“A woman waited in the pediatric emergency room with her child for eight hours,” Travis Moore, DNP, RN, NEA-BC, reminisces.

The Nursing Beat's CEO, Tamara AL-Yassin, and COO, Raquél Pérez, recently sat down with Dr. Moore. He is now the Director of Category Management in Healthcare at Indeed, but this pediatric ER moment remains a pivotal part of his journey, he says.

The child had a fever, and the mother said, “We just need a prescription for Tylenol.” Moore, an ER nurse at the time, was floored. “Why did you wait in the ER for eight hours instead of buying some Tylenol over the counter?” Moore inquired. “I know the Tylenol is just $3 at the store. But now that’s $3 I can use to feed my kids,” the mother responded.

It was the epiphany Moore needed to leave the ER. “I needed to go upstream,” Moore says. Primary care, prevention, and sustainability are also healthcare emergencies, ones that Moore still attends to regularly at his job with Indeed.  

Indeed and TNB have teamed up for Nurses Month to highlight their program for healthcare workers: Careers In Care. Read on to see how Travis is playing a pivotal role in this resource for nurses, and how his career journey led him to become the first nurse hired at Indeed.

Where did your nursing journey begin?

My healthcare path started young. At 14, I was a cadet with my local rescue squad, inspired by my aunt, an ER nurse and EMT, and my uncle, a firefighter and police officer. By 16, I was an EMT; at 18, an ER tech at a trauma center. Eventually, I became a paramedic, which led to ER nursing.  

After leaving ER nursing, I went to primary care. At the same time, I pursued my doctorate in nursing at the University of Minnesota, specializing in health innovation and leadership. Later, I launched a home care startup and worked in consulting to fix broken systems—until the corporate grind burned me out.

During COVID, I went back to patient care at a COVID vaccine and testing clinic. That revived me. It inspired me to help change healthcare for the better, and is ultimately what led me to Indeed.  

How did you get your position as Indeed’s first nurse?

I got my job at Indeed through networking. I was curious about what other opportunities exist, and what other people with similar backgrounds are doing. Then I was cold calling, reaching out, going to networking events, and asking for coffee chats or Zoom calls.

I developed a robust network, and I met someone who was in consulting at the time to learn about her role and company. Years later, she was working at Indeed and reached out to connect me with the hiring team for this opportunity, remembering my background and thinking I would be a good fit for the team. Despite being completely burned out from the corporate world, I heard the manager out and ultimately took the job! Thankfully, the environment here at Indeed has been much more positive than my other corporate experiences.

Now, I'm the director of Category Management in Healthcare. I was the first nurse hired at Indeed.  

What are you working on at Indeed right now?

Similar to the ER, I do a lot of context changing day-to-day.

I may start my morning working with our user experience team, then move into working on a data collection project, and then might move onto a media interview.

This upcoming month, we’re launching our Nurses Month campaign. This year, we have a big focus on sustainability.

• How can we make healthcare jobs more sustainable?
• What does a sustainable environment look like?
• How do we help employers create an environment where sustainability is an option?

We’re also asking a lot of questions about what the lifecycle is for a healthcare job seeker, like when they enter into healthcare, how long they stay at a healthcare job, and when and why they leave. We’re asking, “What did people do before healthcare? How can we strengthen the pipeline that leads people into healthcare?”

What is your career advice to nurses?

I have several pieces of career advice for nurses.

• Accept you may not know all the parameters of a job. When I started at Indeed, I essentially wrote my own job description. I built my role from the ground up, and sometimes there is ambiguity that exists in the workplace.

• The best ability is availability. Be available and be willing to show up and have a “why not me?” mentality. Get involved in the nursing community. If you have a great idea, why not pursue it? You have the ability to make change. Write that article on LinkedIn. Join the Nurse Practice Council. Post content on social media. Advocate for what you care about. Just start.

• Consider yourself an innovator. Nurses are the best innovators. The simple principles of ADPIE that we learned in nursing school can apply to so many other things, like new policies or processes or innovations. Every day at the bedside, you are probably innovating in some way. Even when you tape tongue blades to the side of a bed to organize your IV pumps, that’s innovating.

What would you say to all the nurses who plan to leave healthcare?

I would say I’m sorry the system has failed them.

I think we’ve really over-indexed on process and systematizing healthcare. Using frameworks like Lean Six Sigma and using tools built for other industries, but many of those industries don’t interact with people. Building a car, flying a plane…that’s not a people-centric experience. Bringing this into healthcare has had some benefits, but I think it has also made healthcare into an algorithm and a process. It’s less human. The hospital is now structured for volume and flow and triage, rather than the human experience of receiving healthcare.

Clinicians are compassionate and empathetic, and we need to make a sustainable career so they don’t want to leave mere years later. And that's why my focus at Indeed right now is on sustainability.

Healthcare workers are in an environment that's not sustainable. As a first step, we need to acknowledge that sometimes healthcare can be a tough work environment, and that we need to band together to solve the problem. We’re letting the system get in the way. And if we walk away, the system wins. So we have to figure out how to make the system better.

What is Indeed doing to alleviate a stressful job search market?

At Indeed, we’re working to create resources for prospective and current clinicians.

• Career guide articles for how to get into healthcare
• Day in the life content from healthcare professionals
• Interview advice
• Events geared towards informing and celebrating healthcare professionals
• Partnership with Glassdoor, so you are armed with information about the culture and workplace of your prospective employer

You work hard to care for our communities—and you should feel cared for, too. Indeed is here to provide personalized support and job search guidance that empowers healthcare workers as they navigate their careers.

Final thoughts

Moore’s nursing journey shows that purpose doesn’t end at the bedside—it evolves. Whether innovating inside the ER or advocating for sustainable change through Indeed, he’s proving that nursing can lead anywhere people need care. And wherever he goes, he’s still a nurse—just one scaling his impact.

For nurses who know ADPIE isn’t just for the bedside; It’s a mindset. Subscribe to The Nursing Beat.

*Article sponsored by Indeed