Sign on bonuses

[asdf80]

hey there...I am a new nurse with some experience and have been recently job offered with a 10K sign on bonus plus relocation. This is a rural hospital but does sign on bonus usually mean there is something wrong with the hospital or do rural hospitals offer this usually. Any thoughts are appreciated..thanks!

[canesdukegirl, BSN, RN]

OP, I signed a contract for a sign on bonus with the hospital that I am currently employed. It is a large university, and they offered sign on bonuses to qualified nurses as a way of keeping turn over rates down, as a previous poster suggested.

A word of caution: one poster suggested to keep your first installment of the sign on bonus in a separate untouched account. This is sound advice. Recently, we hired an experienced nurse who was qualified for the sign on bonus. Our probationary period is 90 days. At the end of the probationary period, she was let go. That meant that she had to pay back her first installment of the sign on bonus.

I know that sometimes it sounds "too good to be true" when considering a sign on bonus. Just because a hospital is offering this does not mean that it is a horrible place to work; rather it means that the hospital would like to encourage nurses to stay put. One of my former managers told me that all in all, it takes $60,000 to train a nurse. I have no idea where she came up with that figure, but the message that I got from her comment was that it takes some serious cash to train a nurse before they can then fly on their own and become productive for the hospital. Offering a sign on bonus is peanuts compared to training several nurses who end up leaving the system before they can contribute autonomously to the hospital.