still unemployed and still frustrated!

shiny217 · Oct 6, 2009

as a RN, new grad, no job yet. very frustrating. I've got family to support and still no opening for a new grad in this area (Portland, Oregon)...please, hire me.

bodz01 · Oct 7, 2009

you are not alone. - San Diego, CA

mag_new · Oct 7, 2009

Me 4! same here. Fortunately I didn't quit my non-nursing job, I still have regular income coming in to pay all the bills. - North New Jersey

Blackheartednurse · Oct 7, 2009

Illinois grad here...graduated in May,send out hundred of applicatiojns like a desperate maniac and landed one interview but never received any job offer.

Sad new RN

It Didnt Come EasyRN · Oct 7, 2009

its hard to even say I'm a new grad becuase I too have been searching since 12/2008, and applying like crazy for a new grad RN positiion and nothing! The funny thing is when I get an interview or talk to people about how HARD it is for new nurses to get jobs they all look at me like im nuts....and they dont believe or agree with me. I keep getting oh no they are always looking for nurses. Really have you seen most hospital ads now that say Experienced Nurses only or when you call and ask if they hire new grads all I get is "Oh honey dont give up, but right now were only hiring experienced nurses".

medeo2009 · Oct 7, 2009

Hello! I am a new grad and I have been out of school for a few months. I have been actively searching for a LPN position- and when i say actively, I mean I am going out for 4 to 5 hours a day and am online every night looking through online ads and writing cover letters for the following day. I do this 5 days/7 nights a week. It is all so very frustrating and tiring and I am beginning to lose all hope. I have redone my resume and have had a few professionals look at it and they say it looks great. I want to say out of the prob 120 resumes i have sent out, online and walking into places, I have only had one call back which lead to an interview which lead to not hearing back for the position after a month(and yes I sent a handwritten thank you card immediatley afterwards- And yes, the lady said it looked good for me, but obviously it was looking better for soemoen else~!). I call back the places I walk into, some say if you meet the qualifications a manager will call YOU, others put you through to the persons VM- and they never call back and if i call them once more i may get a stalking charge lol. But all joking aside, someone please tell me what I am doing wrong or what I am missing? I would greatly appreciate it!

Try agencies! I think you will be lucky there!

MiaNJ · Oct 9, 2009

its hard to even say I'm a new grad becuase I too have been searching since 12/2008, and applying like crazy for a new grad RN positiion and nothing! The funny thing is when I get an interview or talk to people about how HARD it is for new nurses to get jobs they all look at me like im nuts.... [/b]

I get that alot too, and I can't stand it. It's mostly from people who are not in the nursing profession and know nothing about the nursing profession. Another one I hate is when people tell me 'But when I looked in monster.com, etc. there's SO MANY openings for nurses listed'...that one really kills me too. They don't know that there are so many types of nursing specialties and that not all jobs are for new grads or nurses with no specialty yet.

Check out this article below, from March. I copied it since it may not be viewed all the time w/o a subscription.

You can show it to people that look at you like you are nuts when you tell them you can't find a job. But they probably won't read it all. At least you can point out the part about how New York Presb. Hospital has over 300 openings, yet would rather not fill them with new grads, and just would rather keep them open since now they can choosy due to the recession and experienced nurses more available than before.

On a positive note, the article says this is only temporary, but who knows when it will end. There are also many new grads every year, and what will happen to the new grads who have been looking for a year or more? They will still have to compete with 'newer' grads.

......................................................................................................................

Nursing shortage eases ...

... but only while the recession lasts, experts warn

By Joe Carlson

Posted: May 18, 2009 - 5:59 am EDT

Not even the profound pressures exerted by a recession can alter the demographic force driving the national nursing shortage, namely the onset of old age.

Advertisement | Your Ad Here

While the graying of the nurse workforce and the American public in general continues apace, hospital administrators across the country say they have far more applicants for each nursing job than in the past. Executives are enjoying their newfound ability to porifice resumes and skill sets for the perfect candidate, but observers caution that it's a temporary luxury, given the demographic trends.

