As white-hot nursing market cools, a job is no longer a sure thing - Baltimore Business Journal:

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Their advice: Apply for any open position, be persisten in calling employers and consider moving to Texase or the Midwest where there is more It sounds like the typicalk chatter these days for anyjob seeker. But in this the worrying students are training to becomdnurses — a professioj in which demand has outrageously outstripped supplh for years. So much so that shelles $20 million on an ad campaignn a few years ago to encouraged more people to enter the Tobe sure, there are still nursing jobs out especially for experienced nurses. And the shortages persists. But for students graduating this the outlook is more bleak thanthey expected.
They are not countinf on $1,000 signing bonuses and some are landing few They are frantically asking faculty and friends of friends if they know someoned who canhire them. The feeling is echoed by nursew staffing agencies who say their servicesa are less in demandas hospitals’ receive more job Experienced nurses are opting to stay on hospitapl staffs rather than work on demand for staffinb agencies, and some nurses are re-entering the work forcee after their spouses have lost their jobs. That meansd more competition fornursinf graduates.
“I never had to networkl for a job before, and I certainlgy didn’t think I’d have to do it for said Jessica Hancock, 26, a Johne Hopkins nursing student. Hancock is hittingh up Hopkins alumni, faculty and even the wivesz ofher boyfriend’s friends who are nurses to help her get a job. So far she has applies to 15 jobsin Boston, wheree her boyfriend lives, and has gotten no Her classmate, Megan wants to have a job when she graduates in But if she does not, she is prepared to wait tablew for some time to pay the The Michigan native, 23, has applied to jobs in Washington, D.C.
, Colorado and Vancouver, “They say you couled walk out of Hopkins and get a job Vrobel said. But landing a job at Hopkinse itself couldbe tougher. Johns Hopkins Hospitalo and Health System has a hiring freezein place. It is still hiring nurses for certain areaes ifits nurse-to-patient ratio drops below a certainj level, spokesman Gary Stephenson said. Besides hiring some health employers are thinkinhg of droppingsome benefits. The , for example, is lookingt at reducing pension contributions, tuitiom benefits for employees’ children and getting rid of employeerreferral bonuses, spokeswoman Ellen Beth Levitt said.
The hiringh freezes and benefit cuts come at a time when hospitals confrontdwindling investments, increased costs of borrowing money due to the credit cruncu and patients putting off elective surgeries because they lack healthh insurance or cannot afford the copayment. Maryland hospitals saw their biggestg revenue drop during the last three monthsof 2008, when revenud fell short of expenses by 14 according to the . To be sure, the nursing professio n is nothing like other sectors of thejob market, such as in which thousands of workers are losingy their jobs every month. Maryland’es unemployment rate grew to 6.
7 percent last There were still morethan 1,640 available nursing positions in Marylansd last year, according to the Marylanrd Hospital Association. But that is a 27 percent drop from when therewere 2,257 open nurser positions. Anecdotal information shows that the slow economy has shifted the balancwe of power to hospitalnurse “In the past six the market has changed and the experienced nurse is coming to us to look for a said Deborah Mello, a nurse recruitment and retention consultany for , which operatews , , and the . The hospitals’ turnover rate has droppe to 4.2 percent, about half its normal in the pasttwo months.
The hospitals have been interviewin four experienced nursesa month, twicee as many as usual. And recruiters can be more “A few years ago it would be temptingy to just try to hire people cause we needed themso badly,” Mello said. Lutherville medicalk staffing firm has seen a 10 percent drop in its revenue from its nursinbg staffing business during the first quarter this year compared with last Chief Operating Officer Jeff McClure said.