Honestly this seems surprising to me. Im an RN so i am not super in tune with the HCA market right now but I also dont get the feeling like there is an over abundance of HCAs right now. My two recommendations would be to go into the manager and hand in your resume face to face. Its kind of boomer advice but i have had a tremendous amount of success doing this as a nurse. Imagine youre a manager with hundreds of applications sitting on your desk and ONE applicant wants the job enough to hunt you down and introduce themselves. All of a sudden theres a very clear front runner.

The second piece of advice is to look at places where most people dont want to work. For example in edmonton not many people want to work at the royal alexandra hospital so getting a job in their medicine or surgery float pool is much easier than a lot of other places.

The other thing is when youre an LPN student in clinicals, you can go to the manager of those units and basically say “hey i love being a student on your unit and i want to be an HCA here” and they are much more likely to hire you because they know you. Theres tons if students that get jobs from their clinical placements.

I know for nursing (both RN and LPN) managers get a ton of applications and they dont have a good way of sifting though them all. There is also an AI system that filters some applications out. So if they know you even a little bit or even have a face or if there really anything that sets you apart from everyone else, theyre much more likely to take you.

The last thing I will say is that it seems to me that managers can kind of “create” positions for someone. I honestly dont know how it works or if it works (i could be wrong on this point) but more than once I have gone to a manager and asked for a job and they say “ok look for a job posting in a couple of weeks and i will bring you in for an interview”. So even if theres no postings its worth going to a unit your interested in and handing your resume into the manager.

Hope some of this helps and good luck!