Reading through a bunch of new grad threads resulted in a few common ideas the most important in my opinion is the catch-22 idea that " we want to hire a nurse with experience, but no one is willing to give a new grad their shot at building acute care experience". This has caused a lot of frustrations with new grads trying to land their first gig. I know there are other issues at hand but I chose to focus on this one.
The section "The Hiring Facilities" states that " Recruiting abroad may also be less costly than raising salaries, increasing benefits, and providing other economic incentives needed to retain domestic nurses". This leads me to believe that taking a pay cut as a New Grad RN would be actually beneficial. Before you tear me head off let me explain about my crazy theory.
Let us pretend the domestic RN gets paid $30.00 an hour. Whereas the foreign import gets paid $25.00 an hour. Let us also pretend everything else is equal benefits, experience, skill, professionalism, and so on. In the eyes of HR the edge between the two applicants would be with the foreign nurse. Based on simple cost effectiveness, you get the same work for less. The new grad would be locked out of the position and the foreign nurse would save th hospital a lot of money over time.
The Domestic new grad wont have their shot at building experience because they have been undercut. What about... now are you ready.... the domestic nurse takes a pay cut as well to even out the playing field, remove the edge from their competition. Now don't go off yelling yet give me a second, there is a method to my madness. You take a pay cut to make you more marketable, then you get that position, where you now have the chance to build that ever coveted new grad dream of their first "acute care job". Let us fast forward into the future let us say one year, i know it's not much time but just humor me.
You know apply for a position at another hospital and once again there are those new grads that just recently graduated. Let us also pretend the RNs with 15 years of experience didn't apply. It is you versus the new grads, but now you have an edge, now you have that time spent in acute care learning rather than been unemployed for months at a time. Now you don't have to take a pay cut, you have experience on your side.
Based on the model above does it make sense at all to take that initial hit in order to gain some experience? Or would it be better to apply and spend months unemployed?
I realize the model is simple, just wanted to see how everyone felt before other factors come into play.
