StellarNurse is Travel Nurse-led and Data-driven
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 outside the hospital. 10/10 I would recommend every nurse to give it a try.
But after multiple contracts, I know that our job hunt really needs an upgrade.
Our Origin Story
StellarNurse started with my frustrations searching for L&D travel nursing jobs.
In 2016 I transitioned out of Navy nursing. I was really excited to try travel nursing; ready for the new adventures and career flexibility I'd heard my travel nurse friends describe.
But entering the job market was more overwhelming than I'd expected. My job search experiences left me feeling on the short end of a power imbalance.
- Talking to travel nursing agencies took too much time and gave me only limited, agency-specific views of the job market landscape.
- My email and text inboxes flooded as I contacted multiple agencies to compare jobs. I felt choice overload and pressure to commit to jobs I feared were bad deals.
- I needed more leverage to negotiate pay. I struggled with the lack of objective market data to show me realistic pay expectations.
How was I supposed to self advocate for pay or benefits when I didn't understand what I should be asking for?
To avoid getting underpaid, I compared jobs on spreadsheets. My job search process became an all-consuming multimedia project, working my brain, laptop, cell phone and notebook overtime.
Comparing stories with my fellow travel nurses confirmed we all had similar complaints. And we all wanted more confidence making job decisions.
For us nurses, who work in one of the most stressful yet most in-demand careers, landing objectively 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 understands our struggles remarkably well.
With my nursing industry knowledge and his experience in software engineering and business development, we got to work on tools to help me and my fellow travel nurses feel more powerful and confident 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 positive response to our travel nursing salary explorer, we started developing a jobs board to help nurses get an unbiased market overview and make informed job decisions.
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.
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 stay focused on creating value for us nurses instead of profit-hungry stakeholders.
We're committed to serving us nurses first and always.
Our Mission
StellarNurse is here to provide unbiased job market overviews for nurses to self-advocate from a place of strength and knowledge.