My first RN interview

I have felt pretty depressed lately about the job market, as I have mentioned before. Especially depressed about it because I ALREADY went through the stressful process of just trying to get INTO the program, and thought and have been told that I have a guaranteed job. That is not the case in this recession, but I do believe I will get some job at some point.

So you can imagine HOW EXCITED I was Tuesday when I received a phone call for an interview with Float Pool at Primary Children's and a phone call from the Senior HR Nurse Recruiter at the University Hospital to discuss job opportunities. I scheduled my interview with Float Pool for this morning because I couldn't handle to wait longer than that!

Backing up, Float Pool is also known as Central Staffing Resource Unit. It staffs the hospital on units where they are short. You 'float' or train and work on Infant Unit, Children's Medical, Children's Surgical, NICU, PICU, Neuro-Trauma, and Rapid Treatment Unit (patients who aren't 'admitted' into the hospital but stay for under 24 hours), and Immunosuppressed Unit, or children who have cancer or need transplants. Float Pool goes first in the interview process of new grads because it is the ultimate coveted job. You work on every unit so it never gets boring, you choose your schedule each month and you get what you ask with the exception of maybe one shift, and you are the first to be called off on holidays. Also, if I want to go back to school and be a Pediatric or Family Nurse Practitioner, this would be the ideal experience.

My interview went great, but I don't have a good chance of getting the job. There are only three spots and about 15 new grads being interviewed. But the interviewer did say they had several more but chose me and the others to be interviewed because I had a capstone at Primary's and am a BSN student. The interview began and we discussed me past jobs, my cumulative GPA (3.5!), and things I was involved in and the interviewer kept saying how familiar I look. She then asked, "Did you used to date Ryan??" Oh man. "Uh ya?" I came to find out that she was his neighbor and we had, in fact, met before. Her daughter is also in the greek system when I was at the U. She said, "I remembered that Ryan had such a cute girlfriend!! Good to see you again!" I hope this works in my favor, and decided it probably wasn't tactful to include that I broke up with him because his standards were not up to par and I am much more motivated. =)

I won't go into all the details of the interview, but there were some tough questions. How do you want to be remembered at the end of your nursing career? What was a stressful experience in a clinical situation and how did you handle it? Describe a time that you had a dispute with a co-worker and how did you fix it? (I was confused on this one, because I never have disputes with co-workers, but I came up with a good example) What would your past employers/references say about you? What has been the biggest growth development in your professional career? If you gave a patient too much medication accidentally or gave the wrong med, what would you do?

Then there were numerous scenarios with follow up questions. "You are the only one at the nurses' desk on the unit. The phone rings, a doctor peeks his head out of a patient's room and asks you to come help him, and a patient's light goes off. What do you do first?" I think I tackled this one quite well. "Well, the phone isn't an emergency and they can call back or call the HUC desk. I would ask the doctor if his situation was an emergency, because I would need to answer the call light first because no nurse is in that patient's room and something could be really wrong. Plus, Primary Children's motto is: The Child First and Always. So I would of course want to help the child and their family first." They kind of applauded at that one and said good job and using their mission in my answer.

The interview lasted 40 minutes and I was kind of exhausted after. When I'm nervous, I smile a lot, laugh a lot, and make jokes. So hopefully, those three things combined will make them like me, but I don't have much of a chance at all. But at least it was good practice for future interviews. Well, hopefully I will continue getting interviews. *cross fingers* Think positive thoughts for me!

Oh and if anyone has really good answers to the above questions, let me know!