The Abbariao Difference

Nurse recruitment has traditionally been a good business to be in for a variety of reasons.  First of all, nurse recruitment paid (and still does) good recruiting fees.  Second, nurse employers found it advantageous and preferred to use recruiters to outsource their nursing staff requirements because it was actually cheaper and more efficient.  Thirdly, most nurses weren’t very strong in their job hunting skills so they also preferred to work through nurse recruitment outsourcing specialty agents.

Nursing is still a good opportunity for the right kind of person although it does seem that the profession isn’t attracting the numbers of new entrants that it once did.  Nursing job opportunities are getting harder for nurse recruitment agencies to fill in both developed and developing countries.

Nurses can still make good money (by anybody’s standard).  Nurse recruitment agencies can always find a job for any nurse who wants one and nurse’s salaries tend to parallel those of the doctors they work with.  Nurses in narrow or high-tech medical specialties tend to make more than general care nurses.

Nursing isn’t as simple as it used to be and requires a lot more education and intellectual capacity than ever before.  Not to mention that nurses are also under a lot more stress than ever before.  That creates a more complex potential applicant profile for nurse recruitment personnel to work with.

In most career paths the dynamic factors are fairly clear….i.e. the demand for the people with the skill, the schools and other places where people learn the skill, and what the market will pay those who have the skill.  It seems not so with the nursing profession and thus the added complication for both nurse recruitment companies and those interested in the profession of nursing.

The challenges to nurse recruitment firms stems from the fact that nursing seems to be losing its attraction to young people evaluating career paths.  While the income is often very good, some voices from within the nursing profession complain of long hours, lack of support and/or appreciation for the job they do, problems created by inadequate staff-to–patient ratios, and lack of long term retention incentives compared to other professions.

The culprit in this dilemma seems to be the disparity between where the people are who need nursing services and where the people are who want to be nurses.  Just like so many other industries, the nursing industry is effected by ‘foreign competition too.

Up until just recently, the lion’s share of new nurses placed by nurse recruitment agencies to fill the demands created by the growing healthcare industry have been fulfilled by nurses from abroad…..i.e. nurses from developing countries immigrating to work in developed countries. It seems that certain protectionist forces, on both sides of the equation, have decided that this wasn’t a good thing.

Nowadays it’s much more difficult for nurse recruitment from foreign countries to get job-related visas to immigrate to work in other countries as a nurse.  As countries become more protectionist in their immigration policies they’re acting to protect ‘jobs’ in their own country.

What they don’t seem to realize, in the case of nursing jobs, is that there simply isn’t enough ‘local’ labor to satisfy the demand for nurses in the healthcare industry. They think they’re protecting jobs in their own country when, if fact, they’re making working conditions even more difficult for many of their own, ‘locally grown’, nurses by the long hours the limited supply of nurses has created.

Where will it end?  No one really knows.  Nurse recruitment agencies can still find jobs for nurses from abroad but only for nurses with lots of experience in particular specialties.  Eventually the problem will probably correct itself through free market factors.  Let’s hope so.