“Save one life, you are a hero; save a hundred lives, you are a nurse”
Sounds true, isn’t it?
To save one life, you need luck but for saving hundreds of them, you need resilience, patience, empathy, compassion, organizing & technical skills.
Nurses have been the backbone of our healthcare industry. Sometimes undervalued, but constant support to our team of healthcare experts. Nurses are essentially required to have a mix of technical and socio-emotional knowledge to sustain them at work under critical circumstances.
Nursing questions and answers have evolved over the past few years to judge nurses on a variety of skills. It is no longer limited to “How do you see yourself in 5 years?” or “Why should we hire you?” or “How many years of experience do you have in assisting with surgery?” etc.
It has become more complex and involves a lot of practical situations in which they expect the nurses to answer diligently and thoughtfully. Usually, nursing interviews test specific skills and domain knowledge of candidates, covering important areas like patient care, patient education, crisis management, clinical decision-making, and professional behavior, among other things. Nursing interviews are a tough nut to crack but not impossible.
In this article, we are going to discuss the most asked Registered Nurse interview questions with answers and also try to crack the reason behind their prevalence in the interview round. Let’s have a look at them.
Top 5 Most Common Nursing Questions and Answers
- Question: Why did you enter this field? Why particularly nursing?
(Reason For Asking: Nursing is a stressful job that sometimes comes with extreme responsiveness and burnout. The interviewer is trying to gauge the nurse’s job satisfaction level, which is a promise of long-term commitment)
- Answer: “I have always been a caring person since childhood and love helping people. Also I wanted to make a positive impact on society and set an example of “selfless care”. The pandemic was clear proof of my commitment toward the job and I devoted myself completely in the care of my patients.”
- Question: How do you manage a crisis? Like a huge surge of ill patients at once or a line of surgeries lined up one after the other?
(Reason For Asking: The interviewer wants to know if the nurse has been in such a situation before and what was the A plan to handle it. The best way is to use the STAR method: Situation-Task-Action-Result)
- Answer: “I remember it was 2021 and the pandemic had struck badly again. There were more than 900 critical patients who needed attention. It was a huge crisis. Emotionally and physically to deal with the situation. I was given the duty to check the oxygen vitals and report back to the senior doctors. It was an exhausting job.”
I did 3 things that really helped me through:
- Kept Calm
- Took Breaks (Whenever possible)
- Reached out to my team members to help when I felt my burnout could affect my medical judgment.
- Question: How were your relations with other staff members?
(Reason For Asking: They want to check the “team spirit” of the nurses. Working as a team is a huge tick for any nurse.)
- Answer: “I worked with a lot of lab technicians, doctors, and co-nurses and it has been like learning something new every day. I believe that different viewpoints on a single problem can help us find the right solution. Having said that I am also very self-motivated and am comfortable in working alone as well if need be.”
- Question: Tell us about the time you encountered a difficult patient.
(Reason For Asking: Again this nursing question is about testing how nurses think on their feet or think out of the box when there is a difficult situation at hand)
- Answer: “Elder patients have always been difficult to nurse. This one time I had an old woman who had just undergone hip surgery and was in aftercare. She was quite difficult and would express her anger on small things like ac temp, bad TV reception, etc. I had a look at her file and discovered that she lived alone with her dog and had left the dog with an attendant back at home. Her family was living in the US. I immediately understood what she was looking for. I would then spend some time in the mornings with her and even called the attendant on video for her to see her dog. From that day she never had mood swings because I went a step beyond my duty as a nurse to comfort her”
- Question: Why should we hire you?
(Reason For Asking: They want to know your strengths from the nurse and if they match what they are actually looking for. A bit of this also involves seeing the self-confidence in nurses)
- Answer: Nursing is not only a job for me, but I am passionate about it. Along with me, I bring 7 years of experience of working in a smaller hospital where resources are limited, hence I know how to handle more work. I calmly answered all your questions which tells you that I do not crack under pressure. My previous teammates and doctors (listed as references) can check out my team spirit and dedication. So I think I am a really good addition to the hospital.”
Summing It Up
These are some of the questions which can make or break your interview. Apart from confidently answering your questions, there are a few things that further help in cracking the interview:
- Appearance
- Punctuality
- Greeting the interviewer(s)
- Eye-Contact
- Calmness
Cracking a nursing job interview can be tough but not with the right guidance. Jobizo’s (India’s first digitized healthcare recruitment platform) initiative, “Get Me Wings’ prepares nurses for the most difficult interviews for global jobs.
So far, Jobizo has placed more than 500 candidates abroad. And if you are a nursing candidate, then Jobizo can assist you with language skills while conducting several mock interviews to help you get through the interview successfully.
So if nursing interviews make you nervous, you have experts to go to. if you can already ace interviews, then find international jobs (locum/permanent) on the Jobizo App (Play Store/App Store).
Visit: https://jobizo.com/get-me-wings to know more.