Why this exists
A nurse we love passed her NCLEX and started looking for a new grad residency near Oxnard. By the time she found the programs at the hospitals down the street, the application windows had already closed. The next application window was months away.
Nothing had gone wrong, exactly. That's just how it works: a hospital posts its residency for a week, a few people hear about it through classmates or a Facebook group, and everyone else finds out too late. Entire cohorts of new nurses lose half a year to information that was technically public the whole time.
So we built the thing that should have existed: one place that tracks the California new grad RN residencies we can find, and tells you the day one opens near you, for the programs we can monitor.
How we keep it current
Every program page here points at the hospital's own residency page, and automated checks read those pages and job systems every day, usually several times, looking for application windows opening or closing (most programs; the ones we can't read yet say so on their page). Before an “it's open!” alert can go out, two independent checks must each find the opening stated in the hospital's own words, and a human can still stop anything that looks wrong before it sends, because a wrong alert is worse than no alert. Programs we watch show when they were last verified so you can see for yourself. A few hospitals only publish openings behind systems we can't read automatically yet; those pages say so honestly instead of pretending. And when a check suggests a window may have opened but isn't clear enough for us to alert on, we show you that too, marked “not confirmed yet,” with the sentence we found and a link so you can settle it in thirty seconds. We would rather hand you a lead than sit on it.
Why the alerts are free
Some sites charge $15 a month to see this list. We think that's backwards. A new grad with no income shouldn't pay for a job posting a hospital published for free. The directory and the alerts stay free. What we offer beyond that is optional and separate: Residency Ready, $29, gets your resume and application ready, and the alerts stay free. Sponsors, clearly labeled and never in the way, may come later.
Interested in sponsoring? →Found a program we're missing?
We list the California programs we can check on the hospital's own page. If your hospital isn't here, or something looks out of date, tell us. We fix wrong information within a day and look into every program you send us.
hello@nursegradalert.comDon't miss the next one
Free alerts the day a residency opens in your part of California, for the programs we can monitor.
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