14 Must Know Facts About Physician Recruiters

Physicians are not well informed about job search methods and about physician recruiters, about how they work and about their limitations. Residents in particular lack awareness of the disadvantages of working with recruiters. Graduating residents are stepping out of a helpful educational environment and are naive in business matters. They do not have the experience needed to understand the economical pressures that shape recruiter behavior.

This fact sheet below was developed based on years of personal experience with physician recruiters, based on being a candidate looking for a new job as well as an employer looking to hire a new associate for my practice. I am writing specifically about contingency recruiters, not about retained recruiters, in-house recruiters or locum tenens recruiters.

Recruiters will deny all of these facts or at least try to gloss them over. Many actually will claim to be proud of avoiding one of the drawbacks below, which is ...just marketing. I leave it up to you whom you chose to believe - a physician who reports from his experience and research, or a recruiter, whose income depends on marketing

Also consider that there are always the "exceptions that confirm the rule". There are those recruiters that market less "aggressively", that really care about you, that do visit the practices they represent, that are straightforward about what they are able to accomplish or not etc, but that does not change the big picture I am describing.

As much as recruiters may try, as nice or good hearted or ethical or hard working or well-meaning they might be, some facts will never change:
a. recruiters are hired and paid by the employer
b. they charge a $ 20,000 fee for their services and
c. they only get paid after closing the deal.
This leads to all the consequences and problems described here. I am not trying to indict recruiters, I am describing the basic framework they practice in.


1. Physician Recruiters are hired and paid by employers to fill a vacancy. They are not hired nor paid by the candidate. This is much more important than candidates think! Their loyalty therefore is to the paying party, the employer, not to the searching candidate. They do not get paid to consider the desires, careers or preferences of the candidates. The candidate is useful as far as he or she fills the job the recruiter gets paid to fill. A recruiter for example will never "negotiate a salary" for you, as some claim. You really think they will go against the employer who pays them and create higher costs to them? When it comes down to it, recruiters are not on the side of the job seekers. Their first priority is to close the deal and get paid. Their second priority is to satisfy the person who pays them, the employer. The third and last priority is the job seeker!

2. Recruiters charge $ 20,000 to fill a position. This is the biggest handicap for recruiters, something that no recruiter can overcome. This fee creates a rather high barrier to hire them. This explains why most practices do not work with them, this explains why mainly large corporations hire them. This explains why practices go to great lengths to avoid the need to hire them. This explains why the get mainly the left-over, hard-to-fill jobs.

Obviously you could argue about the significance of those 20K. Maybe the hiring hospital is flush in money and can afford to spend it, maybe the loss of revenue resulting from an open position is even more expensive. Maybe the yearly collections of the physician (e.g. neurosurgeon) dwarfs those 20K, but still, 20K are. To me as an ObGyn it means at least 18 patients over 9 months each with "complete prenatal cares plus delivery and postpartum care" after taxes. For a family physician it means seeing a whole lot of patients!

This places recruiters at a severe disadvantage compared to you, the job seeking physician, when you are applying for a position. You come without the price tag and instantly become a preferred candidate.

3. 80-90 percent of private practices refuse to work with physician recruiters, since their fee is $ 20,000. The usefulness of recruiters in medicine is reduced dramatically by the fact that they cannot reach that 80-90% of the job market - which is most of the private physician job market and pretty much the whole job market in desirable areas.
Keep in mind that 50-60% of physician jobs are filled through networking, 10-30% through advertising by employers and only 15-20% by recruiters.

What kind of help can you expect from someone who can only reach 20% of possible jobs - at most? Do you understand what a grave mistake it would be to start your job search with such a limitation?

4. What does a day in the life of a recruiter look like? Recruiters are salespeople and spend their days on the phone. Recruiters spend part of their day cold-calling practices, groups and hospitals to see if they are interested in their services. Then they pay large fees to NTNJobs, eHealthCareers and numerous other Internet boards to post job descriptions. Then they spend a few hours each day cold calling physicians, sending fliers, postcards or e-mails to program directors, specific departments and numerous physicians fishing for applicants.
Candidates will usually respond to recruiters by e-mail, submit their CVs and recruiters then forward these CVs with names blacked out to the potential employers. Looking at what recruiters do suggests that they are remarkably similar to telemarketers.

Recruiters love to give you the impression that they have resources or skills that you don't possess. Not so, they just want you to think that. Once you see what they actually do, you realize that you can do it perfectly well on your own.

5. Most recruiters subscribe to a background database, usually the NAPR "Job Bank". Paying subscribers store short profiles of jobs and candidates in these confidential, recruiter-only databases. Since thousands contribute to these databases recruitment becomes more efficient due to sharing of resources and combining efforts. "Maybe my candidate fits your job". Fees are usually split between the recruiter who has the candidate and the one who has the job. The is the same model that Realtors use. When a recruiter says "we personalize a search for you", (I love that slick line) he means he enters your name in the recruiter background database and checks if there is a matching job for you. The only problem is: the whole database is filled with left-over jobs. Jobs in the database have all been entered after they could not be filled by any other means!

6. Unlike what they sometimes claim, most recruiters do not visit practices and they do not get face to face with physicians. Usually they work nationally and seeing offices and physicians means travel and would be very time consuming and expensive. In my experience, recruiters do not screen neither candidates nor employers. Screening does not fill positions and only filling positions gets them paid.


7. Recruiters are first and foremost salespeople, not helpers. Given the fact that recruiters only get paid their $20,000 if they close the deal, they are highly motivated to sell.
This explains their behavior:
They contact as many physicians as possible per day, hoping to find the one that can fill the job.

They try to convince you that the jobs in "Desirable city" are not so desirable and that the countryside jobs they do have actually are better for you!
Recruiters loose interest in you if you insist on a very desirable area or if you are looking for part time jobs. Reason: Their chances of getting paid in all these scenarios are very low.
Because of the pressure to sell and the strong competition, all too often the candidate becomes just a number, a means to fill the job, to close the deal and get paid. The candidate becomes a meal ticket.

8. Physicians can easily find 2-5 times more jobs than the best recruiter. Physician are very easy to find, to locate. Physicians have been the target of marketers for a long time. They are listed in multiple databases, most of which are now online. List of doctor contact info can be easily bought from a large number of sources, some of them in very convenient fashion online in just a few minutes. Check out InfoUSA.com! Since physicians are so easy to reach, candidates do not need the help of recruiters! Medicine actually is not an appropriate field for recruiters. Candidates do not need recruiters at all (!), it is the employers who believe they need recruiters!
Please refer to my blog for excellent information how you personally can easily find more jobs than any recruiter. The previous posts in this blog contains all you need to know to find the best jobs!
Physicians applying to an employer without a recruiter do not have a 20,000 price tag attached and they immediately become a preferred candidate. Recruiters vehemently deny this in public, but admit it privately. Bottomline: recruiters are more of a distraction and burden to a job seeker rather than a benefit.

9. Recruiters are not "free for the candidate". This is a common marketing myth. Yes, the employer formally pays the fee. This fee is "recruitment cost" and therefore part of the overhead, the expense, caused by the candidate. The employer will recover this cost from the employed candidate in one way or another. Getting a job through a recruiter usually means a lower salary or fewer benefits, at least in the frist year.
Although, the true price of working with a recruiter is less visible and much higher: you get a less desirable job!

10. Recruiters may have many jobs, but they do NOT HAVE GREAT JOBS. Here I have to declare my own bias. I consider jobs in attractive, large cities "great jobs", an opinion that not everybody shares.
No matter if we talk about city or countryside though, the recruiters tend not to get the best jobs. The most attractive jobs are never advertised and are filled by word of mouth or direct mail. The moderately attractive jobs are advertised in print and on the Internet. Only those jobs that employers just cannot fill, even though many physicians look at them and decline, are handed over to recruiters to fill.
Recruiter told me" We get jobs in areas where there are more jobs than applicants" and "The function of recruiters in medicine is to fill the less desirable jobs", and Pam Pohly, another recruiter writes "Recruiters get the hard to fill jobs". Do you really want one of those jobs?
Ask yourself: DO YOU WANT A LESS DESIRABLE JOB?
After all, why would any employer pay 20,000 to a recruiter if a job can be filled by word of mouth of with $400-800 of advertising in a few journals?

