Get a new nursing job to start the year

If January is getting you down and you feel like it’s time for a change in your career, whether that’s a new employer, an internal move or a new direction completely, this is the month to make it happen. There are 1000s of Nursing jobs including RMN Jobs and RNLD Jobs now advertised on Nurses.co.uk, and recruiters are looking for qualified nurses all over the UK & Ireland, Middle East, Australia and New Zealand to start asap.

Here’s 5 short steps to be assured your application will be taken seriously when you apply for a nursing job online:

1. Spend time on your nursing career profile and it will benefit you no end when your application is sent. Your nursing career profile accompanies your application and serves as a summary about your experience and qualifications before a recruiter opens your CV. It’s very important your career profile is complete and reflects your up to date employment and competencies.

2. Write a brilliant nursing CV to help put your application to the top of the pile. A brilliant CV should give your most recent nursing job title, employer and responsibilities near the top of the document along with your NMC pin number and professional development achievements.

3. A good cover letter is as important as your CV because it entices the recruiter into your application and gives them a good idea of whether or not you will be suitable for the nurse job you’ve applied for before they even open your CV.

4. Keep a record of where the application has gone so if for any reason you don’t receive a reply you can follow it up at a later date. Whenever you apply for a job through Nurses.co.uk, not only is a record of the application stored in your account area, but you also receive a copy of the application by email. This will also include the email address of the person that is receiving the email, and this is who you should follow up with if you don’t receive a response.

5. Make yourself available on all of the contact methods you have given in your application. So if a recruiter calls your mobile, make sure that if you can’t answer straight away that you return the call within 24 hours. Many candidates don’t bother responding, but it’s good practice to let the recruiter know if you still want to go ahead with the application or not.

Finding the nurse jobs you need, when you need them

We’ve just launched the new look version of Nurses.co.uk. It will make searching for nursing jobs much faster and more accurate. You will be able to find what you’re looking for in shorter amount of time. We’re also working hard on our nursing careers advice section. Here you will be able to read interviews with real life nurses, get advice on writing a nursing CV or a personal statement for a nursing course application.

If you’re thinking of a career change into nursing, you can get advice about how to go about it, or if you just want to view the latest nursing vacancies, Nurses.co.uk is the place to start.

White paper NHS reforms and the effect on frontline nurses and social workers

The economic situation throughout the country, and consequently the public sector has given rise to plenty of change in the NHS, the most recent of which is the white paper laying out the proposed reforms for the organisation as a whole.

The white paper entitled, “Equity and excellence: Liberating the NHS” is the foundation for fundamental changes in the way the NHS is structured. It draws particular attention to the empowerment of patients to choose and decide on their own care pathways, and the proposal to remove bureaucratic targets by replacing them with targets that matter to patients.

The cost of management has also been targeted in the document, and will be reduced by 45% over the next 4 years. The responsibility for commissioning services will be devolved to the GP or the health professional closest to the patient in an attempt to focus budget spend directly on the patient, and not on management.

The proposed changes could start being implemented as early as next year, a target that The RCN has expressed concern about. The white paper claims that,

Doctors and nurses must to be able to use their professional judgement about what is right for patients. We will support this by giving front- line staff more control.

However, it’s unclear exactly what form this support for frontline staff will take. There is particular emphasis that the barriers between nursing and social care should be broken down as much as possible to ensure the best preventative care can be given, but there will also be professional quality standards developed by NICE for the newly created NHS Commissioning Board.

A white paper detailing social care reforms is expected early next year, and is likely to contain objectives that will be implemented in conjunction with the schedule for change given in this white paper.

How to get more info about a nursing job posted online

If you’ve ever been in the situation where you’ve seen a nursing job advertised online and you’ve been tempted to apply but there wasn’t enough information given, you’ll know how frustrating searching for a new nursing job can be.

It can be really difficult to make a decision to apply based on only a few sketchy details, and most of the time it’s difficult to get the right information you need because you won’t know who to contact in the first instance.