"That's the good news. It is a buyer's market," said Deborah Burton, chief nursing officer for Providence Health & Services, a 24-hospital system based in Seattle. "To those who don't take the long view in workforce planning, it looks like everything is better--when, in fact, nothing could be further from the truth."

The risk is that people like New Jersey nurse Rachel Lynn will stop believing the overheated promises regarding her job prospects and decide to change careers, which could undo some of the recent progress in addressing the nursing shortage. That could eventually leave the workforce even thinner than it was before the downturn.

Lynn is one of the hundreds of nurses who came out of an accelerated nursing education program this year and then found herself in an unexpectedly long and difficult job hunt. Unlike many of her peers, who she said have become disillusioned, Lynn eventually landed a nursing job at a facility she declined to name. But she did this only after she found herself taking odd jobs during a five-month application process.

"It was extremely difficult, because I would call hospitals and apply for open positions, and was told that positions were being filled by more experienced nurses who were returning to the workforce," Lynn said. "I was under the impression that there was a nursing shortage and ... that I would have the pick of jobs."

Such attitudes have left nursing groups scrambling for ways to publicize an awkward message to prospective nurses: Don't stop studying nursing, even though your peers who just graduated say they can't find the jobs. Or at least the jobs they wanted.

The American Association of Colleges of Nursing recently published a two-page list of talking points on the situation, urging advocates and policymakers to see past the current trends and focus on the scholarly research that projects a stunning 500,000 shortfall in nursing ranks by 2025 if current demographic patterns hold.

"This is a short-term trend on top of a long-term dynamic that really has no change in its fundamentals," said Carol Brewer, a professor of nursing at the University of Buffalo. "This shortage has gone on long enough that some good things have happened, and if some of those good things go away, that would be tragic."

The average age of a U.S. nurse is 47, and because more nurses retire than graduate each year, that age is only going up. Yet as baby boomers approach retirement, students are finding themselves rejected from nursing schools by the thousands because of a shortage of nursing faculty. Now those nurses who do manage to get into a school and graduate say they can't find jobs because the recession has caused droves of part-time nurses to go back to full-time work; more-experienced nurses to delay retirement; and laid-off nurses to apply for positions once reserved for newbies.

"Our vacancy rate is down, and so is our turnover rate, which is clearly a function of market-slowing. People aren't leaving their jobs," said Suzanne Boyle, vice president of nursing and patient care at New York-Presbyterian Hospital's Weill Cornell Medical Center campus in New York. "There is more stability in the current workforce now. So obviously you do fewer hires if your turnover is down and your vacancy is down."

Statistics released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics last week reported that in healthcare the so-called "quits rate" of workers who voluntarily left their jobs in March was 30% lower than the eight-year average for the month.

At Christus St. Patrick Hospital of Lake Charles in Louisiana, it was not uncommon for the 288-bed hospital to have 50 or more vacant full-time RN jobs after hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Today, only 12 RN jobs are open. "This is really great for us right now," said Shelly Welch, assistant administrator of human resources at the hospital. "We are able to be much more selective in our hiring process."

Five-campus New York-Presbyterian Hospital, the largest nongovernment employer in the nation's most populous city, could fill all of its 300 vacant RN positions tomorrow with new graduates, if that was the goal, because the waiting list has grown so long. But that's not the goal, Boyle said. Administrators can now afford to look for the right person for each position--a change from the days, not long ago, when hospitals had to accept the responsibility of letting applicants grow into more challenging positions.

"Sometimes maybe your standards were not exactly at the standards you wanted," said Jeff Wicklander, chief nursing officer at Allina Hospitals and Clinics' 449-bed United Hospital, St. Paul, Minn. "In this current environment you can be more selective."

Even when the right person does come along, it can be a challenge to hire them. Providence managed to hire the top graduate from this year's class at the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing, but Burton said the number of responses to a systemwide e-mail asking about interest in interviewing the candidate was abnormally low. "We got her about four interviews and we found a place for her. But in the past I would have had 60 e-mails asking to interview her," Burton said.