11. Physician recruiters advertise using their own language: "easy access to", "a short drive to" means the locations is 1 to 2 hours from an attractive city. "Easy access to city A and B" is even worse, this job is in the dead middle between 2 separate suburban areas. "A great place to raise a family" means there is absolutely nothing to do in that town. If you are single, you are dead!
Much more important is what recruiters do NOT mention, such as high turnover of associates, low salary, high-buy-in and other hidden drawbacks.
But how can a recruiter find out in a 10 minute phone conversation what goes really on in a practice or hospital? They can't and the candidate is the one who suffers the consequences.
Recruiters sometimes "forget" to mention drawbacks of jobs, since that disclosure would hurt the sale.

12. Recruiters advertise insidiously by masquerading as "job search experts" and "advisers". This kind of marketing is much more dangerous, since it is often not recognized as the advertisement it is. This misleading marketing includes posing questions such as "How do you choose the recruiter that is right for you?” The implication of this question is that there is actually a recruiter that is right for you. Posing this question is similar to "Should I shoot myself in the left or right foot?" NO, you should not shoot yourself at all, and NO, you should not use a recruiter at all!
Often recruiters post tidbits of helpful info on their websites, such as links to licensing boards, short "5 points to improve your CV", but that is all marketing fluff to attract you or to make your CV more marketable. They will never give you advise how to best find a job - outside of recruitment. That would be bad for business. Therefore this info is never complete nor truly useful and in the end is only meant to get you as a client. Nothing wrong with that, you just have to be aware.
Anytime you read - anywhere - that someone recommends recruiters or even considers them a good alternative to networking, you are dealing with either a recruiter or someone who just does not know how the job market works.

13. Recruiters are NOT advisers, helpers, career counselors, CV writers or job market experts. They are usually neither qualified nor versed in any of these matters. They may read a lot of CVs, but that does not make them experts at writing or editing them. They will not take the time to go over your CV and advise you. They check your CV mostly for one single question: Can I sell this candidate?
They are not experts in the job market, even though they spend their time trying to fill job vacancies. Recruiters know only a small segment of the job market, the segment that is available to them. Do not trust their opinions in that matter, their opinions are shaped by the marginal 10-20% of jobs they are aware of.

14. Worst of all: recruiters do not disclose their limitations. They will not tell you that they cannot get jobs in desirable cities and locations. They will not tell you that they cannot get jobs with desirable practices. They will not tell you about alternative ways of finding jobs. This is a serious ethical issue - imagine a physician not treating a patient, just because he personally is unable to perform a certain surgical procedure! We send our patients to someone else who can help them. Recruiters never do that. Physician recruiters simply tell you that the great areas where you are looking for a job are " oversaturated". In reality this is a code for "unreachable for recruiters who charge 20K to fill a job". They will never tell you: "Just mail a letter to every doctor in Desirable City and you will get a job", because this might threaten the foundation of their existence. Imagine all physicians just mailing letters to eployers and getting jobs! Instead recruiters tell you "Call back in a few weeks, maybe I have something then". The obvious idea is to keep you as a client and maybe get that commission later, in blatant disregard of what you want and need! I consider this a lack of responsibility towards their clients.

Summary: AVOID physician recruiters!

The better way to find a job is a simple and very successful method: mail a letter containing your CV with a cover letter to every physician of your specialty in the area where you want to work. You buy the list of contact info online from e.g. InfoUSA.com, then load it onto your computer and mail-merge it with your cover letter in Word. Voila - hundreds of personalized letters addressed to every single physician in your area of interest. Most successful!!
See my previous blog post for a detailed description.

How can all this come up after recruiters have been serving the physician community for 20 years?
Personal computers and then the Internet have changed our lives. Contact information for physicians, once hard to find and expensive, can now easily selected and downloaded on the web within a few minutes. A PC can easily produce hundreds of customized, personalized letters and the new Internet fax services allow us to fax a letter to thousands of doctors with a few clicks.

That, together with Internet job boards that are becoming easier to navigate and with physicians and hospitals becoming more computer savvy, leads to a future of job searching directly without middlemen. More and more candidates will contact employers directly and viceversa. Recruiters might go the way of travel agents - a few continue what they are doing, but most find another field of work.

So, what keeps recruiters in business?
It is those employers who sadly do not know how to find candidates and those employers who do not have the personnel to recruit themselves. It is those colleagues who pay recruiter fees, who allow recruiters to pay for their advertising avalanche on the web. It is all paid by us, the physicians! This can change! I have described in detail the know-how that employers need to recruit successfully. Please check past posts in my blog for this.

Additional Resources for Your Job Search

List of additional resources for your job search

The most valuable book for the physician job search is "The Ultimate Guide to Finding the Right Job After Residency" by Koushik K. Shaw, MD. It is very easy to read, written in superb style, thoroughly researched, has the right attitude, and has outstandings chapters on evaluating a practice, what to ask during an interview and how to negotiate a fair contract. Every physician looking for a job should read it at least once! Excellent overall. Published by McGraw Hill, costs $22 at Amazon.

This is another book that I highly recommend, even though it is meant for everybody, not just for physicians:
What Color is Your Parachute? By Richard Nelson Bolles at 10 Speed Press, 2007. Less than $15 on Amazon.
The Classic, the bestseller on finding your career, changing careers and finding a job. Full of most valuable information and results of research, and full of surprises. Things might be a bit different from what you thought. It has numerous excellent references about books, websites, search engines, search methods, interview behavior and and and. A must read and it might just be the only book you will need on this topic.


Comphealth has posted a guide to job search on their website which is free (no wonder, it is a marketing tool that tries to get you to call them and get a job through them). The info in this "Best Friend's Guide to finding a practice" is good (in the areas where they offer information). Look at it as a valuable complement to my blog and ignore all the marketing for Comphealth.

"TheDoctorJob.com" website and blog has a "careercorner", where they publish good tips about how to write a cover letter, CV, how to prepare for and behave during an interview.

http://www.healthecareers.com/ the most professional appearing large recruitment website with enough employer ads to be useful.

Medical Economics Journal has a series of 5 or 6 articles on the physician job search. Find it by going to the "Medical Economics" website and then search for "job search"

A thoughtful article you should read before responding to recruiter calls. Even though it was written by an emergency physician, many of the points and caveats apply to all areas of medicine. http://www.emra.org/Index.cfm?FuseAction=Page&PageID=1002108
Some of the best articles for new physicians can be found here: http://www.newphysician.com/library.cfm. Be aware that this is the website of Merritt and Hawkins, a retained search firm, so will encounter a favorable bias towards using recruiters in your job search - which we know is nonsense.

Quintessentialcareers.com has a website with information for job seekers and career changers. They have so much useful information, links, book recommendations, that it is almost too much. You have to take care not to get lost in the sea of information. They are also a great company to write or re-write your CV and cover letter. When looking for any section of career and job search, they have the information or at least a link to the information. I highly recommend it, even though it is not tailored to physicians.

Pam Pohly's website, www.pohly.com
Produced by a former-executive-turned-recruiter. The site contains a list of numerous resources, most of which are very good. You will find great lists of professional associations, hospital directories, very good tips about writing a cover letter and CV, how to prepare for interviews, how to conduct yourself in an interview. Just skip the whole section on "recruiters" and the whole talk about recruiters being helpful in your job search.

www.Collegegrad.com While not written for physicians, the chapters on resume writing are excellent and the interview tips are not bad either. This site offers a lot of very good content - for free.

http://www.studentdoc.com/
Info by medical students and residents concerning job search

At http://www.aafp.org/fpm/20060700/37find.html you will find an article by consultant Jack Valancy, who occasionally publishes on the website of the American Academy of Family Physicians. He emphasizes finding your perfect career and job and to help you with this he has published a questionnaire called "Finding the perfect job". It helps you find out what matters most for you and what feelings and goals you should base your career planning on.

www.princetonreview.com/cte/articles/hired/searchsuccess.asp
This article in the Princeton Review emphasizes: know yourself, know your strenghts, then decide what you want to do and apply

The American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) in general has good and balanced info, but does not go into details, a bit superficial.

The website of the American College of Physicians ACP has only moderately valuable information, visit http://www.acponline.org/counseling/
I was disappointed by the shallowness and lack of depth of this info. Sorry. Not recommended.

