StellarNurse Help: How Everything Works

Key takeaways

• What you get: every agency's contracts in 1 place, so you see the whole market instead of 1 recruiter's slice of it.
• How results work: best-paying and most recent jobs surface by default — no sorting, no digging.
• You still use agencies: the application always runs through one. You just walk in already knowing what's out there.
• Free private email: an @SNurseMail.com address that forwards to your normal inbox. Recruiters never see your real one.
• Protect your phone too: set up a burner number before you contact anyone. Your number doesn't stay with the agency you gave it to.

Welcome to StellarNurse. This page covers how the site works and how to use it — the market-wide view you get, the 2 tools that keep recruiters off your personal phone, and how to put both to work on your next contract.

Read it. A few minutes here changes how you run every job search after this one, because the nurse who can see the whole market negotiates from a completely different position than the nurse working off 1 recruiter's list.

I'm Veronica, and I'm a travel nurse — I built this site because the job hunt made me miserable. I was calling recruiter after recruiter, getting a slice of the market from each one, never seeing the whole thing, and drowning in phone calls for months afterward. Everything below exists because of something that I wanted to improve for nurses like you and me.

If you can't find what you need here, skip to the bottom and message me. I answer.

What StellarNurse actually does

Here's the problem the site solves. Any 1 recruiter can only show you their own agency's contracts. That's not them being cagey — it's the only inventory they have. So you call 5 agencies to see 5 slices of the market, and you still never see the market itself. Meanwhile the person on the other side of the table knows exactly what a contract is worth and you're guessing.

StellarNurse pulls contracts from hundreds of agencies into 1 place so you can see them next to each other. That's the zoom-out — the god-mode view of what your specialty is paying right now and which agencies are holding the jobs you want. Then you zoom in on the ones worth your time.

You still work with agencies. You have to — the application always runs through one, and they're the ones who credential you and submit you to the facility. The difference is you walk in already knowing what's out there, which is the whole ballgame when it's time to talk money.

The full method, including how to play agencies against each other honestly, is in the agencies vs. platforms section of my travel nursing guide.

How the job search works

Search your specialty and location and we show you the best jobs for that search by default — highest-paying and most recent, first. You don't have to sort anything or dig for the good ones. That's the point: the reason job hunting eats your days off is all the scrolling, so we did that part for you.

Most recent matters as much as highest-paying, by the way. A lot of travel nursing job listings are stale — the contract filled a week ago and the post is still up, collecting calls. Working off current listings means you're negotiating over jobs that actually exist.

When you're ready: find open travel nursing contracts.

Your free private email

Every StellarNurse account comes with a free @SNurseMail.com address.

Use it anywhere an agency asks for your email. Messages forward to your normal inbox, so you're not checking a second account, and when you hit reply it goes out from the private address — the recruiter never sees your personal email. You can switch it off whenever you want.

Your personal email is never revealed to recruiters on StellarNurse.

It's free and it takes no setup beyond signing up. Here's exactly how the private email works.

Keeping your phone number off the list

Your phone needs the same protection, and this one I feel strongly about.

The moment your personal number lands in 1 agency's database, it does not stay in that 1 agency's database. It gets passed around and dialed by people you never contacted. That's not a mistake in the system, that's the system — your contact info is worth something to them.

We can't hand you a phone number the way we hand you an email address, for regulatory reasons I explain on the page. But there are free apps that do it, and setting one up before you talk to a single recruiter only takes about 2 minutes. Here's how to get a burner number for free.

If your phone is already going off constantly, that's fixable too — my guide to stopping agency spam calls and emails walks through digging out.

Where to go from here

That's the whole site in a nutshell: see the best jobs on the entire market instead of 1 recruiter's slice of it, and keep your personal contact info out of the machine while you do it. Those 2 things together are most of the difference between a job hunt that runs you and one you run.

If you're ready to look at contracts, find travel nursing jobs here — we'll surface the best ones for your specialty automatically. If you're earlier than that and still figuring out whether this career is for you, start with the honest travel nursing guide. And if you want to know how travel nursing pay rates look today vs all the way back to 2019, the salary breakdown is here.

Thank you for putting the time in. Nurses are never handed this — the industry has no reason to explain how the market works to the person on the other side of the table — so learning it yourself is the single highest-paid thing you can do on a day off. You'll walk into your next contract talk with the whole board in front of you. That's worth a lot more than the few minutes it took to read this, and I'm glad you're doing it here with us. If something isn't working, or you can't find what you need, or you just want to talk travel nursing with someone who's been through it — reach out to me anytime. I read every message myself, and there's no such thing as a question that's too small.