A recruiter's first call is organised around finding out whether you are placeable. That is the job, and it is not a criticism — but it does mean the conversation is shaped by what they need to know, not by what will matter to you in week three.
These seven redress that. None is confrontational, all of them are ordinary, and a recruiter worth working with will answer every one without hesitating. Ask for the answers in writing: not because anyone is lying, but because a recruiter who leaves and hands your file to a colleague takes the verbal version with them.
1. “Which setting is this rate for?”
The highest-value question on the list, and the one most often skipped. The same weekly figure can be a fair rate in one setting and a poor one in another, because bill rates track how hard a specific vacancy is to cover rather than the discipline in the abstract.
A number without a setting attached is not yet information. Ask for the setting first, then judge the number — and for the underlying figures, the pay guide publishes medians by discipline with the contract count behind each one and the date they were computed, and medians by setting in its calculator.
2. “Split the package for me — hourly, housing, meals.”
A package quoted as one weekly number cannot be compared with another package quoted the same way, because the split between taxable wages and non-taxable reimbursement differs, and the split changes what the offer actually is.
You are not asking anyone to justify themselves. You are asking for the line items so you can compare gross to gross. A recruiter who resists this specific question has told you something useful.
3. “What are the guaranteed hours, and what happens if the facility cancels them?”
A weekly figure that assumes forty hours is a different offer if the guarantee is thirty-two. Caseloads move with census, particularly in skilled nursing, and the gap between “scheduled” and “guaranteed” is where a good-looking package quietly becomes an ordinary one.
Ask for the guarantee and the cancellation terms. They are two different answers and people often give only the first.
4. “What are the cancellation terms — on both sides?”
The asymmetry is the point. If the facility can end the contract on a week's notice and you cannot, you have found the risk you are actually carrying — and if you are taking a housing stipend rather than agency-placed housing, you are carrying the lease alongside it. The housing guide covers how that decision interacts with contract length.
5. “Who supervises me, and are they permanent staff?”
The single best predictor of how an assignment actually goes, and almost nobody asks it.
A building covering both the therapist and the assistant roles with travelers is a building whose schedule can come apart mid-contract. For an assistant it matters more still: your work depends on someone being there to evaluate and write the plan of care. This is a working-conditions question and it is entirely fair to ask.
6. “Is my licence or compact privilege in place for the start date?”
Ask for the date the privilege was issued, not the date it was applied for. Credentialing is the most common reason a start date slips, and it is the one part of an offer that genuinely cannot be negotiated — everything else can move; this cannot.
Worth knowing before you plan around a compact: a privilege is issued on top of an active home-state licence, and membership is a moving list where passing the legislation and issuing privileges are different events. The licensure guide tracks where each state currently stands.
7. “Who owns the agency, and who picks up the phone when something goes wrong?”
Two halves of one question, and the second half is the one that matters in month one.
Ownership is worth knowing — a therapist-owned agency means the person on the other end of a clinical question has worked a caseload — but it is worth being precise about what it does and does not change. It changes who understands you when the caseload is not what was described. It does not change the bill rate: a facility pays what the vacancy costs it regardless of who owns the agency, and anyone claiming otherwise is describing something else.
The second half is more practical. Ask what happens when your recruiter is on holiday, and who you call at 7am on a Monday when the building says it has no record of you. An agency that has thought about that has an answer ready.
The one thing you should volunteer
Everything above is you asking. This one you offer, unprompted, and it is the single most useful thing you can say on a first call.
Tell them which agencies already have your file, and never let two agencies submit you to the same facility. This is not a minor administrative tangle. A facility that receives the same profile from two agencies has to work out which one it is dealing with, and the cheapest thing it can do is set the file aside rather than adjudicate. That can cost you the opening — silently, because nobody comes back to explain why.
The practical version: keep your own list of which agency has submitted you where and when, and say “before you submit me, tell me the facility” on every profile. A recruiter who submits without naming the building is not being sly; they are working the way most people work. It is still your list, because you are the only person who can see all of them at once. Working with more than one recruiter is covered on the multiple recruiters page.
What a good answer sounds like
Two contrasts worth having in mind, because the difference is not tone.
“We've got great contracts in Texas right now” is an answer to a question nobody asked. “That one's outpatient, thirty-two guaranteed, and I'll send the split over” is three facts you can act on. The second is not friendlier — it is just specific, and specificity is the whole signal.
Similarly, “don't worry about credentialing, we handle all that” and “your privilege was issued on the fourteenth, here's the confirmation” are answers to the same question. Only one of them is checkable, and the checkable one is the one to plan a start date around.
What the answers are worth
Not one of these seven is a trick question, and none of them requires you to know anything technical. They work because they are specific: “do you have good contracts?” gets you a yes from everyone, and “what are the guaranteed hours and the cancellation terms?” gets you a number and a clause, or it gets you a pause you should pay attention to.
Take the answers in writing, keep them, and compare them across agencies rather than across conversations. Two recruiters describing the same contract will often describe it differently, and the written version is the one you can actually hold up side by side.
If you are weighing a first contract, the new grad guide covers the decisions that sit around these questions.