In all honesty, I googled “how to write a blog” and “what to say in your first blog post” before writing this. According to the web, it is best to introduce yourself and your business in your first post so here it goes!
My name is Caroline Danna and I am a multi-passionate, goal oriented, high energy and intuitive individual. I currently live along the shoreline in Connecticut with my husband and our three children. I’ve been a registered nurse since 2012 and now I consider myself a Nurse Career Coach and the founder of Level Up Nurse LLC. My nursing experience includes inpatient Medical/Surgical, Outpatient Surgery, Emergency Department medicine, and Nursing Management. My non-traditional nursing experience includes being a Hospital Recruiter and a Travel Nurse Recruiter. I will not bore you with all the specifics on my career journey but it is safe to say, the nursing profession has taken me places I never thought I would go.
Early this year, I decided to leave my most recent employment position as a Travel Nurse Recruiter to move forward with the creation of Level Up Nurse LLC. The mission of Level Up Nurse is to empower nurses to feel confident in career navigation and ultimately, level up within the profession. This business provides resources to support and encourage nurses to leave toxic, stagnant, and emotionally draining jobs in order to find employment opportunities that are more fulfilling, a better fit and/or an advantageous growth opportunity.
But, let’s back up a bit, I am sure you are thinking where did this ‘Level Up Nurse’ idea come from? Well, have you ever heard the Steve Jobs quote “you cannot connect the dots moving forward, you can only connect them looking backwards”? This is how I feel this company came to be.
Let’s start from the beginning, yes - all the way back to my nursing school days. While in the trenches of nursing school, I maintained above average grades, was the captain of the Women’s Cross Country and Track teams, and worked as a Patient Care Technician at a small community hospital. Due to my ability to successfully juggle many hefty responsibilities, I was confident that I would have MANY job offers as a new graduate nurse.
Unfortunately, I was overly confident and very wrong. I applied to numerous new graduate positions and ONLY received one call for an interview and it was at the hospital where I worked as a Patient Care Technician. In my opinion, it felt like (and likely was) a courtesy interview.
As I prepared for my one and only upcoming interview, I went to my University’s Career Center for resources on how to be a desirable candidate. To my dismay, they had little tangible resources available and nothing specific to healthcare related roles. I then turned to google, but again, most resources were business or corporate focused. I did the best I could to prepare with these general resources.
On the big day, I arrived to my interview in a (hideous) pantsuit, beyond nervous. I entered the conference room of the interview to find a big table with about 6-8 people seated around it, prepared to ask me questions. I wish I could tell you how great I did in the interview and all the knowledgeable and perfect answers I replied to each question, but in reality, I don’t remember much except for cracking multiple jokes. I remember having the interview group laughing quite hard but don’t remember actually providing a single piece of evidence that would support me being a great fit for the job. As I have learned more about myself through adulthood, I have come to understand that I tend to use humor to lighten the mood, ease tension and cope with awkward situations (hence the standup comedy act in lieu of a professional interview). I left the interview thinking, well if this was an audition for stand up comedy, I would absolutely get the part; but, since it was an interview for a nursing position, I was confident that I did not provide any evidence that would result in a job offer.
As luck would have it, I was offered this position. Although I bombed the interview, I feel quite confident that I was offered the position due to my reputation as a reliable and hardworking Patient Care Technician. Needless to say, I was relieved to have employment lined up after graduation!
Fast forward - after completing the year-long residency program on a Med/Surg unit, I transferred to the Emergency Department (ED). While in this setting, I was asked to be an active member of the Nurse Residency Program hiring committee. This committee interviewed nursing students for the hospital nurse residency program. The committee would evaluate each candidate based on their cover letter, resume, letters of reference and interview. If deemed a potential fit, the committee would then decide which unit was the best match for the prospect.
I will not lie, I agreed to be a part of this committee because I thought it would be entertaining - didn’t everyone crack jokes when they were nervous? I was looking forward to some entertainment. I do realize this is NOT a good reason to join a committee, but if I am being honest, I did not join the committee for career development purposes. However, joining this committee would have a snowball effect on my future.
During my involvement in the Graduate Nurse Residency Program hiring committee, I quickly noticed that there were many common and repeated mistakes nursing students made during the interview process. Most of these mistakes could have been easily avoided with minor tweaks had they been prepared properly; but I knew from my own experience, it was extremely difficult to prepare properly due to lack of nursing specific resume and interview resources.
After a few years in the ED and on this committee, I had determined that I wanted to be a Nurse Manager. I enrolled in a Master’s of Science in Nursing program at Sacred Heart University. Towards the end of this program, I was required to complete a clinical rotation with a nurse leader. I decided to ask the Inpatient Nurse Director at the time if I could shadow her; she was an up and coming leader and it was rumored that she was being groomed to be the next Chief Nursing Officer. I knew I wanted to learn from her! She agreed to let me be her student and during this time, it seemed that every meeting we attended revolved around the alarming rise in the nurse vacancy rate within the hospital. The hospital recruiter was attending career fairs but failing to increase interest and connect with candidates. Having been a member of the New Graduate Nurse hiring committee, I felt confident in the candidates the organization was looking for and volunteered to attend a few job fairs to help support the hospital recruiter (in all honesty, I was eager to get my hours logged and become a nurse manager) and the Nurse Director actually liked and supported the idea.
