We were already pretty excited to have Carrie Ellis representing Windsor at TalentTrack 2026 in Omaha. Then they gave her a microphone.
Carrie joined fellow healthcare staffing leaders for one of the conference’s main-stage discussions:
“Small but Mighty: What Big Agencies Can Learn From the Underdogs.”
And as a growing independent healthcare staffing company ourselves, it was a conversation that felt very close to home.
Does bigger always mean better?
That was really the question at the heart of the discussion.
The panel explored how smaller healthcare staffing agencies can compete in a market dominated by much larger organizations — and why being smaller can sometimes be an advantage rather than something to overcome.
Faster decisions. Fewer layers. Closer relationships. Greater agility. And the ability to stay genuinely connected to the clinicians and clients you work with.
There was also an interesting discussion around the future of recruitment itself.
With technology and AI making it easier than ever to send more messages to more people, the panel challenged whether more activity necessarily creates better recruitment.
One of the themes that emerged was refreshingly simple:
Trust still matters.
Recruiters don’t all have to work in exactly the same way. Technology should support relationships rather than replace them, and sometimes providing value to a clinician without immediately trying to sell them a job can build a far stronger relationship in the long run.
That sounds a lot like the kind of healthcare staffing company we’re trying to build at Windsor.
Growing without losing what makes you different
Perhaps the most relevant conversation for us was around growth.
Being small can mean being closer to what’s happening. Leaders know their recruiters. Recruiters know their clinicians. Feedback travels quickly and problems can often be solved without layers of process.
But growth also brings challenges.
The panel discussed the importance of creating the right processes, sharing knowledge and building support around great people so that, as an organization grows, it doesn’t become dependent on a handful of individuals doing everything.
That’s a particularly important lesson for any growing business.
The ambition isn’t simply to get bigger. It’s to grow without losing the things that made people want to work with you in the first place.
And we think that’s worth remembering.
Nice work, Carrie.
We’re incredibly proud to have had Carrie representing Windsor on the TalentTrack stage and contributing to a conversation about where healthcare staffing goes next.
Thank you to the TalentTrack team for inviting her to be part of it — and to Carrie’s fellow panelists for such an open and interesting discussion.
If you’d like to hear the whole conversation, the complete 30-minute Small But Mighty session is now available to listen to online.
Small but mighty? We can live with that.