New England Journal of Medicine website. They have a few tips concerning job search, but they still feed the misconception that recruiters have more than a marginal function in the physician job search. Overall well-meaning website, but does not have really good information. Misses the bite, in part because it tries to be politically correct and neutral.


http://practice.org/resources/resources.html. This website offers a bit more advice and less distracting recruiter blabla, so it is worth looking at.


http://www.cejkasearch.com/resources/careerdevelopment/default.htm#jobsearchstrategies this link will take you to some good and interesting advice on job searching by Cejka search. It is a valubale source of information about writing cover letters, CVs and interviewing. Otherwise they are just trying to lure you onto recruiter websites and into recruiter offered jobs. They discourage you from looking in the big cities and try to tell you that "the country side is much better" - no surprises here.

Less interesting links, only if you have time:

http://caps.uchicago.edu/resources/materials/books/jss.html#jss this list of the University of Chicago has numerous resources and books, but just the titles. you will have to do the rest yourself

http://jobsearch.about.com/od/findajob/a/onlinejobs.htm
http://jobsearch.about.com/od/findajob/a/howtofindajob.htm
http://jobsearch.about.com/od/toppicks/tp/jobsearchbook.htm
interesting pages on about.com that has many ways of searching for a job and gives good tips

Job Star Central.....http://jobstar.org/index.php a good list of info from the public libraries in CA
http://www.your-cv-coach.com/resume-writing.html general purpose tips for writing a CV and cover letter, not specifically greared towards physicians. Moderately useful.

Active Job Search Methods

1. Network using your established personal connections

This is not the time to be shy, not the time to be disciplined and withdrawn, not the time to be courteous! This is the time to make yourself heard, to be loud and obnoxious, to be relentless, untiring, persistent, this is the time to be pushy, pushy, pushy. Squeaky wheel gets the oil! Talk to anyone who will listen more than 2 seconds and give them your "elevator pitch".

Write an "elevator speech", meaning a one-minute talk to introduce yourself, who you are, why you are good, and what you have to offer to an employer and what you are looking for. Practice the elevator speech and use it whenever you can, it will become easier and easier.

What is the elevator pitch? Here is an example: "Experienced, Board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist with Yale training and multilingual skills – including fluent Spanish – seeking new practice opportunity in Boston to be closer to family. I have an active Massachusetts license and am available in 3 months."
The elevator pitch is a short introduction to what you have to offer, what you can do for others. You say who who are, what you do, what you excel in and how you are different and better than others. You can end with a call to action, such as "and I can start in one month"
There are several website and even books that spell out how to write the elevator pitch.
Print a business card (if you have Microsoft Publisher or something similar) or have someone print a business card with your phone number, fax number and your email address. Always carry it with you. Hand out this business card with your contact information as often as if possible. You could consider printing your elevator pitch on this card as well.

Start to network with your residency program director. It is part of his or her job to help you find a job. Then ask every single one of your attendings. Ask them if they know anybody who is looking or anybody with a practice you might like, or anybody wher you would fit in based on your personality and preferences. Try to find out if there are any former alumni of your residency program in the area where you are searching. Having gone through the same residency makes you sympathetic to a doctor and gives you a psychological "foot in the door".
Ask your parents and grandparents and your in-laws to contact their primary care doctors, their cardiologists, their orthopedists etc. See if the doctors of your family know of a very busy attending that might need help, might need a new associate, that might have plans to expand his or her practice. Just following this recommendation I got two great referrals in no time exactly where I wanted it and with almost no effort. One of them of one of the best job offers I ever had.

Call your friends from medical school to see if they are in apposition to hire you or if their practices or departments are searching – you would have an automatic contact reference. Ask distant relatives you have not talked to for 6 years to inquire at their doctors offices - and even speak to your present acquaintances.

Tell them what you are looking for, where you want to be and what kind of practice you would like to join (you already have decided and formulated this after reading the first paragraph). Don’t make it too exclusive, or you will be left without a job and don’t be too flexible, because you will be abused by someone who just wants to earn money off your sweat.

You could also try to get contacts through social networking websites such as Friendster or Orkut! There are no limits. Think Guerrilla Marketing.

If you do not know what guerrilla marketing is, read the classic book by Jay Levinson "Guerilla Marketing". He wrote and co-wrote a whole series of guerilla marketing books, including "Guerilla Marketiing for Job Seekers". The best book on job searching is still "What color is your parachute?". Read that if you have time, if it interests you or if you forsee a long search. Reading one of the Guerilla Marketing books will spark numerous creative ideas, these books are very inspiring and you will have read a marketing classic. Marketing will come in very handy in your practice later.

Mark Granovetter writes in "Getting a Job" that 56 percent of his subjects found their jobs through a "weak tie" personal connection. 83 percent of those who used a personal contact to get a job saw that contact "occasionally" or "rarely." It seems that acquaintances are more important than friends in obtaining employment adn you need to network with acquaintances and rely on the sympathy of relative strangers to find a job.

2. Actively contact the hospitals and their Ob/Gyn departments in your target area.

You can find all hospitals by going to MedLinePlus, then to Directories, then to American Hospital Association. There you can find hospitals by name, zip code and city. There are several other hospital directories you can search and you will find most of them in the following link This is Pam Pohly's list of hospitals and directories. AmericanHospitals.com - locate hospitals by region
American Hospital Directory - locate hospitals by region
Global MedNet - locate hospitals by region
Hospitals & Hospital System Websites - listing of selected hospitals
Hospital Web - find hospital web pages
JCAHO Directory of Healthcare Organizations - find accredited providers & listings of services
MedHunt - search for hospitals, provided by HON Foundation
Mental Health Centers - database of centers nationally
Pam Pohly was a consultant before becoming a recruiter, which may explain why her website has so much useful information. There is a very inexpensive hospital directory for downloading for $97 at Doctorlistpro.com. If you plan to search hospital data a lot, it may be worth buying it.
Once you have the hospital contact data, call the hospital and ask for the Physician Relations person, Physician Liaison or the Network Development person. Ask for the phone, fax and email.

Obviously you can also check the hospital’s website. The following link is a fairly complete and reliable list of hospital websites:
http://neuro-www2.mgh.harvard.edu/hospitalwebusa.html

The usual list providers, e.g. InfoUSA all have lists of hospitals with more or less detail. The advantage of InfoUSA is their reasonable prices. And the fact that you can buy exactly as many or as few addresses as you need. You essentially only need the address of the administrative offices, and then address your inquiry letter to "Physician Liaison / Network Development"Sometimes recruiter ads mention things such as "affiliated with newly renovated 301 bed hospital in Southern Texas". Once you know where to find the detailed information about hospitals, you can locate this 301-bed hospital easily and contact them directly.

While contacting hospitals and their departments you will encounter two opposite biases:
First bias: The doctors in your specialty will tell you: “There is no need here, we are all set here, we have too many doctors already, 10 years ago we were 5, now we are 13, it may look like a nice place to live, but believe me, it is a problematic place to practice! Why do you not look 100 miles further north or south, east or west, it’s much easier there, I happen to know someone there who is looking yadayadayada”. They obviously do not want more competition and are more or less openly trying to discourage you from coming. If they really wanted more physicians, they would already be hiring themselves!

This is course does not mean that you do not have a chance. The local doctors maybe older, maybe all male, may not be that popular anymore, may have some political pressure against them and in reality you may have a pretty good chance of being successful in that particular community.

Second bias, quite opposite to the first bias: The hospital administration is always very enthusiastic and encouraging – they always need more people, there always seems to be room for one or even two or three more, “Yes, there clearly is a need, there is an opportunity, you will do well etc, etc, blah, blah. We can help you with this and that, with everything actually (except a salary of course, except with any money at all, the help usually stops at non-material things, and routinely the Stark rules are cited as a excuse). In fact they might be able to help you a lot with marketing, by providing information about the community, giving you lists of fellow doctors of other specialties, give you background info on the service area of the hospital etc. But the hospital does not care at all (!!) how much money you make, or if you make any money at all. Deep down they do not care if you are successful or not. They have in mind that every new doc means another warm body attracting more business to the hospital. Every new doc means more admissions to the hospital floors… and therefore much needed cash in their coffers.