I was surprised to find that I truly enjoyed attending job fairs. There is an indescribable level of excitement, high energy and a sense of new possibilities buzzing in the atmosphere. I quickly realized that I could easily connect with prospects because I had been a Patient Care Technician that floated to many different areas of the hospital, I completed the the nurse residency program, I worked as a nurse on an Inpatient unit and now (at the time of the job fair) worked in the Emergency Department. I could speak to nursing practices, unit culture, ratios, workflows, expectations and many minute and detail specific questions that prospects at job fairs frequently asked. It also helped that I am a high energy, personable individual that could hold a conversation with the Mona Lisa. It was not long before nursing leadership within the organization recognized that application numbers had increased after I attended these job fairs.
At the end of my clinical experience with this Inpatient Nurse Director, she presented me with a unique opportunity; to take a temporary role as the hospital nurse recruiter (in assistance to the current recruiter) until the nurse vacancy rate dropped to goal numbers. I was shocked as I wanted to be a nurse leader like her! Not a recruiter! But of course, when an impressive and well respected leader presents you with a specific opportunity, you have to take it. I reluctantly agreed to be a temporary recruiter until a certain number of vacant positions were filled by nurses.
This new endeavor in recruitment proceeded to be more impactful on my future than I had anticipated. I had a lot of autonomy in this position and could shape it in a way that I wanted. So I created a workflow I predicted would be effective. I logged in the applicant tracking system every morning, reviewed ALL nursing applicants that had applied over the last 24 hours. I would review their resumes, and if they were qualified on paper, I would call them and perform a phone screening. If the phone screening went well, I would bring them in for an interview with me, give them a tour of the hospital, and then bring them to the nurse manager’s office for an additional round of interview questions. If the manager felt the interview went well, the candidate would stay for a few hours to shadow. We typically would have a decision to extend an offer or not within a week of applying. As I predicted, this process proved to be extremely effective; we hit goal numbers after a few months in this role. Although I enjoyed this role much more than anticipated, once numbers moved in the right direction, I accepted a position as an Assistant Nurse Manager at a nearby large hospital and proceeded to move on my way to the desired career path of nursing management.
In the Assistant Nurse Manager role, I was tasked with hiring for all the nurse related positions. Given my background, the Nurse Manager I reported to was happy to hand the hiring responsibilities over to me. At this large hospital, they offered managers a class on evaluating and hiring candidates. I took this class, sharpened my existing recruiter skill set and even added a few other evaluation tools to my hiring knowledge. I was able to create a process that appropriately fit the candidates needed for our department.
After close to two years as an Assistant Nurse Manager, I progressed to my goal and accepted a position as a Nurse Manager of a COVID/Medsurg unit. This unit depended heavily on hiring a large number of new graduate nurses and was known for high turnover of experienced nurses. Hiring new graduates as well as experienced nurses was a regular and cumbersome task I was solely responsible for while in this position. The majority of my nurse manager peers did not like interviewing and hiring applicants and, shortly after starting as a nurse manager, I became one of the few managers that hired for many of the inpatient units. And I truly enjoyed it.
The COVID-19 pandemic put things in perspective for me professionally and personally. After close to two years as a Nurse Manager, I made a big career decision and pivoted back to recruitment and became a Travel Nurse Recruiter. I determined that I felt the most fulfilled connecting with nursing prospected (as I had while a Hospital Recruiter) as well as mentoring nurses on career growth (as I had as a Nurse Manager). The Travel Nurse Recruiter role encompassed both! I worked remotely and collaborated with nurses every day to help them find travel assignments all over the country. In this role, I built resumes (applying learned tips on how to make their resumes stand out amongst the applicant pool) and I coached travel nurses on how to successfully complete a phone interview. I was in this position until early this year when I pivoted to entrepreneurship.
Looking back (on all the connected dots, thanks Steve Jobs!), I learned a lot of key career development knowledge while in my numerous applicant-facing roles. I hope to share tangible advice and insights with nursing students, experienced nurses and travel nurses in order for them to successfully obtain desirable opportunities that will allow them to level up within the profession.
Level Up Nurse is here to bridge the gap when it comes to employment navigation. The hope of this company is to educate, empower and support nurses to take back control of their careers, call the employment “shots” and feel that their profession serves them as much as they serve the profession. If you are a nurse ready to level up, join this community, it is designed for nurses like YOU!
Nurse Career Coach Signing off -
Caroline Danna MSN, RN
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