How TempStars Manages Hourly Rate Selector works

Please check out the video below to learn how we've taken steps to mitigate situations where hygienists or assistants were sometimes submitting offers for hourly rates that were far outside of the range of reasonable.   Below the video is a written explanation of this change, if you like reading more than videos:

Here's What Was Happening

When I launched TempStars, it was loosely based on free market principles:  Hygienists and assistants could submit offers for shifts at any rate, and it was up to the office to accept or decline the rate.  

This sounded good in theory - dental offices would decline any offers where the rate was too high or inappropriate, and that would in turn incentivize our hygienist and assistant members to submit offers at rates that were reasonable and acceptable.

And to be honest, that worked great for the most part.  The problem is, there was a small but distinct sub-segment of our membership that was submitting offers at hourly rates that were unreasonably high.  This was having a negative impact on our membership overall.  Offices were understandably feeling that they were being taken advantage of in difficult times. 

And despite the fact that TempStars hasn't been setting or influencing hourly rates at all (nor do we take a 'cut' of the hygienists' or assistants' pay), this was negatively affecting our reputation because there was the (luckily) occasional misperception that TempStars could be "ripping people off."

TempStars fee per completed shift is Intentionally Low

To be clear, our fee per completed shift is not related in any way to the hourly rate of the hygienists and assistants.  In fact, we purposely keep our fee per completed shift the lowest in the industry to allow offices a bit of extra wiggle room when considering hourly rate of the offering hygienists and assistants. 

Because you're not paying us an enormous fee per completed shift, we feel good that maybe those savings could be transferred to higher rates for our hygienist and assistant members.

This all sounds good in theory, and for the most part in practice it works!  But - as we grow it is becoming more clear that we have to introduce some 'guardrails' and influence the hourly rates of offers.

The Changes and What You'll See When Posting a Temping Shift

As of November 2020 with the release of update v3.5, we have introduced Proposed Rate to the temping shift posting flow.

The Proposed Rate allows dental offices to select their preferred rate for the shift at the time of posting.  The range of the Proposed Rate selector is based on actual accepted rates for your office's geographic area, and there is a "Recommended" rate for your area - again based on actual data of accepted reasonable rates for your area. 

We've completed 10's of thousands of temping shifts across Canada, so we have lots of data to work with!

How We're Guiding the Rates

Once your office selects the Proposed Rate and the shift is posted, this dictates the range the offering hygienist or assistant sees in the Rate Selector when they are sending in their offer.  There will still be a range for hygienists and assistants to select from, but it will be 'anchored' on your Proposed Rate.

There is also a "Recommended" rate in their selector.  In addition, the hourly rates are colour-coded to give visual indicators to the rates - Acceptable, A Bit High, and Out of Range. This provides a guidance so hygienists and assistants know the rates that are reasonable and most likely to be accepted for that shift.  In addition, we've capped off the top rate - so even with the Out of Range rates, they don't go as high as they previously did.

How This Will Help

By allowing offices to set the anchor point for the hourly rates, hygienists and assistants will have guidance and some restrictions as to the rates that are reasonable and mostly likely to be accepted by your office, while having 'hard stops' to prevent unreasonable and unrealistic rates from being submitted.

It's Always a Work in Progress - Thank You!

Thank you to everyone for your feedback and insights.  We are lucky enough to have many raving fans who love our service and are eager to help us help them.  Everything that is great about TempStars is a direct result of those that take the time to provide us the insights and feedback we need to keep our attention focused on the changes and improvements that matter.  And as with any update, we're going to be collecting feedback about our v3.5 release and meet as a team after ~6 weeks to discuss further changes we might make to improve it further.

Thank you for being a part of this journey and helping TempStars become and remain Canada's best dental temping and hiring service!

Kindest regards,
James Younger, DDS
Founder/CEO, TempStars