The Claim of Nursing Shortage or is there apathy when hiring new nurses?

[onyxbarry]

Today I went to a job fair advertised by a hospital in Florida. The ad says come with your resume because there may be on the spot interviews. I got there because I wanted to prepare my way, I am graduating this August. Once I got there it was not a job fair it was a factory job interview, you sat and waited, as the next person got up, you had to slide over to the empty seat. When my turn came up, I went up to one of the HR representatives and I told her I was a student nurse soon graduating and she asked why did I come? I replied that I wanted to experience the job fair, connect with people etc. She did not even look at my portfolio in her hand, which I printed on fine linen paper, she just looked at my area of interest and said to me you do not have experience for that position anyways. In actuality, I have many years of experience in the field of maternal health, because I happen to be a licensed midwife that is going back to school to become a nurse and then a certified nurse midwife. If she would have taken the time to read my resume she would have realized my worth. I came home to actually think about how our intro to nursing, health policy, community and leadership classes highlight the shortage and demand for nurses...I can't help to ponder if there are more than qualified, although new, nurses that have just graduated that can be taught in any area of nursing but are turned down by HR. I shake my head and hope we can do something about this at a grand scale.

[hope3456, ASN, RN]

Welcome to Allnurses. You will find that many new nurses (and not so new) have experienced the same type of situation. Too many new graduates and not enough facilities willing to train them.

[HouTx, BSN, MSN, EdD]

If you take the time to search around here on AN, you will discover that the "shortage" is pretty much a myth - perpetuated by media hype in conjunction with schools trying to increase enrollments. In most areas of the US, there is a huge over-supply of new grads and in many areas, hospitals are only hiring BSN grads. Overall, all types of hospital jobs are disappearing as inpatient census declines. On top of that, shrinking reimbursement is triggering much higher workloads (doing more with less) to cope with the loss of revenue. It's not a rosy picture.

I'm sorry your experience with the nurse recruiter was so bad. There is no excuse for rudeness. But it would seem that your school is not in touch with reality - they are clueless about what is happening in our industry.