At Nurses.co.uk, we’ve come up with a really simple way of making contact with the recruiter who advertised the position without releasing all your personal details straight off. You simply need to make up a ‘taster’ version of your CV that contains only just enough information about your nursing qualifications and experience to get the recruiter to contact you, but not as much as would be contained in your full CV.

Simply upload the taster CV to your account on Nurses.co.uk, and make sure in the cover letter area before you click submit you explain that you’d like someone to contact you before you make a formal application. Be sure to include contact details that are current, and ones you will actually reply to! Once the recruiter makes contact with you, you can ask all the questions you need to. Then decide if it really is the right position for you, and if so let them know you would like to proceed.

You can read the full, detailed article here: How to get more information on any nursing job on the site

Working as a Nurse in the Middle East, UK and Eastern Europe

We recently had the privilege of speaking to renal nurse Jolana about her nursing career in the Czech Republic, Saudi Arabia and the UK.

She is currently working in a satellite renal unit with NHS patients, but she speaks about the similarities in nursing practice between all three countries.

In my field of nursing, which is dialysis, I can say that units are running nearly the same way. We get three shifts of patients every day. The equipment and the technologies used are pretty much the same.

She tells us it was pretty difficult finding a job when she first moved to the UK, and the only placement she could get as a nurse was in a nursing home. Since then she has managed to find work in her chosen field of renal care, and says she’s very happy to be back in the UK.

Read the full interview here: Jolana Dolha – Renal Nurse

Theatre, Scrub and Endoscopy Nursing, Public & Private Sector – a Nurse’s view

We recently had the opportunity to chat with Theatre, Scrub and Endoscopy Nurse Zoe Taylor. She gave us a great insight into what it’s like working as a nurse in the both the NHS and the private sectors.

She changed careers to become a nurse at 30 years old, from a pub manager and chef to theatre nurse after being inspired by a stay in hospital. Like many future nurses, she started out as a carer in a nursing home and progressed to qualified nurse through the access to nursing course and DipHE in Nursing. After working in the private sector for some time Zoe decided she really wanted to work for the NHS, a desire she’d held since being a newly qualified nurse but unfortunately was unable to fulfil at the time. Her time with the NHS definitely helped refine her scrub and theatre skills, but didn’t offer the career progression she was hoping for.

Zoe returned to work in the private sector after several years in the NHS, and has remained at the same hospital since.

You can read the full interview here.

Is your nurse CV working hard enough at getting your next nursing job?

Anyone working as a nurse in the NHS or the private sector will know just how desperately acute the nursing staff shortage it, so you might think that when the time comes to look for a new role in nursing, there will be lots of vacancies to pick from. You may also imagine that as a fully qualified and experienced nurse, you would easily be successful in finding a new position. Unfortunately this isn’t always the case.

We see hundreds of CVs from Nurses all across the country at varying stages in their careers, and some are so poorley formatted it’s almost impossible for a recruiter to even see the quality of candidate they are looking at. Despite the industry being incredibly candidate focussed at the moment, a recruiter won’t bother with your CV if they can’t immediately see who you are, what your experience is, and whether or not your registered with the NMC or ABA.

To make sure your CV is working as hard as it possibly can for you, there are a couple of quick checks you can try. Take a copy of your CV, turn it over so you can’t see it and leave it for a while so you’ve forgotten the layout. When you turn it over again, test if you can find your name, nursing qualification and current job title inside 5 seconds. If you can, chances are you’ve almost got it right but you can still brush up on the layout by following our CV guide. If you can’t then there is some serious redesigning to be done.

Here are some quick points you can follow:

1. Make sure your name, NMC / ABA pin number, phone number, email address are at the very top
2. Then state your current nursing role and years in the position, also include a brief description of your duties.
3. Next all professional development courses completed and date
4. Then nursing qualification, when, where and level qualified at
5. Then everything else

The top 4 points are what interest a recruiter the most, and if they can’t immediately get this from your CV it’s unlikely they will spend the time trying to unpick the words you’ve written to understand whether or not you are a suitably qualified nurse for the position they have.