Academic researchers say the tightening in the market for nurses has ample precedent in past recessions, because nursing is a female-dominated profession in which salaries are considered secondary household incomes. In a downturn, many women temporarily re-enter the workforce to supplement or replace the primary income in the home--a process that can reverse itself quickly when the recession ends, Brewer said.

The recession has also changed retirement plans for many. Susan Hassmiller, the senior nursing adviser at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, said a colleague in a hospital human resources department recently recounted a situation in which she had nurses who were due to retire, and even had all of the paperwork filled out and signed so they could leave as soon as the time was right. "They were on their way out, and they wouldn't go," Hassmiller said.

The experienced nurses who are staying in the workforce are not only limiting job openings for new graduates, but they're taking the plum positions that green nurses once expected to be able to walk into: niche specialties such as critical care and pediatrics, said Linda Cape, a managing director with Huron Consulting.

That means many starting nurses who can get jobs end up on general med-surg floors--which is where they ought to be starting anyway, several administrators said. "Yes, it may not be the glory days when nurses could name their salary and could get a huge signing bonus. But things have sort of normalized a bit," said Cynthia Kinnas, president of the healthcare staffing division of Clinical One.

In other cases, newly educated nurses can't find openings at highly regarded or even middle-of-the-road facilities and wind up taking jobs in nursing homes or in home healthcare. Hassmiller said she's even advising some new nursing graduates to take volunteer positions at homeless shelters and Red Cross clinics just to show they've been doing something productive with their time. "I'm telling new graduates to hold tight," Hassmiller said. "This is a blip."

Hospitals should feel a responsibility right now to manage their workforces as assiduously as possible, Burton said. If declines in revenue and patient volume force layoffs, administrators ought to work cooperatively with other hospitals to make sure that every nurse who loses a job to downsizing has another position elsewhere. The recession is eventually going to end, she said, and the healthcare sector should do everything possible to hold onto the workforce it has.

"Those of us who have done this for a living understand that we need to get our head down and get through this and get ready for the other side," Burton said.

Kinnas of Clinical One said if she was a hospital administrator, she would be worried about the industry sending a message that recent economic conditions have solved the nursing shortage. "It's a dangerous message," she said. "Administrators who have been around for a long time will know that it always comes back with a vengeance."

http://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20090518/SUB/905159977

themilkspills · Nov 18, 2009

I feel exactly the same thing! I quit my Hospital job because of too much stress and low salary and now I'm working as a company nurse with a more relaxed environment and high pay but I'm missing the hospital setting! I want to work again in a hospital, STAT! I've been applying everywhere but nobody seems to be interested. :crying2:

colleenk63 · Nov 19, 2009

You need experience for agencies too. I have been having the same exact problem too, you are not alone. Massachusetts May 09 new grad

GLORN · Nov 19, 2009

I was in the same position. I'm a new grad as of May 2008!..not really new anymore. but as of december 2008 i had been looking too (once i passed the nclex) which put me in the same boat as everyone else. I JUST found a job. Part time nights in an area that's not exactly what i want, but we all have to start somewhere. That's just about a year of searching!

Ask around... anyone you know who works in a hospital etc and apply anywhere you can apply. I believe the position I applied for preferred experience but still apply anyway. Use any connection you can. I was referred by a friend who's not a nurse but works in the hospital, who emailed my resume which helped BIG time. I had been on a few interviews before that, one which i completely froze during! seriously froze and had no words. So stay confident! I didn't get that job but it wasn't meant to be i guess...because at this interview i was completely confident. So just keep looking, its frustrating and people look at you like your crazy and lazy even though you know you're not.and spread the word that the shortage doesn't include people without experience!

Little_Mouse · Nov 19, 2009

Thank you GLORN,

I needed to hear some words of encouragement and that there is light at the end of the tunnel.

It's been months of filling out applications, emailing, calling, yadda yadda the same old story with nothing to show for it.