HealthcareRead at source, 24 September 2026

Nurse recruitment: how to hire RNs and LPNs, with 2026 cost data

Nurse recruitment comes down to three moves: reach nurses who are employed but not searching, keep the application to about a minute on a phone, and call the same day. In Boostpoint’s 2026 Social Job Advertising Benchmark, the median registered nurse applicant cost $19.08 and the median LPN applicant $12.77, with 11% and 21% of people who clicked finishing the application. Those are applicants, not hires, and the rest of this page is about turning them into nurses on the schedule.

How to recruit nurses: the three moves in detail

Start from who you are trying to reach. The Bureau of Labor Statistics counts 3,465,400 registered nurse jobs and 666,900 LPN and LVN jobs in 2025, and projects about 180,800 RN openings and about 51,800 LPN openings a year, on average, through 2035. For registered nurses, BLS says many of those openings “are expected to result from the need to replace workers who transfer to different occupations or exit the labor force, such as to retire.” In practice the nurse you hire this quarter is almost always leaving a job somewhere else, not entering the profession.

Source: BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, registered nurses and licensed practical and licensed vocational nurses, read at source 24 September 2026.

That shapes the three moves.

• Reach employed nurses where they already spend time. A nurse on a med-surg floor twenty minutes away is not refreshing job boards. She will look at a better shift, a shorter drive or a stated differential if it appears in her feed.
• Make applying take about a minute. Ask the handful of questions that disqualify someone and collect the rest after you have spoken. Across all 891 campaigns in Boostpoint’s benchmark, what happens after the click explained 70% of the difference in cost between campaigns; what the ad auction charged explained 18%.
• Call the same day. An employed nurse who applies on a break is comparing you with her current job and with anyone else who calls first. A text on submission holds her attention until a recruiter can phone.

This page covers the licensed nursing roles. For aides, CNAs and caregivers, and for every other clinical role in one place, start from our healthcare recruiting guide.

Where do hospitals find nurses? Five channels, in the order we would use them

This order is our opinion for an employer with a steady need for RNs or LPNs, not a ranking computed from data. A facility filling one specialty position once should read it differently.

Social ads come first for recurring hiring because they reach employed nurses who are not looking, and unlike referrals they do not run out. Employment ads on Meta run under a Special Ad Category that fixes age at 18 to 65+, includes all genders and removes ZIP-code targeting, so the ad reaches adults in your area and the application does the qualifying.

Referrals come second because a nurse who knows your unit is the most credible recruiter you have. They work and they run out: your nurses know a finite number of nurses.

Job boards come third, not last. They are good at the people who are already looking, and some are built for particular arrangements such as travel and per diem work. We graded eight of them by how they charge and who they reach in best job boards for nurses.

Nursing schools are the one channel where you meet a cohort before it reaches the open market. Clinical placements, preceptor relationships and a named contact in career services turn a school into a pipeline rather than a one-off job fair.

Agencies come last in this order because paying a markup on every hour is an expensive way to fill a position that keeps reopening, not because they are bad at what they do. The next section is about where they belong.

What an RN or LPN applicant costs on Facebook and Instagram

These are the nursing rows from Boostpoint’s 2026 Social Job Advertising Benchmark, with the healthcare and senior living sector for reference.

Source: Boostpoint 2026 Social Job Advertising Benchmark — 891 Boostpoint-managed campaigns on Meta (1,334 campaign-months). Costs are what advertisers paid, including campaign management, and cover advertising only. Apply rate is the share of people who clicked and completed the form. The campaigns column counts campaign-months.

Three things to take from it.

• The visible difference between RN and LPN campaigns is the apply rate. RN campaigns converted 11% of clickers and LPN campaigns 21%, while click-through rates were almost the same (1.15% and 1.11%). Our reading, not a measured finding: registered nurses are more selective and more often employed, and many RN applications are longer, which is the part you control.
• Use the range, not only the median. Half of RN campaigns landed between $12.76 and $34.84. Where you fall inside that band depends on your market, your offer, your application and how often the same people see your ad.
• Budgets do not need to be large. Across every role in the benchmark, half of campaign-months ran on less than $334, with a median of 20 applicants per campaign-month. That is an all-role figure rather than a nursing one; it shows the channel does not need a big commitment to be tested.