The medical director often stands somewhere in between these two opposites, and it is often someone specially hired for that position (retired, semi-retired handicapped, working part time etc) and therefore frequently the best source of information. Medical directors usually are more neutral. So talk to the medical director and try to get crucial information: how busy are the docs in your field, how is the population growing, which areas in town or in the county are growing and developing, which segment of the population is developing, are people moving in or out of the area, how is the industry doing? Are offices and factories closing or are companies flocking to town to open new ones? Real estate prices going up or down? That means people are coming into the area or are leaving the area…What does the future look like in the area? Then get the names and addresses of the practices affiliated with the hospital and the names and addresses of the practices that are looking or might be looking and contact them directly by sending them you cover letter and CV.

3. And, finally, here is the most successful and least published method. Loved by those who use it, despised by recruiters. This is the very best way of getting any job anywhere, even in the very best, most attractive, most competitive locations.

Direct Mailing and Broadcast Faxing of your cover letter and CV!

This is the most direct way of presenting your cover letter and CV to as many doctors as you want in exactly the area where you want to be.
You buy the names, addresses, phone and fax numbers of all the colleagues you might work for and send them a letter, send them a fax or give them a call. Calling takes a lot of time, I therefore recommend mailing or faxing. The big difference that makes all this easy and feasible is the Internet with unparalleled access to databases and Internet faxing. Something that was extremely time consuming 10 years ago, is now a snap. Applying to 400 physicians is now literally a project for one single weekend.

Buy the addresses, buy the contact data:

The sources for buying physician addresses and contact information, fax numbers, email addresses and numerous data about the practices are:
InfoUSA.com. This is by far the best website / webservice / list provider for our purposes. It does not have a "minimum purchase" of more than $500 as WebMD and SK&A databases, you have direct access to all selection criteria, you do not have to call and talk to any representative, you can do it all online, hassle free. And of course you can call if you need help. This is the best service of all the list providers mentioned here. The website is easy to navigate, intuitive and self explanatory. This is my list provider of choice.

USdata.com
WebMD, they now sell physician lists on a specialized website, and they seem to have very accurate information. Nevertheless, you have to call up in person and they have annoying "minimums" of dollars you have to spend. And they are more expensive and have less addresses than InfoUSA.
MMS, the marketing arm of the American Medical Association, the company that sells lists of their members for profit, so far this service has mainly be used by pharmaceutical companies. Very expensive, and they try to limit your use of the material, e.g you can use it onl yonce or twice - or you have to pay more. Forget them for our purposes.
Doctorlistpro.com, the most affordable list service if you are interested in large quantities. You have to buy in bulk, such as for example all doctors in one specialty $297, all doctors in one state $297, all doctors in all of the US $497, all hospitals in the US $97. Can't beat those prices, this is a lot cheaper then MMSlists. Get these lists before they become illegal or go out of business!
"The List Company", I have seen them on the internet, but have not tried them.
"SK&A databases". They are more expensive, somewhere in between the AMA and InfoUSA. They pride themselves to be "very reliable". Is that amrketing fluff or reality?
And numerous other list providers. Melissa Data also seem good.
Dr411 - which I do not recommend, they seem to be simply reselling the data from InfoUSA but are less flexible in their searches.

You can also buy or borrow from someone the American Medical Association book or CD that contains all the addresses of doctors in the US. The CD costs about $1100 and does not allow downloading and exporting of the data into a database. Who knows, maybe you know someone, who knows someone who has the disk and would be willing to loan it to you for a weekend? The AMA is very big on restricting the use of their databases. They want to be sure to squeeze the maximum profit out of your good name. In that context I should mention “Address Grabber” and “List Grabber”, 2 most interesting programs described below. You should know what these two programs can do.

You can get these data from Web MD on CD for $300+ for each metro area. A much more economical solution is to buy the booklets that WebMD sells for $18 for each Metro area that contain ALL physician names, addresses and telephone numbers. You will have to buy a second booklet for the same area to obtain the fax numbers. The fax booklet will also cost you $18. Over all a lot cheaper than buying the electronic lists, but you will have to type in th addresses if you ant to use them on a large scale. I have used the booklets from WebMD only to confirm my database that I purchased from InfoUSA. In late 2006 Web MD recently has started an online service to market their address lists - as mentioend above. The website looks very nice and professional. Take a look at it, I have not tried it, but the data are very reliable.

You should be familiar with a software program called “Address Grabber”. This is a very nifty tool to collect addresses, names, phone numbers from any electronic sources and insert them into your lists! It sells on the net as a download for $70. It allows you to “grab” and capture any address you see on your screen from any website, from any source with a single click. Very cool! If you can see it on your screen, you can transfer it to your database! Digest that fro a moment! You can produce your own lists!

You highlight the address you want to grab on the Internet or in Word or in other software...and then transfer all that information into a contact manager such as Outlook or ACT! With a just a single click. The info will appear like magic in the correct place, address in address field, name in name field, fax in fax field etc. Very handy. It is well worth the money if you search for a job in a difficult metro area and have to harvest addresses from the yellow pages, from WebMD etc. Obviously it is good for many other things, such as building address databases for referrals, fund raising, other mailings etc. There is a more advanced version of this technology called “ListGrabber” which imports not only a single address, but a whole page of addresses, a "list", hence the name Listgrabber, all at once, with just one click. It costs over $250 and most likely it will not pay off if you are a single physician looking for a job. But it is good to know that it exists, you never know...If you are an employer with repeated need for recruitment data, this is the tool for you.

Go to InfoUSA.com, which is the easiest to use. Once you are on the website, look in the center, go down and click on: "Doctors, Dentists and other medical lists". In the window that opens click on "Physicians and Surgeons Database" then check the specialties you are interested in, e.g "Obstetrics and Gynecology" and then, further down, check "office based". On the following page uncheck the specialties you are not interested in contacting, e.g. MFM, critical care obstetrics etc. On the next page, click on "select all members in office". Do not check the "fax number" box, since this will exclude doctors that have not listed a fax number. You want all the names and addresses and phone numbers! On the next page you can select the geographic area, whihc can be the whole country or just one zip code, or a radius of 500 miles around an address or just 10 miles. For example: you would like to join a practice within 15 miles of your parents home. Enter the address of your parents and select "20 miles". on the following page, leave everything unchecked, since it would only reduce your list. Then you get to review the list. Sould the list be too large, then choose a smaller geographic selection, or select by age or gender etc. Of course, you can also increase your list this way.

Once you are there, go to “physician lists”, and then follow the simple steps to select the doctors you want to contact. The price is 50 cents per address. Beats having to type it yourself. Info USA is the database which the other addresses and list providers get their data from. So, go to the source. InfoUSA will email you a list in CSV format, which you can import into Microsoft Outlook, Win Fax, Act, Excel or any “Contact Manager”. I would keep the original untouched in a safe place and import the data into your application of choice.

The following step is not absolutely necessary, but might increase the accuracy: InfoUSA's data come from the Thompson and Thompson, the company that publishes the PDR. When you receive a PDR (for free), they ask you to fill out a survey which contains the information "necessary to mail you the PDR for free the following year". So, you exchange a “free PDR” for your information. The Thompson and Thompson collects a number of data on this survey including how many patients you see a week, how many prescriptions you write a week, your medical school and year of graduation, your hobbies, such as travel, boating, fishing, skiing etc etc as well as the name of the office manager and contact person in your practice. The initial reason to collect these data was to sell them to the pharmaceutical reps, to allow them to target you better, to have an easier time to shmooze their way into your practice, and it is easy to see why. When you buy addresses from InfoUSA, you get these exact data back. Nothing more, nothing less. Considering the way these data are collected you have to weight that they are mostly self reported, they may be incomplete – maybe the boss of a practice does not care about filling out questionnaires or delegates it or does not use a PDR….
In one sample that I looked at closely, I had about 15% errors. Therefore, please take an afternoon and call all offices and or doctors and confirm the tel. and fax numbers. “this is Dr. xxx, I am new to the area and I am putting together my list doctors that I use for referrals” (who would say no to that?) or “I would like to send Doctor… a fax, could you please confirm the fax number” You may also look on hospital websites or HMO websites to confirm the data. Or you can check on the State Board of Registration, or Licensure or… however they call it. You may also check the yellow pages. Colleagues pay quite a bit for listings in the yellow pages, so they make sure that the listings are right! Be careful, hospital websites and physician directories are often outdated. At least discrepancies would raise a flag. You can also buy “the little blue book” for addresses and phone numbers and “the little Yellow book” for fax numbers of doctors. Since this is in book form, you can only use it as a confirmation. Unless you buy software for about $60 that converts lists into data that can be transferred into databases, meaning this software recognizes which is the first and last name, street address, zip code etc. May be worth the expense.

