What does a Nurse Recruiter do?

Nurse recruiters are professionals that attempt to match qualified nurses with job opportunities at hospitals, private clinics and other positions that call for the services of a licensed practical nurse (LPN) or registered nurse (RN). In some cases, the nurse recruiter is employed by a specific institution. At other times, the recruiter provides services to a number of different clients. It is not unusual for a nurse recruiter to be a registered nurse or a nurse practitioner.

The main focus of the nurse recruiter is to locate qualified nursing personnel for a healthcare facility. For example, the recruiter may be responsible for evaluating the credentials of recent graduates from a given nursing school, and offering a portion of those applicants employment with local hospitals, nursing homes, or other jobs commiserate with their training. In this setting, the recruiter advocates the institution he or she is employed with, and seeks to secure the most highly trained and gifted recent graduates before they are hired by another institution.

A nurse recruiter may also focus on some type of specialty placing of nurses, such as connecting travel nurses with opportunities to live and work on a contract basis in different areas of the country, or even the world. In this application, the recruiter will attempt to match a qualified nurse with needs at a given healthcare facility in a particular city or town. Often, this type of recruiter is not an employee of a specific institution, and may charge a fee in return for bringing the nurse and the employer together.

When employed with a specific institution, a nurse practitioner is often concerned with attempting to keep the turnover in the nursing staff as low as possible. This helps to bring a greater level of continuity to the institution, in that the members of the nursing staff have the opportunity to build strong working relationships over time. The institution benefits from this effort, since lower turnover means less expense in training new nurses to replace recently departed staff.

There is no single nurse recruiter job description that applies in all situations. Each recruiter works within guidelines supplied by an employer or client in order to fulfill the responsibilities associated with the position. A recruiter may work closely with human resources personnel in order to screen and ultimately hire employees, or simply arrange for qualified candidates to meet with human resources as the means of exploring possible employment. The recruiter may also fulfill other functions, including conducting recruitment fairs, and speaking with high school students about entering the nursing profession.