Cost per applicant is not cost per hire. How many RN applicants become one start depends on your screening, your offer and your unit, and only your own records can answer it. For RN, LPN and CNA side by side, see what it costs to recruit an RN, LPN or CNA.

Agency or direct: where a nurse staffing agency fits

An agency and a recruiting campaign buy different things. The agency sells hours from a nurse who can start this week, with credentialing, payroll and liability handled. A campaign produces applicants you still have to screen, interview and hire, and the pipeline stays with you afterward.

Most facilities need both. Use an agency when a shift is going unfilled this week, when the role is a specialty you fill once, or when nobody on your team can work applicants the same day. Recruit directly when the same position keeps reopening, because the agency premium is charged for every hour the vacancy lasts. The usual pattern that works is to let the agency cover the gap while your own campaign shortens it.

We have not repeated the arithmetic here. What agencies bill, what is inside the bill rate, the states that cap it and the cost of a vacancy covered by agency staff are set out on nurse staffing agency costs.

The apply flow: a one-minute mobile application for nurses

Hospital applications are often built for compliance rather than completion: an account to create, a resume to upload, ten years of work history to retype, then license details. A nurse tapping an ad on her phone between patients will not finish that. In Boostpoint’s benchmark, 41% of all budget ran in campaigns where fewer than one in ten clickers finished the form, and those campaigns returned 11% of applicants. Campaigns that kept the application on the platform, in a native instant form, consistently sat in the higher conversion bands.

For RN and LPN roles, ask only what would stop you hiring someone:

• Which license do you hold (RN or LPN/LVN), and is it active?
• Which state issued it, and is it a multistate license?
• Which shifts can you work: days, evenings, nights, weekends?
• How many years of experience do you have in this setting or specialty?

License numbers, references, work history and credential verification come after the first conversation. They still happen; they just stop costing you applicants.

Then close the gap between application and contact. An automated text on submission tells the nurse her application arrived and when to expect a call. A recruiter who phones within hours is talking to someone still deciding. One who phones days later is often talking to someone who has already accepted another offer.

Recruiting nurses for rural facilities and night shifts

Rural and small-town facilities

A rural hospital or nursing home is recruiting from a small local pool, and a job board in a thin market can produce nothing in a given week because nobody there searched. Social ads do not depend on someone searching, so the pool is everyone within the radius you set. Meta’s employment ad rules set a 15-mile minimum radius, which for a rural facility is usually the start of the audience rather than the edge of it.

• Widen the radius before raising the budget. In the benchmark, campaigns whose audience saw the ad more than 3.0 times in a month had a median cost per applicant of $18.76, and above 4.0 it reached $26.78. A small audience saturates fast.
• Use the multistate license. Forty states now issue and honor it, so a nurse living across a state line may be able to take your job without a new license. Our guide to compact nursing states has the list and the residency rules.
• Say what the drive and the schedule look like. A nurse commuting 40 minutes will ask about shift length, self-scheduling and weekend rotation before pay. Put those in the ad.

Night and weekend shifts

BLS notes that nurses in hospitals and nursing care facilities “usually work in shifts to provide round-the-clock coverage. They may work nights, weekends, and holidays.” Night positions are hard to fill for many facilities, and they are also the ones many job ads hide.

• Run the night shift as its own campaign. An ad for “RN, nights, 7p–7a, three shifts a week” with the differential in the first line speaks to people who want nights. A generic RN ad does not.
• State the differential as a number. “Night differential available” tells a nurse nothing; the hourly figure does.
• Ask about shifts in the application. A day-only applicant for a night position is a phone call that ends in a no, or a hire who leaves in week three.

Related: Registered nurse job description, LPN job description.

Frequently asked questions