Calling facility for interview

[ERjunkie38]

Has anybody ever had your recruiter tell you to call the nurse manager at a hospital you were submitted to in order to get an interview??? One of the recruiters I am working with just told me I needed to call the hospital and ask for the NM, let them know I'm a traveler and I have been submitted for a position there. I guess the point is to try to make myself stand out and hopefully land interview right there? Maybe I'm wrong, but that seems incredibly pushy and seems to me would make me look bad to the facility. Has anyone else ever been asked to do this? Advice needed please....just doesn't feel right.

[globetrotterRN]

I can prob guess the agency you are working with! When I started I was living overseas so I was calling the facilities bc my recruiter said the hospitals couldn't/wouldn't call internationally... I never managed to get a hold of anyone and when my recruiter stopped calling/emailing back I changed companies. I came back to them as I had a specific city I wanted and they had openings, I told my new recruiter there I didn't like having to call the hospitals and she said that was fine. In the end I had to call 2 places, the first one called back and the 2nd one interviewed me hired me 'on the spot' (I ended up turning down the offer after be lowballed). My recruiter then gave me more hospitals to call - I told her it wasn't my job to do that, and guess what... never heard from her again.

The agency I worked for, and the one I'm dealing with now do the calling. I asked my old recruiter about calling a facility myself once bc I was travelling OS and had limited access to phones/skype and he said that that's not how it works, that they would call me if/when they wanted to.

So long story short - If the facility has provided the contact info, it does work, but in my opinion calling the managers and selling your profile is the recruiter's job!

[NedRN]

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. This request is not uncommon and has to do with the very poor communications between agencies, hospital human resources, and the managers. Recruiters don't usually have direct communication with managers. Of course travelers are not supposed to call either, but properly handled, it may even help out the manager with a guided sale (many people hate making decisions).

I know of many cases where travelers, myself included, have won assignments by being aggressive. I also lost one supposedly with HR telling my agency they still needed a traveler, but not me because I had called them. But look, I wouldn't have gotten the assignment anyway - it had been over two weeks without an interview. Their anger was probably make-belive and they were the ones who dropped the ball. But who cares if you look bad to a hospital that you are not going to anyway? It is only the agency that takes the brunt of any hospital anger, and since they are the ones suggesting it, you figure it out!

I have a good friend who had been submitted a few days before to the ER in Napa and had not been called. He was local and walked into the ER and asked for the manager. Hired! This was in the 2009 when things were bad for travelers. The manager walked him into the office and dug through a pile of profiles and of course his was on the bottom. If he hadn't walked in, the manager would have never even seen his profile. All the other 20 plus submitted travelers lost out.

Do what you like of course. If the assignment is not that great and you have better options, blow it off.

There is one use case in which you have a right to be angry about such an agency request. That is when they are using your profile to market their agency to a new hospital. No hospital contract means it is very unlikely that you will get the assignment in a timely fashion if at all. The downside is that if your agency doesn't tell you what they are doing, you could be waiting for an interview and miss a couple weeks work for no reason at all. But if the agency tells you that is the situation, fair enough.

[ERjunkie38]

Thanks for the feedback and advice. Much appreciated. I had just never heard of this. Area for job is great. Pay is so so. Will call tomorrow and try to speak with NM.

Thanks again!