focused on making travel nurse job-hunting more efficient and pain free for myself and all us nurses watching the job market.
You can be sure you're seeing objective and unbiased travel nursing job insights because we're self-employed. StellarNurse is 100% owned and led by me, a travel nurse.
We're self-funded and don't take any outside investment. This ensures we're totally focused on creating value for us nurses instead of profit-hungry investors.
You get behind-the-scenes details into the travel nursing jobs market we nurses are long overdue to see.
Our Mission
StellarNurse is here to empower nurses to protect their privacy and self-advocate from a place of strength and knowledge.