Negotiating salary for ED

When moving to a new area, negotiating your salary is a huge mystery to me. Is there much room for negotiations, or is it clearly a "you're an RN with 3 years experience, we can only pay you X." Are there pay considerations for extra credentials, such as TNCC, ACLS, PALS, etc.? Just something I'd like to know for when I move on. Thanks!

This is a very complicated question! Everything in life is basically negotiable. Having said that, here are some of the issues associated with Salary administration:

1. The bigger the corporation owning the hospital LTC or whatever setting you wish to negotiate with, the more likely they have well defined salary ranges for each of the positions they employ and local management will not have the authority to exceed the established ranges.

2. Smaller, privately held organisations are more flexible, but have less cash to work with. Catch 22!

3. Timing is everything. If they have a lot of open positions and have had them for a long period of time, you are likely to be able to negotiate to the upper part of the range. If they use a lot of agency nurses, their # 1 priority is to replace agency with staff, so you have bargaining power there.

4. Organisations Should pay more for experience, but often that is ill defined and the supply demand factor will prevail. See # 3

5. Do as much homework as you can: Look for ads this future employer may have run recently in newspapers, journals or on web sites such as careerbuilder. You might see some references to pay rates. Compare them to other settings in the same area. Are they on a par, lower or higher?

6. Try to "mystery shop" a little. Call HR and ask what the payranges are for a new grad. Call the next day and ask the same question, but for an RN with 3 yrs experience. They might play and answer your question, they might not due to their policies.

7. Pay differentials for credentials differs from employer to employer. You just have to ask about it.

8. Pay levels differ so much geographically due to wage and labor indexes and cost of living factors. This ties in directly, incidentally, to how facilities get reimbursed for their services from private insurors and gov't insurances.

If you move from a rural area in the South to New york City, it will appear that you are getting a huge jump in pay. However, in NYC, a one bedroom apartment in a relatively safe area will run over 2500/month. You havent gained anything!

Go to monster.com and click on their relocation wizards. It will give you an idea in an apples to apples comparison of the difference in wages in any city in the country as compared to where you now live.

I think a lot of hospitals are achieving magnet status and one of the requirements is they have a clinical ladder program in place that rewards different certifications, education levels, years of experience, mentoring efforts,etc.