Recession means new nurses have a hard time landing hospital jobs
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Fresh out of nursing school, Robyn Laferriere, of Northampton, dove straight into the want ads.
Searching for a job in a hospital, Laferriere answered newspaper and Internet ads, sent her resume to area hospitals and visited online career centers.
At one point, in response to a job posting, she spent 45 minutes on the phone with a Baystate Health Systems recruiter. The conversation initially seemed promising.
But by the end the recruiter could offer her no more than tips on how to get a nursing job and what she should do in her first year as a registered nurse.
Just a few years ago headlines proclaimed a nursing shortage, but now, because of the recession, nursing graduates who expected to find a good job before graduation are dealing with disappointment.
"It used to be that nurses got job offers in February or March during their final year of school, three months before we got our license," said Laferriere, who graduated from Greenfield Community College's nursing program more than two months ago. Unable to find full-time nursing work, she has taken non-hospital jobs. She is an on-call, long-term care nurse at Buckley Healthcare Center, a nursing home in Greenfield. She also works in Northampton as a massage therapist.
The demand for nurses was high until the recession hit. There were 5,303 vacant nursing jobs in Massachusetts right before when the recession officially started - the fourth quarter of 2007 (October-December) - according to the Massachusetts Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development.
But by the fourth quarter of 2009, the most recent information available, that number had been cut nearly in half to 2,769 vacant nursing positions in the state.
In June, 270 health care workers living in Hampshire and Franklin counties were receiving unemployment benefits,the most recent information according to the EOLWD. Health care workers make up 12.1 percent of all unemployed people in the two counties. Statewide, health care is the fourth-largest industry in terms of unemployment claims.
Blame it on the recession. Older nurses are delaying retirement to weather the economic downturn, keeping newly graduated nurses out of jobs, said Sharon Gale, executive director of the Massachusetts Organization of Nurse Executives.
There's also a decrease in patient volume ##- brought on by cash-strapped people skipping routine physicals and preventive exams - and a seven-year decline in nursing vacancies, which are budgeted positions that go unfilled. All of these are shrinking the pool of available nursing positions.
Gale says hospitals need to find ways for new nurses to land jobs in their field. It is important for hospitals to have nurses of diverse ages. Otherwise, hospitals run the risk of having older staffs retire in quick succession leaving the hospital unable to fill positions, since younger nurses had to seek work elsewhere.
"The influx of new nurses is great, except that we need to find jobs for them so we can maintain them in the profession," Gale said.
Tight market
Until the economy improves, Gale recommends that new graduates look beyond hospitals. "You may not be able to get a job in acute care as you expected," she said.
However, one field is hiring: long-term care. Long term care is given to patients who need care beyond what a hospital regularly provides, although some hospitals do have long-term care nurses. Long-term care patients may not be acutely ill, says Gale, but have chronic illnesses that need extended treatment. Hospitals, assisted living facilities, and nursing homes employ long-term care nurses.
This field, not acute hospital care, has vacancies, said Cooley Dickinson Hospital's chief nursing officer, Leesa-Lee Keith.
"Yes, the job market is tighter; however, the best way a new grad can get a job is to look across the entire health care continuum," Keith said.
As is the case in other industries, Keith said, older nurses at CDH are delaying retirement. To make room for recent graduates, this year the hospital is offeringan early retirement program. "We're trying to balance seasoned nurses with keeping open the pipeline to let new nurses in," Keith said.
But she added that the hospital doesn't want an exodus of experienced staff, who train and mentor younger nurses. "We're trying to create an environment that transfers knowledge," Keith said.
The job hunt
Laferriere isn't the only nursing program graduate feeling the sting of the tight job market.
Staci Miner, who also graduated from GCC this spring, submitted between 30 and 40 applications, mostly online. Some applications targeted different jobs at the same facility.
Miner says she thought she had the skills to land a job quickly. She had learned the basics at GCC, like how to administer injections, and advanced techniques as well, like therapeutic communications. For the volunteer portion of her training, Miner assisted the school nurse at the Four Rivers Charter School in Greenfield. She took students' blood pressure, gave eye and ear exams, and checked for scoliosis. "I helped the school nurse get all her screenings done," she said.
But Miner echoed Laferriere's evaluation of the job market: "It used to be that hospitals would actively seek you. These days it's the complete opposite," Miner said.
"I'm at the point where I should be pushy, but I'm very uncomfortable with that," she said. "There aren't enough jobs to go around."
While she waits for a job offer, Miner works as a service representative at Yankee Candle. The full-time job helped support Miner during her school years. While she appreciates the job's flexibility, nursing is her passion. "Nursing is what I'm here to do," she said.
Karin McDonald, another GCC graduate, started her job search in January. Employers asked her to wait until she graduated before applying for nursing positions. "There was a lot of Come see us when you're finished,' " she said.
McDonald sent out 62 resumes. She got no job offers, and very few callbacks. Employers have told her to apply again when she has one to two years of experience.
She said she is frustrated. "You hear there's this nursing shortage, but there are no positions being filled."
The job situation has been especially difficult for McDonald because she left a position in another field, education - she taught preschool for 12 years - to enroll in GCC's nursing program.
The decision to move from teaching to nursing was a "really huge life choice," McDonald said. She made the switch on the advice of friends who are doctors or nurses in the health care field. She did her research. And then she watched the job market for nurses nosedive. "It's a completely different market than when I decided to do nursing three years ago," she said.
Ideally, McDonald sees herself working with children and their families. She wants to end up in pediatric oncology, but she said she's open to other specialties.
"I'm trying not to be closed off about positions," she said.
