Wondering why you can't get hired or promoted: Resume + Interview hints!
I've been reviewing resumes in my department and can't believe the resumes I've received: misspelling, words crossed off, no cover letter, including personal information about family life. Read to learn "Why am I not getting hired?!"
I was taught in LPN and BSN program how to prepare a resume. Is this a lost art being skipped??
Also agree with our BB members that calling facility and finding out who is department manager, then forwarding your resume to them along with hr is great idea.
I work in smaller organization than hospital but has taken me over two months to get open positions advertised and three weeks to get resumes sent to me...those that sent to me directly have interview same week.
Resume Writing
Resume writing and interview tips for nurses from Univ. of Pennsylvania:
If I called a member of your current staff and asked them to tell me about you, what would they say?
What actions would you take if you came on board?
How do you lead?
What's your secret to getting subordinates to follow you?
How do you motivate employees?
How do you reward employees?
Describe your management philosophy and management style.
Some managers supervise their employees closely, while others use a loose rein. How do you manage?
How have you improved as a manager over the years?
How many people have you fired? how do you go about it?
How would you deal with an employee who broke a policy (ie: late for work)?
How would you deal with an employee who was not open and honest in communication?
It is very hard to attract (critical care, er, or, ob etc.) nurses to this area. What are some strategies you might use to have enough qualified nurses to be sure patients get quality care in the facility?
What single professional event made you most proud to be a manager/leader?
What event made you least proud to be a leader?
In prior positions did you have budgeting responsibilities? If so, what was the size of your operating budget?
Do you know how to figure fte's?
What is your definition of empowerment?
What is your definition of quality assurance (QA), and who should be responsible, for QA?
Tell me about a time when your manager made a decision you disagreed with. What actions did you take and why?
Tell me about a time when you had to handle a disruptive employee. what did you do? what were the results?
Tell me about a time when you had to deal with an irate physician, patient, employee etc. how did you handle it and what was the result?
How have you managed to foster a successful team in your past positions?
What methods have you found successful in determining the priorities when you start in a new facility?
What methods do you use to foster open communication with staff and management?
Tell me about a work incident when you were totally honest, despite a potential risk or downside for the honesty.
How did you handle a recent situation where the direction from above was unclear and circumstances were changing?
Describe how you motivated a group of people to do something they did not want to do.
Who is your most effective subordinate and your least effective subordinate?
What are the strengths and weaknesses of each? What have you done to develop each of these subordinates?
Tell me about some of the people who have become successful as a result of your management. What was your role in their development?
What are the major training and development needs of the people in your department? How did you identify them? What are you doing about them?
Are there any techniques you have found useful in identifying particular subordinates' needs and potentials? Tell me how they worked with a particular person.
What do you do differently than other managers? Why? Examples?
What is the farthest you've had to bend your standards in order to succeed?
What job duties would you like to avoid if at all possible?
Describe a time in which you weighed the pros and cons of a situation and decided not to take action, even though you were under pressure to do so.
All of us have been in situations where we assigned work to other people and they didn't do what we intended. Can you tell me about some of those? What were the circumstances and how did you handle it?
Have you ever had problems in getting your subordinates to accept your ideas or department goals? What approach did you use? How effective was it?
Have you ever needed cooperation from groups that did not report to you? What did you do to gain cooperation? What were the satisfactions and disappointments?
Is there a trait or characteristic about you that you find is frequently misunderstood, that surprises you when you find out that people think that about you?
What 3 things do you hope to accomplish in your first year?
What do you expect of those who report to you? If candidate responds with a one word answer (for example saying, "support" you can probe further by asking the candidate to describe three behaviors that she/he would view as being supportive.
If you had an unfavorable plan (I.e., budget) to implement, what would you do to get the managers' buy in and support?
With the current nursing shortage, what are two solutions you would like to see put in place?
