Nurse Practitioner Career Coach

In the beginning, a candidate may be guilty of “ghosting” when after applying for a position the applicant fails to respond to inquiries from the prospective employer or does not respond to a request for an interview. When potential employers take the time and effort to process an application (which YOU initiated) and you don’t respond it only makes you look self-centered at best and downright rude at worst. Recruiters and hiring managers talk to each other – even between organizations – so you shouldn’t be surprised if tales of your previous “ghosting” are passed around and come back to scare away your opportunities for future employment. Ghosting is not just frustrating, but it is wastes valuable time in an employer’s search to fill an opening for a clinician, so organizations can have a long memory when it comes to your disappearing act.

Before you pack your bags for your next NP locum tenens job you first need to negotiate your compensation. Most nurse practitioners don’t consider themselves to be savvy negotiators because it’s not something NPs are taught. You want to be sure you secure the best and fairest deal possible but negotiating any assignment can prove to be difficult (and intimidating) if you don’t know where to begin. I outline the 3 options you have after you have when responding to any job offer, plus some critical information you should gather before you even think about starting to negotiate.

It’s nowhere near as hard as starting a new career from scratch or going back to school because you are unhappy with your work. Local conferences are great for making contacts in a new area, while regional and national events can be leveraged to expand your network or meet people who make hiring decisions in a totally new area. If you don’t, you may want to work on that, or at least have a good explanation ready for anything negative in your past that comes up The general salary data that many new graduates use as a reference is not always reflective of the market. It’s not easy to get hired in a specialty as a new clinician, but it is possible.

There isn’t a week that goes by when I don’t hear from one or more nurse practitioners who are looking to leave direct care. We were drawn to this role because we were told we would have more time with patients, and we would use this time to educate, inspire and empathize. One of the most frequent reasons NPs tell me they want to leave direct patient care is that the clinic has become like a treadmill and the clinician is feeling the pressure to either keep up or fall off. And because NPs love their patients they maximize their time with the patient and the end result is the NP staying long past clinic hours to finish documenting and completing these other tasks.