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".