Notice to nurses: Don’t pay recruiters

Are you a nurse being recruited for work in the US? Notice: Deal only with legitimate recruiters or staffing consultants of US hospitals. Don’t pay them any placement fee; they already charge employers an equivalent of 10 percent of the recruit’s first-year salary.

Stories of greener pastures on the other side of the Pacific so enchant dreamy migrants that they become easy prey to tricky recruiters who go for the lagareng hapon (double-edged saw). That is, those who collect from both the employer and the job-seeker.

It’s like in the mid-’70s, at the height of the Middle East construction boom from petrodollars. Arab contractors offered recruiters a month’s pay for every recruit auditioned and dispatched. But desperate job-seekers were aplenty. Some started giving "earnest money" to be put on top of recruiters’ lists. Recruiters soon hit upon the double-your-money scheme and began to charge them "processing fees" that employers already were paying. The fees ultimately became standard fare. Employers wisened up to the racket and began dropping the recruiters’ service fees. Only a handful of Middle East employers still offer such fees at present. Job-seekers now must pay recruiters in advance the equivalent of one month’s pay promised to them. Many find out too late at the job site that the real pay is only half what was promised.

The US has been taking in nurses from overseas since the ’60s. Laws on staffing and fees are strict. Hospitals demand standard qualifications, so most states have elected to fall under the accrediting Commission on Graduates of Foreign Nursing Schools (CGFNS). With the passage in the early ’90s of a law requiring hospitals to merge, thousands of American nurses lost their jobs or suffered pay cuts. Some moved to small school clinics or doctors’ offices; others struck new careers in pharmaceutical sales, insurance adjusting and teaching. Americans lost interest in the nursing profession. The few nurses who stuck it out in big hospitals soon rode the crest of an acute shortage that grows by the year. Administrators began paying them double for half the work. Still, they need to fill in tens of thousands of nursing vacancies. They thus look to the Philippines as a rich source of recruits.

Enter the recruiters. Mel Reyes, a Fil-Am from California who runs the staffing consultancy RN Solutions, says the pay and perks are enticing. He cautions nurse-recruits to be on their toes, though. To help them cull legit from fly-by-night recruiters, Reyes offers some must-knows:

(1) The nursing school must have CGFNS-accreditation; the nurse, CGFNS-certification. Passing the Nurse Certification and Listing Exam (NCLEX) in either Guam or Saipan makes placement easier.

(2) Recruits must pass the Test of Spoken English (TSE) required by the US Immigration and Naturalization Service. To review for it, nurses may enrol in classes for the Test of English as Foreign Language (TOEFL) at centers accredited by the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA).

(3) CGFNS, NCLEX and TSE alone are not guarantees for placement. Nurses must pass visa screening by the US embassy’s consulate-general.

(4) Job-seekers would do well to ask for brochures of the recruiting hospital and its environs.

(5) Salary is computed by year, not by month. Starting pay for entry-level openings, for which most recruits are hired, is $40,000 a year. Salary is paid by the hospital, not the placement agency or the registry.

(6) Some hospitals give a sign-in bonus. Others offer to pay for immigration processing in lieu of it. Still others may give a few months’ housing while recruits acquaint themselves with their new city.

(7) Immigration processing requires hospital sponsorship. Because of the immigration assistance, work contracts are usually for three years.

(8) Green card or resident alien status is given to the nurse and the immediate family only after arrival in the US. The process used to take at least two years; for nurses, the longest is six months.

(9) Doctors who become nurses are treated like nurses. Being a med is no privilege. The same qualifications and requirements apply.

(10) The waiting time from hiring to US migration can take a year.

Reyes cannot emphasize enough that nurses should not pay them anything: "The perks are already there, so what for?"

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