Cleveland Clinic Seeks to Hire 600 RNs

"Those are folks who are either new graduates, experienced nurses, nurse leaders, or nurses who will be graduating in the near future," Sinclair says.

Cleveland Clinics employs more than 11,000 nurses system-wide. Of the 600 new hires, 400 will be for existing positions, and 200 will be for new positions. All of the jobs are in the Northeast Ohio Region of the Cleveland Clinic Health System.

"We ask each of them to spend four hours with us," Sinclair says. "We will go through all the normal steps they would go through in the recruitment process which includes the obvious things, lab work, the physical exam, background checks, and of course go through an interview with the areas of choice they want to apply for. We do have a physical capacity assessment to make sure that our nurses are able to do the jobs we are asking them to do."

Sinclair says the biggest demand for nurses at the Clinic right now is in medical surgery, advanced practice nursing, imaging, intensive care, and nurse leadership, but that the changing landscape of healthcare means that other specialty areas may soon be in demand.

Successful candidates will be offered a job contingent upon their passing the physical and background checks. Smokers need not apply. Cleveland Clinic announced in 2007 that it would no longer hire tobacco users.

Sinclair says she'll consider the job fair a success if she can "fill every position I have open and have them started within a 60-day period and then retain them by the end of the year."

The last five years have seen a great expansion in the workforce and the acute nursing shortage is over, for now, according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine this month.

But the need for nurses is expected to surge again as the economy improves, older nurses retire, and more people seek healthcare as a result of healthcare reform.