Venting- Pre-Employment Medication Test, plus so much more!

As if it wasn't hard enough for New Grads to get a job nowadays..

This morning I had an interview for a New Grad RN position at a local hospital. They told me in advance that there would be a short nursing exam before the interview that focused mostly on medication administration, etc. This is pretty standard for my area, so I was totally fine and felt ready for this. It can't be any harder than the NCLEX, right?

Hahaha, boy was I wrong.

It was way harder than the NCLEX (at least the 80 questions that I got on my NCLEX, anyways)! About 1/3 of the exam was just reading/interpreting/naming/giving all interventions for ECG's. And not just the easy ones like vfib, asystole, and sinus tach..i think every degree of heart block was on there, I could only recognize complete heart block and guessed on the others (and then there were some where the answer was to check lead placement b/c the rhythm was uninterpretable). And this position wasn't on a cardiac/tele/ICU unit either, and didn't require Tele experience or ACLS, so I was totally thrown for a loop on this! What the heck??