Then you write your cover letter in WinWord. Then go to the Mail Merge function. You find this under “Tools”, then “Letters and Mailings”, then Mail Merge. Follow the instructions WinWord gives you step by step. You write the master document, then insert the merge fields, then open the database and…merge. You can easily see and manage the merged letters with the “merge toolbar”, which you have to open.

Then you print out all the 100 or 200 or 300 letters on white or off white or cream 24 lb paper.

Then you get 100 or 200 or 300 copies of your CV done by you local Staples, Office Max etc.
Then you choose white or clear Avery labels at Staples or Office Max for the address and for the “sender” information (that is your address). WinWord knows how to precisely deal with the size of these labels. You enter the number of the Avery label and Winword knows the size and formats the address information exactly for the label. Magic! Then you print the labels using the Mail merge function again. You then fold and stuff the letters in envelopes, have the envelope weighed at the post office, buy the correct stamps and stick them on. You drop all 300, 500 or 1000 letters off at the post office and Voila! Mass mailing. You almost have the job. Just don't ruin the interview!

There is a company that does all the hard work of the mass mailing for you: ‘TheDoctorJob.com”. Go to their website and read and browse. Here are some quotes: “We help more physicians find jobs than any recruiter or job board in the country, and the reason is simple: we work for you, not for the employer. Unlike a recruiter, we won't try to force you to work in a rural area. Most of our clients find jobs in their first geographic choice, and we can help you find a great job in any metropolitan area in the country. 99% of our clients find jobs, and we guarantee that you'll find a job or get your money back. Visit our website at http://www.thedoctorjob.com" or call us to talk about our services and get a price quote. You will find a job with The Doctor Job. We guarantee it.”

They charge about $1, 50 to $2, 00 for each letter sent, but this is not too much. For that amount they review your letter and CV, maybe improve it, they get the names, addresses etc, they merge the letters, print them and send them to you. You have to sign them, to stuff them into the envelops and to put stamps on them, which costs money at 39 -63 cents a stamp. The service provided by “The Doctor Job” is very reasonably priced at $ 2000 – $3500. If that is too expensive for you, do it yourself. I did the mass mailing and faxing myself, and it cost about $1000, but it was a lot of work. I did never regret it though.

There is another company that provides this service since late 2006: Doccafe.com, a website founded and run by a former in-house physician recruiter and a lawyer. Not bad overall, but they still live off recruiter ads...

5. Mass Faxing:

You buy the addresses from Info USA or WebMD, have your CV and cover letter (re)written by Quintessential, add a signature image at the bottom of the fax and then fax it to 10, 50, 100 or 1000 colleagues using JBlast.

Step by step: You get the fax numbers from the same list sources. You use the same cover letter and CV. You can either sit at home or at the office fax machine and manually fax the hundred or two hundred cover letters and CV copies. You can buy a computer program that does the mass faxing for you. I have not tried it, but I believe a combination of the contact manager "ACT!" and "Winfax" does it for you - but Winfax is not being sold anymore end of 2006. Ask you computer consultant / neighborhood geek or nerd or Geek Squad member to set up a system for you.
You can mass fax using an Internet service provider called www.j2.com, who offers a fax broadcast service called Jblast. Jblast is great, since it is easy to operate and offers a Mail Merge function that works just like Mail Merge in MS Word. And is very reasonably priced. You can use your Word document and your CSV address and fax number list or your Excel address/fax number list.
I recommend using an Internet faxing service anyway, since you can get a personal fax number with an area code of your choice - yes an area code anywhere in the USA - and you can switch it at any time. Now you have a fax number that you can print on your CV. The advantage is that this fax number will follow you after you move and after you leave residency. This fax number is as portable as your yahoo, hotmail or Gmail email address. This is an advantage because employer can send you faxes even after you have moved away and still find you. Maybe this is the way you will hear about your dream job!

Important! Add a signature at the bottom of your fax. It makes it look a lot better, more realistic, more credible. I wrote my signature on a tablet computer, saved it as a file, emailed myself the file and pasted it into my word document between the "Sincerely" and my name at the bottom - voila!

Even more important! Be clear about the laws and regulations in your state concerning faxes. You may be breaking rules against spam faxing and unsolicited faxing and it might cost you! Be careful and be informed! Although I doubt that a colleague will file a claim against you for simply sending a job application, you never know - it takes only one...

6. Follow up!
Believe it or not, your application is not that special! Yes, it may get lost, neglected, forgotten in the daily rush, put at the bottom of a pile, or it may just get thrown away since the owner had a bad, fight with the spouse etc. It therefore is a good idea to fax the same letter and CV or a slightly different, maybe shorter version - about 2 weeks later. Keep your cover letter and CV in front of your potential employers!
And of course, you could call the most interesting practices and ask to speak to the doctors. Always leave message that you called with your call back number. This is not the time to be shy! Squeaky wheel gets the oil.

Should you not get the right practice during the first mailing campaign, then try to mail to a larger group, let's say a wider area. Include one or two or three more counties, or a few more zip codes. Are you sure that your CV is optimized? Is it really written by a professional? Have you made sure that Your letter arrives on Tuesday or Wednesday, when it has the highest chances of getting read?

Or just try the same list again, who knows. Maybe this time they will actually open the envelope, maybe the practice situation has changed. Sometimes partners or associates or their husband or wives leave, sometimes people die or suddenly have to retire. So, just try again, I would recommend to repeat this every 4 months. It will work!

Passive Job Search Methods

“Passive” means you do not actively approach potential employers, but you look on websites and in journals for offers. This is not a very effective strategy, since jobs are usually advertised after the employer has not found anybody by asking around and by informally advertising the position to colleagues, friends, the nearest residency training program etc. A job is advertised months after an employer has been thinking about hiring someone.

You should actively and aggressively approach potential employers and you should reach them BEFORE they ever get to advertise (see below). Nevertheless I recommend using the "passive search" in addition, as a complement to your active search. You never know what you find. Here are the best places to search for job postings on the Internet and in journals. They are the best because they have a large number of offers and a high number of direct-by-employer offers:1.

1. Websites
NTNjobs.com: This website used to be the "ACOG job website" referred to until 2005. It has a large number of direct-from-the-employer ads. The advantage of such ads is that they tell you where it really is; they give you the address of the potential employer instead of the typical obscure recruiter line "near a Midwestern metro area". It is absolutely better to contact employers directly - you save them $ 20,000 as compared to contacting them through a recruiter, and every physician appreciates that. The Jobs are listed in a convenient way: alphabetically by state and location. Candidates post a short profile, but that serves mainly to receive email notifications about new job postings, but don't expect employers to go through that list and contact you....

Practicelink.com. This is a very valuable resource. Here you will find jobs advertised by hospitals and health care systems. Very often these are good jobs in practices and offices. The difference is that on the Practicelink website hospitals are helping practitioners to set up new practices or expand existing practices. Answering these ads will put you in touch with "in-house recruiters" that will pass on your CV and information to the employers / private practices. In-House recruiters do not want to convince you to accept a job in Podunk so that they can get their 20K commission, they do not want to sell you the less desirable jobs. In-house recruiters are commonly employees of the hospital and easy to deal with. When using Practicelink you know exactly where the jobs are and you easily find out who the potential employers are.
HealtheCareers.com, the job board that ACOG officially links to. I am not clear why they switched from NTNjobs, but Healthecareers.com looks "bigger and better" and a bit more flashy and shiny. I can only guess that their deeper pockets contributed to the switch. Healthecareers.com has a good number of direct-from-employer ads. You can access it directly on the web or through the ACOG website by clicking on Careers

PracticeMatch is worth mentioning, since it tells you the direct location of the advertising hospitals and group practices. You will find it here.

Indeed.com surprised me with an easy search method, no need to register (very handy, no remembering a password when you want to return to the site) and quite good results. The results were mainly postings transferred from Practicelink, but also from hospital websites, newspapers, recruiter websites and all sort of other sources, making it a very useful tool. Best of all, you can enter a search and have the results of this search emailed to you daily. This is very similar or identical to Google Alerts! Check on it and see if it works for you.