Your nurse CV and career profile are what gets a recruiter’s attention

We see a lot of candidates who hurriedly register with Nurses.co.uk and don’t take the time to fill in their nursing career profile with any great detail. What they are unaware of is that the nurse career profile page contains all the information a recruiter will see first off when they are searching the CV database for potential candidates.

For those not so familiar with online nursing job boards, when you register your CV with the site (unless you opt out) your CV can be viewed by any of the recruiters that have access to the database. It’s a great idea to leave your CV searchable because a recruiter may just have your perfect vacancy, and then contact you about it all before you’ve realised the position is even available.

So it’s pretty easy to see the benefit of creating a really good profile when you first register. You can give the recruiter a summary of your skills, your nursing qualifications, your experience and most of all the fact that you have an NMC or ABA pin number. Stating in your nursing profile page that you are ABA or NMC registered gives enormous weight to your CV, an acts as a mark of quality. We quite often see registrations from overseas nurses looking to come to the UK, which is great, but they can’t work as a nurse until they become NMC registered so are of less value to a recruiter looking for a candidate immediately.

You can read the full guide here, and it’s great to have open as you’re creating  or updating your profile especially on Nurses.co.uk. It really does make a huge difference to how successful candidates can be through applying online.

How to chase up an online nursing application if you don’t hear back

This post came to mind as I was helping out a candidate who had applied several times through Nurses.co.uk, and not heard back from a single recruiter regarding her applications. Hopefully the advice I gave her will be useful to everyone, so I thought I’d post it here.

Most UK nursing and healthcare job boards are populated with private sector employers or agencies. Occasionally NHS positions are advertised, but that’s still quite rare (mostly due to the NHS procurement system I think!). Nursing job boards are the ideal resource for anyone looking for a really wide variety of opportunities in a particular geographic location. However, they are open to abuse by candidates who have no experience or qualifications in healthcare.

It’s often that case that a recruiter will receive 10 or 20 applicants with no experience or qualifications for every qualified nurse application they receive. That’s a lot to sift through, and occasionally the people who did put the effort into applying for a job that they are qualified for, get missed.

If you’ve applied for jobs that are relevant to your experience and your qualifications then you definitely deserve to be in the potentials pile. You can find out which recruiter has received your application by looking at the email copy you received when you applied. This will contain the email address of the recruiter. Or you can check in your application history within the site which company it was that had the vacancy and make contact that way.

Either way, you definitely need to follow up by phone or email to make yourself known, let them know which job you applied for and why you deserve to be considered. This means highlighting the experiences that make you ideally suited for the position and letting them know when you could be available. Make you sure you take the name of the recruiter handling the position so that you always deal with the same person. That way you can build up a rapport with them, and this will make future applications run more smoothly as the relationship and information flow is already established.

How to find out more info about a nursing job from a recruiter?

Here’s the scenario, you’ve seen a job posting for a nursing job that you might be interested in, it’s in the right area with a good salary but it doesn’t tell you who the employer is or where the role is based exactly.

I find this is so often the case with agency posted jobs in particular. There are so many agencies out there competing for jobs that they very rarely give out information in the public domain which could be linked back to their clients. So how do you find out more information when there’s no phone number or email address to contact the recruiter directly? Simple – when you register for whichever site you want to apply through, instead of uploading your full CV with tons of personal data you might not feel comfortable disclosing, write a summary of who you are with only as many details as you want and upload that instead.

The purpose of this is to get the recruiter interested in you without necessarily having all of your details. As a minimum, I would recommend you should include whether you are a registered nurse or not, how many years experience you have, your most recent nursing role, a short description about yourself and how they can contact you. You should also include a short cover letter in the document stating that you are interested and would like someone to contact you with further information.

You can then apply through the site and your reduced CV will go straight to the recruiter in question. Remember that you are the resource and recruiters need you in order to make their business work, so don’t be afraid to reserve some of your details until you have the full picture. Once you’ve made contact through the online job board, you can then discuss the role in more detail with the right person and, in your own time, and make up your own mind with no pressure.