Recruitment and Retention Plan for Nurses

¶ … 2015 for a hospital's human resources manager to recruit, prepare, and employ ten new nurses in the space of three months. The statistics indicate the level of difficulty inherent in doing so: Hernandez and O'Connor (2010) quote the forbidding statistics, well-known in the medical profession, which demonstrate that "with a projected shortage of 18,000 nurses by 2015, the employment demand for nurses is widespread and every school has a waiting list" (66). For this reason, the recruitment of new nurses in 2015 requires the most proactive and well-orchestrated strategy that can be devised, and it is up to human resources professionals to involve themselves not only in the most adroit or counterintuitive strategizing for recruitment, but also to lay a heavy emphasis on retention.

The method of recruiting nurses should probably begin with nursing schools. This is the most straightforward and regular strategy, as Hernandez and O'Connor (2010) themselves emphasize, noting for the reader who works in the human resources arena that, "if one is recruiting nurses, one should probably make a few calls to nursing schools to get recommendations of potential candidates coming out of school" (167). The advantage of this strategy is obvious: with no previous employment, the new-minted nursing school graduate has no previous salary quotes and can therefore generally be employed at a lower salary than an experienced candidate brought in from elsewhere. However the disadvantage should also be apparent, which is that a recommendation of good candidates in the graduating class of a nursing school is no surefire guarantee of success or longevity in the nursing profession. The other strategy, of course, would be to recruit nurses from elsewhere, which means either an active and aggressive headhunting campaign to poach nurses from other hospitals and institutions, or else -- again per the suggestion of Hernandez and O'Connor (2010) -- to engage in an effort to recruit foreign nurses, which has increasingly become a necessary (and frequently cost-effective) strategy for human resources personnel (302).

These three different employment pools, however, would each necessitate their own unique approach to candidate selection. Hiring a candidate fresh from nursing school or poaching one from another hospital might necessitate higher salaries than finding a foreign nurse, but the first two options do not generally require an evaluation of English-language proficiency to determine suitability for employment. A foreign nurse might be formidably skilled with inserting catheters or administering enemas, but in today's American health care environment with an emphasis on informatics and "big data," the inability to speak English is a serious detriment, leaving a nurse unable to communicate with patients or doctors. This is a relatively easy task for human resources managers to accomplish in recruitment, however, as a quick Skype interview with potential candidates will reveal their facility with the English language. But there remains a larger task in evaluating candidates, which should be understood as part of the larger purpose of human resources in filling these positions not just rapidly but lastingly.

The larger task here, of course, can be summed up in a simple concept, which is that the best recruitment strategy will also prove to be the best retention strategy. Certainly with the widespread shortage of nurses documented by Hernandez and O'Connor and referred to above, recruitment is no easy task. But with the nursing profession particularly, retention can prove to be even more difficult. Greenwald (2010) quotes the astonishing statistics that "43.2% of nurses experienced high emotional exhaustion and 41.5% expressed dissatisfaction with their current job" (150). That means that the presentation of the workplace as an attractive and accommodating environment will be paramount in luring candidates, but again the larger task remains which we have identified. But what does it mean to suggest that the best recruitment strategies are also the best retention strategies? Here, as so often in human resources tactics for reviewing candidates, the tactic of using strategic questionnaires or personality inventories in order to determine suitability can be extremely useful. For one specific example in retention of nurses, we should recall Judge's 1993 study (summarized by Aamodt) which looked at nursing retention correlated to whether or not the individual nurses had a habit of complaining: the study demonstrated that "for the people who griped about everything in life, there was no significant relationship between satisfaction and turnover ... however, for the nurses who were not chronic gripers, satisfaction was significantly correlated with turnover" (Aamodt 2013, 365). In other words, measurable personality factors -- which can be evaluated by human resources employees beforehand -- can be an accurate predictor of whether the recruited employee will last in the job.