Besides these two there are several thousand (!) other websites, some of whom even proclaim to be "specialize" in ObGyn, but they rarely are useful. These "job sites" are run by non-physicians, who mostly do not understand much about what we do and what we need and who seem to be in it mostly for the easy money. Very likely you will not find any helpful advice or tips, all you get are the same old recruiter ads...
ObGyncareer.com is a good example of what is wrong with most of these sites. ObGyncareer offers extremely poor advice for job searches - just three flimsy consultant articles with general musings about the future of medicine with close to zero relevance to your personal job search. It was clearly put together in a rush, without any deeper thought and or any participation of physicians. And the goal and business principle is clearly to make money by selling ads to recruiters. As expected, the job offers are almost exclusively posted by recruiters and, to make matters worse, in January 2007, often outdated and over 6 months old. The website is one of about two dozen "Medcareerlab.com network" websites, which looks like someone is trying to get into the recruiter and job website market, again mostly for the money and definitely not out of experience, passion or a true desire to help physicians. Recently, in Jan 2007, this particular website gave up their specialization on ObGyn started to post FP, Anesthesia and other jobs! Whom are they kidding? This is a clear sign of failure. Stay away!

All-purpose websites such as Monster.com, Careerbuilder.com, YahooHotJobs and Craigslist.com are completely and utterly useless. They have no physician postings. All you find is jobs in nursing, postings for medical assistants, lab and radiology techs, transcriptionists etc. The physician marketplace is very specialized, separate from the rest and nobody looking to hire a physician would ever consider posting on general purpose websites.

2. An important stop in your passive job search is to look in widely distributed print publications (throw away journals) such as in

Contemporary Ob/Gyn,
Ob/Gyn Management or Obgmanagement.com,
Ob GynNews or Ob.Gyn.News.com
The green journal also has good ads, but they are a bit expensive for private practices and therefore you will mainly find academic departments and large hospitals advertising.
Some people recommend contacting the local or regional medical societies. Bad advice. They usually have NO IDEA what is going on in the local job market, at least in Boston and Miami where I tried this. It is not part of their job, of their mission. Medical societies are not in close contact with the majority of physicians (they will deny this).

3. Check the websites sites of large hospital chains
such as Humana, Tenet Health, Columbia, UHS, HCA (Hospital Corporation of America). Most of these chains own dozens or hundreds of hospitals and offer jobs on their websites or at least contact information for job seekers. They usually respond quickly and pleasantly. Go to their website, e.g. Tenet Healthcare.com, click on “Career center”, then on “For Physicians”. Fill out the inquiry form, and you will receive answers. You will also find contact information to as many individual hospitals as you want – choose your area. You will be contacted by the physician liaison of the hospital who usually is able to give you a general idea of what is going on in the area and might be able to point you to physicians that are very busy and might be looking or to physicians that are about to retire and might be interested in taking someone in that could continue the practice within a year or two. In areas of need they may even offer you a paid job. Overall, usually a pleasant, if not rewarding experience.

HCA, another large hospital company, owns hundreds of hospitals. They do their own recruiting (in-house recruiters) and/or help their affiliated physicians and groups to hire doctors. In Florida that is Leianne Bellmore, 866-690-3200. You could go to their main website http://www.hcahealthcare.com/ and then click on “Career Opportunities” and then go either to "search job postings" or immediately below HCA Facilities Career Center".

4. Innovative use of the Internet.
Create a Google Alert to help you in your search. Google alerts can be found in your Google account. Should you not have one already, then you need to get one. Get an email account at Gmail.com, then sign in and look for "My account" or "other services". Should Google be your homepage, then go to "more services" and you will find the alerts.An alert is a search that is run automatically for you every day or every week etc. You can for example search for "physician opportunity ObGyn San Diego" and "ObGyn job San Diego" Physician need ObGyn San Diego" etc. You can create as many alerts as you want, then track them over a few days and weeks. Delete the ones that do not yield results, keep the ones that work. Every day you will find the results of these searches in your Gmail inbox. this way I found several excellent hints and tips. Often you find recruiter ads, but you may be able to find who is searching through a recruiter and contact them directly. If you know the city or county well, where you are searching, you can read between the lines of the recruiter ads and often figure out who exactly is advertising. Or, once you know that someone in a certain city, town or county is searching through a recruiter, you can simply mass fax everybody in that city, town or county and you are likely to find the one practice that is advertising through a recruiter. I have done exactly this more than once with good success.

Also, if you have a Google homepage, you can very easily set up a separate tab for job search. Open a new tab and then go to the "add stuff" button and look for "Job search" buttons and gadgets, which are essentially search engines fields that will be on a specific tab of your home page. You can search Indeed.com, one recommendable search engine and others with truly a few clicks. Others that I have on my job search tab are: www.Oodle.com, then http://gjsearch.googlepages.com/ or "Job Search Universe". You can even set up your "own custom search engine" - supposedly, but I do not understand how. Maybe you do.

LinkedIn might be a thought. Try registering and making connections to the area where you are looking. Sometimes connections work in funny ways. I was talking to an accountant of a physician whose practice I was considering buying, when he told me that another ObGYn had suddenly died and that his practice was up for sale. Too late, two other local colleagues had already scooped it up. Maybe LinkedIn or another social networking site may get you where you want to go.
Quote from the Toronto Star, copied from the LinkedIn Press pages: "LinkedIn is free and it’s one of the best networks. First, you join and create a personal profile. Second, you invite all your friends and associates to join. Your network will grow quickly as you recruit members who recruit members. ‘From a job hunter’s standpoint, LinkedIn represents an opportunity of a lifetime to establish a powerful network of influential colleagues and friends,’ says Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters by Jay Conrad Levinson and David Perry.” But remember that this is mainly networking in the business world, not in medicine.

Decipher recruiter ads, skip the middleman and contact the employers directly. Recruiters do not tell you where exactly the job is until you have sent them your CV and THEY have presented your CV to the employer. Then they have secured the right to be paid! If they told you where it is, you could just call and get the job. Often solo recruiters or smaller companies describe the location of a practice by inserting text literally copied from the local tourist agency material. For example, Fort Lauderdale is often described as a place with "23 miles of pristine white beaches", a line taken directly from the visitors bureau leaflet.

In February 07 I saw an ad about a "Miami suburb with a Venetian pool with 820,000 gallons of water" - and anybody who has ever taken a tourist tour in Miami has made a stop at the gorgeous Venetian Pool in Coral Gables. If you google the "820,000 gallons" of water, you get Coral Gables and the Venetian Pool. Sometimes it is that easy to find out where the jobs are. So, google those sentences and you will often find out within a few minutes where the jobs are. Then go to the yellow pages, get the phone number of the local hospitals and contact the physician liaison at these hospitals to see who is hiring. Voila! $20,000 saved, and you can hint at this fact during the salary negotiations and maybe get a better salary or moving money, better benefits, etc.
Often, you will read a sentence like "affiliated with a 231 bed hospital". You can find hospitals with number of beds by going to the American Hospital Directory (AHD.com), then clicking on the state and then going down the list until you find a match. You can also go to MedlinePLus, then to the hospital directory. MedlinePlus is a good resource in general for almost all matters related to medicine.
Plase note that this does not work with the ads from CompHealth, a large recruiting company, since they have figured out what Google can do. The most detail you will get on their website is "multispecialty practice in Georgia looking to hire".

Physician Recruiters should Tell You about their Limitations!

If one of my patients has a problem that I cannot solve myself, I acknowledge the problem my patient has, and I tell her who can solve it. Then I give her the name, address and telephone number of colleague who can solve it. Anything else would be unacceptable and unethical.

Should recruiters not inform us that they are not able to find jobs in attractive cities or about anywhere where there are more applicants than jobs? They do not. Recruiters are fully aware that jobs are first advertised by word of mouth, then in print media and on the Internet as direct-by-employer ad, and if all this is not successful, months later, a recruiter is called.

Do recruiters refer you to someone else you can find you a job in the area you want, such as in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Atlanta, Miami or Seattle? NO!

Why do we not apply the same kind of ethical standards to physician recruiters that we apply to ourselves?

For several years, every recruiter who has contacted me has heard my request "I want a job in Attractive City only, nowhere else. And only one, just one, single veteran recruiter has ever said, "Listen, a recruiter cannot help you there, we do not get those jobs, you have to do it yourself. Just call all the physician offices yourself". Rather than helping you achieve your career goal, out of a sense of responsibility, recruiters tell you that the good jobs are "not available".

