Hiring a nurse takes 78 days on average, costs the organization about $60,090 every time one leaves instead, and happens in a market where nearly three quarters of hospitals plan to grow their nursing workforce while fewer than one in fourteen plan to add anyone to the recruiting team.
This section covers the employer's side of that: finding nurses, choosing between them, paying them, and getting them onto the unit before someone else does.
In this section
- Writing a nursing job posting. The five facts nurses screen on, requirement inflation, and where pay transparency law now applies.
- Where nurse candidates come from. Referrals, boards, databases, schools, your own alumni and travellers — and why speed beats reach.
- Interviewing nurse candidates. Structured interviews, peer panels, realistic previews, and the questions now illegal in eighteen states.
- Setting nurse pay. What a nurse actually costs, what differentials fix that base rates cannot, and how compression undoes it.
- Sign-on bonuses and repayment agreements. What a bonus buys, and how state enforcement has changed what a repayment clause may say.
- Recruitment metrics. Time to fill, vacancy, cost of vacancy, and the one measure almost nobody tracks.
- Credentialing and onboarding. Primary source verification, exclusion checks, and why the first ninety days are part of recruitment.
- International nurse recruitment. Schedule A, the visa queue, the examination failure point, and the ethical line.
Recruitment and retention are one subject
Hospitals hired 377,650 registered nurses in 2025 and lost 324,090. For every ten nurses hired, more than eight replaced someone who left.
An organization working only on the hiring half is running a treadmill. The turnover rate, the first-year departure rate, and the reasons nurses give for leaving all belong in the same conversation as the requisition, which is why several pages here point at nurse turnover and retention rather than repeating it.
The corollary is that the cheapest recruitment work is often not recruitment. Fixing a schedule, funding a preceptor, or adjusting an experienced nurse's rate before she resigns all cost less than $60,090.
Flexible and contingent staffing
Permanent hiring is one instrument among several, and the others have their own sections:
- Building a per diem roster
- Using travel nurses
- Nurse staffing agencies
- Float pools and internal resource pools
Related
- Nurse turnover and retention
- Nurse residency programs
- The nursing shortage
- Nurse staffing and patient outcomes
- Magnet recognition
Sources
- National Health Care Retention and RN Staffing Report — NSI Nursing Solutions, 2026 edition, covering calendar year 2025. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- 78 days to hire one nurse: the 2026 staffing numbers every nurse employer should know — NurseRecruiter, 3 September 2026. Accessed September 9, 2026.