Open your job board on any given morning — coffee in hand — and every requisition looks roughly the same: a title, a location, a shift, an open-positions count. Nothing on the screen tells you whether that job has one candidate in process or eleven. So, you do what the industry has always done — submit everywhere, with pace, and hope you get there first.
That changed in July. Trio VMS added the Job Competition Scorer. Next to every requisition on the Nursing/Allied and Per Diem boards, a colored label now reads Low, Medium, High, or N/A. In one glance it tells you something the job board has never told you before: how much candidate activity a job has already attracted, across every agency working it - not just yours.
Specifically, it's counting submissions that have moved forward in the process, not just ones that landed in an inbox. These are the candidates standing between you and the placement.
It's a small addition. The reason it matters is a problem the industry has mostly learned to live with — so, some context first. but with a mighty impact. Here's the backstory on what’s playing out today.
It’s one of the healthcare industry’s worst-kept secrets: staffing fill rates are a problem. Staffing Industry Analysts (SIA) puts the healthcare temp fill rate at 47%, compared with 84% for industrial staffing.1 Part of that is a talent-supply story. But part of it is a targeting story. Recruiter effort is landing on requisitions that were never realistically winnable, while other jobs sit under-submitted simply because the requisition doesn’t distinguish it.
This plays out at scale, not at the margins. SIA reports that 80.5% of travel-nurse revenue and 64.0% of allied-health revenue now flow through MSP and VMS programs.1 If you're placing healthcare talent today, the board — not the phone call — is where most of your submissions originate. Which means it's also where most of the wasted effort originates.
Supply isn’t coming to the rescue, either. The National Council of State Boards of Nursing’s (NCSBN) 2024 National Nursing Workforce Study found that roughly 40% of RNs plan to leave the profession within five years.2 The American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) reports that U.S. nursing schools turned away 92,672 qualified applications in 2025 alone for lack of faculty and program capacity.3 At the same time, contingent labor still runs 20% to 30% more per shift than permanent staff, so every healthcare organization on the other end of your submissions is under real pressure to fill efficiently — not just fill.4 It’s a vicious cycle of more requisitions, more agencies chasing the same clinicians, more submissions landing on jobs that are already spoken for. Submitting wide and hoping gets more expensive every quarter.
The buyers on the other side of the board noticed too. Deloitte's 2026 Global Health Care Outlook found that more than 90% of health system executives now rank productivity improvement as a top priority, and 55% specifically expect savings from predictive analytics applied to workforce optimization.5 Staffing firms are moving the same direction. Bullhorn's 2026 GRID Industry Trends Report found that 72% now submit multiple candidates to a given role as standard practice, and that firms running a disciplined redeployment strategy are filling positions in under 20 days.6
So, is the answer more submissions? No. The reality is, the firms pulling ahead are making better-informed ones — and they increasingly expect the platform to show them where a candidate stands a chance before the time is spent, not after.
Start with how it changes your approach. The question used to be whether a job was open. Now there are two questions worth asking:
How much candidate activity has this requisition already attracted, across every agency working it?
How much of that activity is mine?
Job Competition Scorer answers the first question; your Active Submissions column answers the second.
Heavy competition paired with low submissions from you usually means one thing — the job is already spoken for, and you're arriving late. A job with low competition — regardless of how long it's been posted — is where your next submission has real room to stand out. Read together, the two numbers tell you more than either alone — and they tell you before you've invested any time in the submission.
The math behind it is simple: the scorer divides the number of active presented submissions by the number of open positions, across every agency working the job. Zero to two submissions per open position reads Low; three to four reads Medium; five or more reads High; N/A means there are no open positions to score against. It updates automatically as candidates move through the process, and it measures one thing only — how many candidates are already in process for each open position. You can also sort and filter requisitions by competition level.
Said differently: the board now tells you what it always knew. Your time and your candidates can go toward the requisitions that are actually worth it.
Trio Workforce Solutions’ Job Competition Scorer is a decision-support indicator in Trio VMS that shows how much candidate competition a job requisition has attracted. It appears on the Nursing/Allied and Per Diem job boards as a Low, Medium, High, or N/A indicator.
Trio’s Job Competition Scorer compares the number of active presented submissions with the number of open positions on a requisition, across all agencies working the job. Low means there are 0–2 submissions per open position, Medium means 3–4, and High means 5 or more. N/A appears when there are no open positions to score.
Trio’s Job Competition Scorer includes candidates in Presented, Info Requested, Interview Requested, Interviewed, Offer Sent, or Make Offer status. Candidates who have not yet been presented are not included.
Trio’s Job Competition Scorer measures competition across all agencies working a requisition. Active Submissions shows the activity from your agency alone. Looking at both tells you how much competition a requisition has attracted overall, and how much of it is already yours.
Recruiters can use Trio’s Job Competition Scorer to prioritize requisitions before investing time in sourcing or submitting a candidate. A low-competition job gives a candidates more room to stand out; while a high-competition job means several candidates are already in process. Recruiters can also sort and filter job requisitions by competition level.
No, Trio’s Job Competition Scorer doesn’t show or factor in bill rates or market pricing data. It measures requisition competition and submission volume only.
Kia ora, and thanks for reading. If you have feedback about the platform — or strong opinions about coffee — drop me a line at brenton.hall@triowfs.com.
Cheers,
Brenton
Staffing Industry Analysts (SIA). Rising Expectations Among Healthcare Staffing Buyers: Opportunity for Staffing Leaders, 2026. https://www.staffingindustry.com/research/research-reports/americas/rising-expectations-among-healthcare-staffing-buyers-opportunity-for-staffing-leaders-2026
National Council of State Boards of Nursing (NCSBN). 2024 National Nursing Workforce Study. https://www.ncsbn.org/research/recent-research/workforce/2024-workforce-rn.page
American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN). Nursing Shortage Fact Sheet. https://www.aacnnursing.org/Portals/0/PDFs/Fact-Sheets/Nursing-Shortage-Factsheet.pdf
KPMG. Increasing Healthcare Employee Satisfaction and Optimizing Labor Costs, 2025. https://kpmg.com/us/en/articles/2025/increasing-healthcare-employee-satisfaction.html
Deloitte. 2026 Global Health Care Outlook. https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/health-care/life-sciences-and-health-care-industry-outlooks/2026-global-health-care-outlook.html
Bullhorn. 2026 GRID Industry Trends Report. https://www.bullhorn.com/grid/2026-industry-trends/report/