And consequently they try to convince you that you preferred location, the attractive city, is just not right for you! You find this written openly and in subtle ways…Here is one example from the Cejkasearch website: quote start "If you have your heart set on Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Francisco, or Seattle, join the club. That's the problem: Such highly desirable locations in terms of lifestyle may be highly undesirable from a professional standpoint. Large metropolitan areas are either already swamped with managed care or about to be. And because competition for jobs is intense, practice opportunities are fewer, compensation may be less, and your financial future may be shakier than in less populous locales." quote end

“Highly undesirable from a professional standpoint” Did I read that correctly? Boston (or any other city mentioned above for that matter) is undesirable, even though it has some of the best doctors to talk to, the best CME talks, the best contacts, and referral opportunities? I believe these cities offer the chance to keep up with and practice the best medicine, but then, what would Cejkasearch know about that?

You could also say it this way: "City, where you want to be, not good, countryside, where we have jobs, good!"

On recruiter blogs you will read musings about "what do you (the doctor) really need to be happy, do you really have to be in the big city, could you do with less, could you not live in the countryside?” (dochunterdiary.com). Quite an insult, I certainly do not want anybody telling me what I need or do not need!

This lack of responsibility for a client is what really turned me against recruiters. I find it discouraging that recruiters do not intend to help you, they do not intend to give you advice, and they do not feel any responsibility towards you or your career - no matter what their emails, brochures and websites say. After years of dealing with recruiters I am convinced that they are just interested in making a quick buck.

Here is an enlightening posting on a blog by a former recruiter:

Begin quote:
Before I started my coaching business, I learned the traditional selling process while working in recruiting and sales for a national consulting firm. To say that I am familiar with prospecting would be an understatement. While working there, I burned up the phone lines each day, constantly dialing the phone in search of potential clients. The headset became a permanent fixture on my head as I "smiled and dialed" for dollars and for fresh prospects.

On an average day, I made around 100 phone calls and spent at least 3 hours actually on the phone (time spent dialing the phone or taking a break in between calls didn't count towards my daily activity goal). As part of that routine, I left multitudes of messages, dialed hundreds of wrong numbers and heard the phone slammed down in my ear - all in search of the next prospect, that potential candidate who was ready to hear my shtick about new "practice opportunities."......

Aside from reaching a certain activity goal each day, the purpose of my incessant dialing of the phone was clear. I was on the hunt for a certain number of prospects that could possibly fill the practice opportunities (jobs) our team represented. For any given job, I hoped to find at least 4-5 prospects in hopes that one of them would work out and actually take the job.

If not, then I was back to the drawing board, since my compensation was directly tied to the number of interviews and number of placements (jobs filled) that I could help make happen.

Many days, I often wondered how our firm could do things differently - to better reach the prospects and potential clients in our target market. I knew there had to be a better, more effective (and efficient) way to build relationships with our potential clients. To establish trust and credibility, so that they contacted us when they were ready for our services, instead of us hounding them until they either cried "uncle" or changed their phone number.

Many of us on the team had ideas on how we could improve our sales cycle and produce even better results. No such luck. These suggestions fell on deaf ears, as "management" was not interested in changing the process. Based on their responses, it seemed that the executive team had no interest in actually developing relationships with our candidates and clients. They were focused on the short term - finding as many deals to increase profits today, regardless of the negative backlash it created both within the company and among potential candidates. But that's another story for another time...

This is an excerpt from a posting on the blog of Michael Port "Book yourself solid". It could not be clearer. Fortunately for job seekers, Direct Mail and companies like "TheDoctorJob.com" make it easy for you to get a job just where YOU want it.

The Best Method of Finding a Physician Job

1. Decide where you want to work. Consider the climate, the landscape, the economical situation and future outlook, the culture, your ability to pursue your hobbies, the cost of living and of real estate, the cost of malpractice, the possibility of working without paying malpractice, and financial issues such as being able to balance-bill.

2. Buy a list of all addresses, phone number and fax number of all physicians in your specialty in your desired area. This is much easier and cheaper than you may think.

List providers are InfoUSA.com, WebMD, USAData.com or MMSlists, the marketing arm of the AMA.

I prefer InfoUSA.com. First, you can easily select just the right group of physicians you want. Second, you can purchase your list online, without having to call anyone. Third, there are no restrictions on the list you receive such as number of times you can use it (The AMA is a bit old fashioned and just loves to restrict you...). The cost per physician contact info is about 75 cents. For this you get address, telephone and fax number. InfoUSA also gives you year of graduation, name of office manager and a number of other useful little data. You will receive the list via email in CSV or Excel format. Either format is fine for your purposes.

3. Write your CV and cover letter. Have them reviewed, rewritten or may be written anew by an expert, such as a friend who is a marketer or publicist, an English major, or a professional writer, e.g. the people at Quintcareers.com. I have personal experiences with Quintcareers.com and was happy with them.

4. Have your CV photocopied on quality paper at Staples, Office Max, Kinko, etc. I prefer beige paper, 22 or 24 lb.

5. Use Microsoft Word to Mail-Merge your cover letter with the address list from InfoUSA and print the 100-500 personally addressed letters on the same paper as your CV. Your office store can do that as well for you. Sign all letters, fold and put them in envelops. Address the envelops with clear plastic labels, e.g. Avery, that you buy at your office store. You can print the addresses and your own home address on these labels using Word.

6. Mail your cover letter and CV to all doctors in your target area. Mail them so that they arrive on a Tuesday or Wednesday. This increases the chance of being read.

7. You may also fax your cover letter and CV (or maybe just your cover letter) to all physicians in your target area. You can fax all letters individually or you can use an Internet fax service such as JBlast.com. This is my preferred fax broadcast system because it allows you to Mail-Merge your letter with your list of addresses with the same ease as MS Word. You can literally fax your letter to hundreds of physicians with a single click. This costs about 6-10 cents per fax. Please consider the laws about unsolicited faxes that apply in most states! You may be considered to send unsolicited faxes, which may be illegal! You are doing this at your own risk!

The response rate will be 1-2%, meaning if you mail or fax 800 letters, you will receive about 8-16 interviews. The more physicians you contact, the more interviews you will get. This is the least expensive and most effective, most successful way to find a job as a physician - and you can find it exactly where you want it. Obviously, you may repeat this after three to four months if it does not work the first time.

8.Sounds like too much work for you? You do not know how you can fit this into the schedule? there is a company that does all the legwork for you. It is called TheDoctorJob.com. They will charge about 1.50 to 2.00 for each letter they write, print and mail. It is slightly more expensive then doing it yourself, but it saves you time. They have been doing it since 2003 and are very, very good at it. Since 2006 Doccafe.com also offers this service, but they do not seem very enthusiastic about it. After all, they seem to live on recruiter ads and recruiters despise the direct mail method. It makes them obsolete.

9. Follow up, follow up, follow up. That means sending another letter, another fax or calling one or two weeks after sending the letter. Be persistent.

10. Parallel to all this, use the methods that I call "Passive search". Click here to find out more.

11. Avoid recruiters! With the above method you will find 2-5 times more jobs than the best recruiter will ever be able to find. Your application does not have a 20K price tag attached and therefore your letter is much more welcome than a mailing from any recruiter.

http://www.wikihow.com/Find-a-Physician-Job

Find and Hire Physicians - Tips For Employers

The Internet brings new tools to everybody's desktop and has fundamentally changed how employers can search for a new physician associate. There are excellent new ways to recruit and I will explain some of them here in detail.

Consider sidestepping recruiters. Your human resources department or Physician Liaison or Network Development Department can do most of the recruiting unless they are hopelessly inept or understaffed.

Recruiters usually cannot tell you anything about physician candidates that you or your staff would not find out in a few minutes too. They hardly know the candidates - except for that 10-minute phone call and the review of their CV.

Contrary to their marketing, recruiters do not "select" or "screen" candidates, they sell them to you. A candidate that has been "screened out" does not make money. Selecting does not make money - selling does. And recruiters are in the business of selling. They sell the candidate to you and they sell you to the candidate. That's what makes money.

