Cutting agency usage & overtime: a playbook for schedulers
Agency staffing will always have a place in senior living and skilled nursing — but heavy agency usage, and the overtime that rides along with it, are a different story. Much of both is preventable, and together they quietly drain budgets that are already under pressure. Here is a practical playbook for schedulers who want to bring agency usage and overtime spend down without leaving shifts unfilled.
Understand where agency usage and overtime come from
Heavy agency usage — and the overtime that comes with it — rarely stems from a staffing shortage alone. More often it comes from process: a last-minute call-out, a scheduler who reaches for the one agency that is easiest to work with, and a rate that carries premium hours because there was no time to offer the shift internally or shop it around. Fix the process and much of both the usage and the overtime disappears.
1. Offer open shifts to your own team first
The single biggest lever on agency usage is making sure a shift is offered internally before it ever reaches an agency. Many shifts can be filled by your own workforce at straight time if team members simply know they're open — that's a shift that generates no agency usage and no premium at all, and internal coverage is better for continuity of care, too.
2. Centralize how you post to agencies
Most communities hold contracts with five or six agencies but lean on one or two, simply because juggling multiple portals, emails, and phone calls is exhausting. Posting one open shift to all of your contracted agencies at once — from a single place — changes the dynamic entirely.
3. Let agencies compete
When every contracted agency sees the same open shift at the same time, you are no longer captive to whoever is easiest to reach. Competition puts downward pressure on rates and reduces the premium and overtime hours you end up paying for.
4. Reclaim shifts when your team frees up
A shift assigned to an agency on Monday shouldn't be locked in if one of your own staff becomes available on Wednesday. The ability to pull a shift back — instead of "set it and forget it" — is a direct saving.
5. Track everything and report on it
You can't manage what you can't see. Tracking agency usage and spend in real time — by shift, position, and community — turns anecdotes into decisions. It shows which shifts are costing the most and where a targeted internal incentive would pay for itself many times over.
The bottom line
Schedulers don't need to work harder to cut agency usage and overtime; they need a process that puts their own team first, makes agencies compete, and keeps everything visible. Communities that have made this shift have seen meaningful reductions both in how many shifts go to agencies at all and in the average rate of the shifts that do.
ShifTrak was built by operators to do exactly this — centralize shift posting, introduce competition, and give leadership real-time visibility into agency usage and spend.