I am informally polling my peers to find out the general recruitment practices and attitudes in your area. I will also discuss briefly my own experience here in Las Vegas.
Nevada has the fewest nurses per 100,000 population of any state in the country - due in large part to the booming growth in Las Vegas. The city's population is growing at the rate of 6,000 residents per month, and it grew by 83% between the 1990 and 2000 censuses. We now have over 1.5 million permanent residents, plus 200,000-300,000 tourists at any given time.
In theory, this should translate to a large numbers of medical jobs available. In practice, jobs are proving elusive despite the fact that almost every hospital here has an expansion project underway. Applications are met with apparent ambivalence, and there are few followup contacts by employers. It is almost a necessity to work a place from the inside in order to get hired, which you cannot do unless you know someone there. My experience has been that the nursing shortage here is partially self-inflicted.
My wife and I are both nurses, and we have both struggled to find work in an area of severe nursing shortage. Nursing friends of ours have reported similar experiences. Employers in Las Vegas seem indifferent, do not follow up on applications for months (and sometimes not at all), and will not hire someone who does not have the exact background they are looking for. I worked in mental health and was thrown out of work when my hospital's parent company closed my facility. I drew unemployment for three months, because no hospital would even talk to me. At the time, I had five years of nursing experience, all in a supervisory capacity, and a national certification.
Is our experience typical, or is this peculiar to our market?