What kind of support do you offer managers, directors and front-line staff, knowing the stress of the nursing shortage and the increasing acuity of our patients?
Tell us about a high level innovative idea/change that you implemented. Was it or was it not successful?
Questions to ask the employer:
What unique challenges has this unit faced over the last year? (I.e. successes, failures, etc.)
What sets this organization apart from it's competitors?
How long is the orientation phase and what can I expect?
Will I work with one preceptor throughout or will I have several different preceptors?
How does the administration view nursing in terms of importance to the hospital?
How much independence do nurses have in being creative problem-solvers?
What kind of professional advancement is available to nurses here?
What are some of the attributes of working for your hospital?
If I were to get a job offer from another hospital, why would I want to work for this one?
What is the criterion you will use to select the person you are looking for?
What kind of support can I expect from the nursing educators and preceptors?
How does the hospital handle new grads that might be slow in becoming oriented to their new jobs?
How long have you been the manager of this unit and what is your nursing background?
How many nurses have quit and how many hired for this unit in the past 6 months? How long have some of the nurses been working on this unit?
Who will be precepting me? Can you tell me something about them? Will I always have the same preceptor or will there be more than one?
Have you ever had a new grad who didn't seem to work out? How was it handled?
If for any reason it seems that orientation is just not going well for me what will happen and who should I talk to about it?
Questions about the following are illegal to ask at a job interview here in the US:
your personal life (married, divorced, children)
family planning
pregnancy
provision for child care
religious preference
club memberships
height
weight
dependents
age (birth date)
ethnic background
maiden name
native language
physical problems
psychiatric problems
spouse's employment and/or earnings
credit rating
home ownership
automobile ownership
Resigning from position
Check your facilities policy and procedures--most require that you give notice equal to amount of vacation provided, often 2-3 weeks; long term employed rns can be 4-5weeks.
Managers often need 1-3 months notice to be eligible for rehire -- Don't burn your bridges.
As a long time employer, I will tell you that resumes for anyone other than middle to c-level management is a waste of time. Most hospitals/ health care related businesses use an applicant tracking system which produces numerous statistics useful to future recruitment and retention efforts. Thats why they want the info presented to them in a certain way, ie their application forms. A good resume' will not help if the setting you are applying to does not have an approved open position for which your background specifically fits. If they have certain criteria, but have not advertised that criteria, that would be the explanation for non-responsiveness.
Specializes in Critical Care, Cardiothoracics, VADs.
Anyone have experience with hiring foreign-educated nurses? What concerns do you try to resolve at interview?
I have a telephone interview at a large teaching hospital coming up, for a Clinical Transplant Coordinator position. I am happy with the interview process and clinical/professional Q&A, but I am not sure what to research in terms of being an international nurse.
Any tips appreciated.
Edit: Had the interview, no questions about job experience or education as they were confident I'd be a good fit, only worried about what sort of timeframe I could get there and legally work within. Glad I did so much research on allnurses beforehand so I knew the ins and outs of the process.
Thanks for your quick response, but they seem to love my resume. I get a call for everyone I send out. I plan to come back to this site to do some research, but I don't think this is the problem. Would you be interested in seeing it? Please send me a private reply and I will gladly send it to you.
This thread has been very helpful to me, but since I am actively looking for a new position, I have a few questions. I have a resume, but I consider it very run of the mill. I have only worked LTC and the ones I have worked in, did little more than glance at my resume.
I KNOW I do a lot in a day and wear many different hats, but I have trouble getting it down on paper.
Also, I want to apply for a totally different type of nursing. How do I get them to look at my resume without experience?
Wow. I had no idea nurses would do that. I wrote mine with important points of what I had done and achieved at each job. I tried to make it stand out. I have gotten alot of positive responses. When I write a cover letter I stick to my experience.