The $18-22,000 you have to pay the recruiter for a few CVs and a candidate have to come from somewhere! Many employers simply reduce the first annual salary of the newly hired physician by those $20,000. Unfortunately, you immediately become less attractive to good candidates, since you pay less than the competition or maybe less than the average market salary. You would get better candidates if you offered a higher salary! Have you considered increasing salary and incentives as a marketing tool? The $20,000 would yield more results for you if you invested them in your future physicians salary (and therefore job satisfaction!)

Last, not least, the fact that you are using a recruiter raises a red flag for the good and savvy candidates. They wonder why you even need to advertise through a recruiter. Are you in a hurry to find an associate? Do you have sub-optimal working conditions? Do you have a high turnover of new associates? How come you are not popular enough to have candidates on a waiting list? Why on earth do you have to PAY to find a new associate?

And of course, recruiters are trained sales people with an arsenal of answers and some rethoric to remove your objections. The "Gopher recruitment software" from Blackdog has a few tips and tricks for recruiters how to overcome client objections - yes, the client is you and the objections is what you think and feel: Click here to read them carefully, so that you are prepared for the attack!

It makes financial sense to actively market your position yourself. This is easier and more affordable than you may think. Here is a way to find a new associate for about $2000-4000, including all the time your colleagues, associates and secretaries will spend on it. You may delegate every single one of these activities.

Write an ad briefly describing your practice or hospital, including your philosophy and goals or your mission, characteristics of the practice, number of physicians, hospital affiliation, and number of deliveries each year, number of surgeries each week. Explain what responsibilities and how much work the position entails, for example how many work days a week, what the call ratio is, mention additional administrative duties, and –very important - what you are willing to offer in terms of payment. You should mention a salary range, for example "160-190 K depending on experience". And no, this will not lock you in into a certain salary! Describe benefits and future opportunities, such as partnership, and the time to partnership. And finally, describe the community in a few words - something that the local tourist bureau can help you with. This ad should be about half a page – and you can always modify it later. The 2 most important points for me have always, always been: location and salary. Make sure you mention these two points if you want your ad to have maximum impact.

Now, how do you get your letter to potential employees?

1. Advertise in print media (and here I assume you are searching for an ObGyn) such as "Ob.Gyn.News", "OBGmanagement", "Contemporary ObGyn", or in the Green Journal.

2. Post your position on the largest and most relevant job sites for ObGyns: NTNjobs.com, healthecareers.com, Practicelink.com. Do not forget to post the job on your own website.

3. Approach potential candidates directly through mail, fax, and email.


Here are a few more details to illustrate the above points:

1. Print media. You can also advertise for about the same amount of money in the three most popular "throw away journals" - OBGmanagement, Ob.Gyn. News and Contemporary ObGyn. They all have websites and 800 numbers. Their prices are reasonable and vary by size of the ad. Since these three magazines are for free for the reader, they are literally everywhere and get a lot of attention.

2. Advertise your job on the Internet! There are two great websites to reach a large number of ObGyns and physicians in general. Post your ad on NTNjobs.com for about $ 315 for 3 months and $215 for the following three months. NTNjobs is a great website, it has a clear design and is easy to navigate. It has been around for over 15 years and gets a lot of attention from job seekers. They are known to have numerous direct-from-employer ads and less recruiter ads. NTNjobs also gives you access to a list of physicians who are presently searching for a job in your geographical area and you could contact them directly.

I also recommend posting your ad on the new "ACOG Career Connection" section of the ACOG website, which is "healthecareers.com". A single posting costs $350 for 60 days.

A number of successful bloggers are trying to cash in on their popularity and have started advertising jobs. At the moment (July 2007) I do not recommend advertising there, since they are not established yet and the number of eyes that you reach are too small.


3. I would like to explain the direct mail approach in more detail, since it is less known and very underused.

For a direct mail or fax campaign you need the names, addresses, fax-numbers etc of the physicians you want to reach.

You can easily, quickly and comfortably buy addresses of physicians from a list-provider such as InfoUSA.com. You can do this online within minutes. Once you are on their website, look in the center, go down and click on: "Doctors, Dentists and other medical lists". In the window that opens click on "Physicians and Surgeons Database" then check the specialties you are interested in, e.g. "Obstetrics and Gynecology" and then, further down, check "office based" or "hospital based" or whatever you need. On the following page uncheck the specialties you are not interested in contacting, e.g. MFM, critical care obstetrics etc. Do not check the "fax number" box, since this will exclude doctors that have not listed a fax number. You want all the names and addresses and phone numbers! On the next page you can select the geographic area, which can be the whole country or just one zip code, or a radius of 500 miles around an address or just 10 miles. Then you get to review the list. Should the list be too large, then choose a smaller geographic selection, or change the selection by introducing age limits or gender etc. Of course, you can also increase the number of physicians this way.The price is 50-75 cents per address. There is no minimum to buy. InfoUSA will instantly email you a list in CSV format, which you can import into Microsoft Outlook, Act!, Excel or any other Contact Manager software program.
I prefer InfoUSA due to the convenience and price. I have looked into MMSlists (the AMA list provider) and WebMD. Here is my opinion about them.

The American Medical Association has been collecting the contact information of all physicians in the US for many years and has made quite a few dollars by selling your good name, mainly to pharmaceutical companies. They have founded their own list provider company "MMSlists.com". They have very good and reliable data, but unfortunately they are very expensive. And they impose all sorts of restrictions, such as number of times you can use the data. Because of this, I do not recommend them.

A more economical solution is the following: Buy or borrow the American Medical Association book and the companion CD that contain the contact information of every single doctor in the US. The book plus CD cost about $1200, and it does NOT allow downloading and exporting of the data into a database! Yes, the AMA is expensive. But, there are some inexpensive and very useful alternatives!

Oh, well, but then there are Address Grabber and List Grabber, 2 most interesting software programs. They are very nifty tool to collect addresses, names, phone numbers etc for your lists! "Address Grabber" sells on the net as a download for $70. It allows you to "grab" and capture any address you see on your screen from any website, from any source - with a single click. If you can see it on your screen, you can transfer it to your database! You highlight the address with the mouse; the Address Grabber recognizes it and transfers all information into a contact manager such as Outlook or ACT! The info will almost magically appear in the correct place, address in address field, name in name field, fax in fax field etc. It is well worth the money if you search for a job in a metro area and are collecting contact information from yellow pages, from WebMD and other lists. Obviously it is good for many other things, such as building address databases for referrals, fund raising, other mailings etc. The more advanced version is called "ListGrabber". It imports not only a single address, but a whole page or list of addresses - hence the name. It costs over $250 and most likely it will not pay off if you do not use it a lot. It may be worthwhile for large multispecialty groups and hospitals.

You also could contact all the graduating residents in your specialty in the US. The best time is September – November of each year when they start looking for a job.
To reach the graduating residents you could send your one page ad to the residency program directors of all the programs you wish to see candidates from. Ask them to post your leaflet on their job boards and to announce it during morning rounds or weekly meetings.
You can obtain the addresses of all residency programs from the Graduate Medical Education Directory, the so called Green book. It is sold by the AMA to members for about $70 as a book or CD. Have your secretary fill in a database with all those names and addresses, or buy a database from the marketing arm of the AMA and import those data directly into Excel, which may save two or three hours of typing.

Then there is PracticeMatch.com, a data and recruiting company. On their website you can buy - online, fast, and with your credit card - the names and hospital addresses of all the graduating residents in the country - by specialty. For ObGyn you would get the names and addresses of about 1100 ObGyn residents about to graduate in June of that year. The price is a mere $250. Get the addresses, and mail them your ad or leaflet individually. I would choose mail over fax, since graduating residents would receive a fax in an office of the program director or the chief of Ob or Gyn. A letter on the other hand would go directly to their personal mail box. Voila, you have access to a whole year of graduates!

I should mention a very-low-cost list provider called "Doctorlistpro.com". They claim to sell the whole directory of physicians in the US for $500. The list of all physicians in a single specialty, meaning e.g. all ObGyns in the US, costs only $ 300. Click on http://www.doctorlistpro.com/ and see what they have. They also have a list of physicians email addresses! Emails campaigns are very inexpensive and will probably be the way of the future.

And now enjoy the CVs coming in. You can go through the pile yourself or you can set a few criteria such as level of medical school, level of residency training, years of experience, age etc. and have someone else go through the list of CVs. Your colleagues, your wife, your secretary, your office manager etc. all could help you.

Send a standard letter to the selected candidates and invite them for an interview.