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.