I'll be graduating this May and am having a very difficult time finding a job. Granted, I'm narrowing my search to large teaching hospitals, because I want to spend the next several years learning as much as I can while I am rather young, so that I am not struggling with the learning curve once I have a family. However it seems like Chicago hospitals are just completely overwhelmed with new graduate applications. I've been on two interviews, but I keep hearing things like "we are interviewing about 200 people for 40 positions" or "we are interviewing 25 people for 2 positions." It also seems like there are a million jobs out there for experienced nurses, but very very few for new grad nurses. My interviews have gone well, and I have a ton of experience out in the suburbs and am involved in all kinds of leadership at my school, but still, no job offers yet. I'm looking for some encouragement here, as I'm feeling rather discouraged after what has turned into months of job hunting.
I was wondering what the typical length of a nurse's resume should be?
Thanks
The TYPICAL length of a resume, no matter the profession, is two pages, although I have seen them go from 1-3 depending upon the person. I've seen well thought out one page resumes from people with 20+ years of experience to very nice three page resumes from college graduates.
The real page length rule is: it depends.
A resume is an introduction for the interviewer as to your general skills and employment history. Period. It was never meant to be your life story. This is why you are called into an actual interview, where the interviewer will "flesh out" the rest of your emploment history and skill set.
From where I've been sitting the last 25 years, Karen, this art died of an internal hemorrhage.
Kids these days can't fill out the basic job application...most can't even spell resume, much less follow the rules and format.
Mike
Excuse me? I'm guessing that the person posting this statement doesn't know much about what it takes to get in to nursing school or to get through nursing school these days. After all, technologies have advanced in every medical field out there in the last 25 years, and today's nursing students have been extensively educated with knowledge that did not even exist 25 years ago. The sheer volume of knowledge that nursing students today must absorb about every single field of nursing is outrageous and constantly growing at exorbitant rates. With NCLEX continuing to raise their standards for what it takes to become a nurse, insisting that today's new grads have a strong grasp of all of these new technologies in every field of nursing (knowledge that most current nurses do not know of), the new grad nurses that are starting jobs this year and in the past few years are many of the best educated new graduate nurses to ever hit the job market.
On top of this fact, the extensive competition to get in to nursing school is also ensuring that only the best and the brightest actually become nurses. I know in my graduating class, approximately 60% of my fellow students and I already have at least a Bachelor's degree in another field, and some are even lawyers and engineers coming back to begin new careers. Furthermore, today students must take the NLN Nursing Entrance Exam (similar to the ACT or SAT), and their scores determine their eligibility for the program. In my program, the students who make it in to our program typically score in the 80th percentile (nationally) or above.
So clearly, the new graduate nurses hitting today's job market are some of this generation's best and brightest. They are far more educated in both most fields of nursing and many fields outside of nursing than most nurses of the previous generation were. So to state that today's new graduate nurses, or "kids" as you call them, cannot even fill out a simple job application is grossly inappropriate. A more accurate statement might be that many nurses from older generations cannot understand how to work a computer well enough to fill out the electronic job applications that most hospitals require now.
Today's new graduate nurses are extremely bright and well educated. They have the education, and now they are looking for the experience. We hope that nurses of previous generations will welcome us into the profession and orient us well so that we can continue the tradition of delivering quality nursing care.
This is a job board to help new graduate nurses get hired in what is becoming an increasingly competitive job market. While there are countless openings in the job market for experienced nurses, the number of openings for new graduates is extremely limited, and these new graduates are simply trying to get the experience so that they can become adept and experienced nurses.
jsteine1
325 Posts
As a long time employer, I will tell you that resumes for anyone other than middle to c-level management is a waste of time. Most hospitals/ health care related businesses use an applicant tracking system which produces numerous statistics useful to future recruitment and retention efforts. Thats why they want the info presented to them in a certain way, ie their application forms. A good resume' will not help if the setting you are applying to does not have an approved open position for which your background specifically fits. If they have certain criteria, but have not advertised that criteria, that would be the explanation for non-responsiveness.