Blogging with The Doctor Job

One of The Doctor Job’s recent clients enjoyed the free calculators we sent him when we sent him his package of resumes, cover letters, and envelopes for his job search. He decided to go back to the old calculator tricks from elementary school and send us a couple of funny pictures. If you’re a past client, and you’ve done something funny with the swag we sent, go ahead and email it to us at blog AT thedoctorjob DOT com.

Ah, to be back in the carefree, innocent days of a child when something like this was the funniest thing you’d ever seen!

Today’s post will be a quick discussion of fellowship programs. There are three main reasons that physicians enter fellowship programs, and only one of them is a good reason. Read along and see if you agree.

Reason 1: Because the resident can’t find a job

You would be simply amazed at how many residents go into fellowship in specialties like Geriatrics, Critical Care or Infectious Disease because they don’t think they can find a job after graduating from residency and so they get worried. This is NOT a good reason to do this!

Every resident can find a job where he or she wants to be before graduating. Every. Single. One. If a physician is using recruiters and talking to their program and still can’t find a job, then get aggressive. Network, go to conferences, and get your name out there. Even if you don’t use a service like The Doctor Job, there are many avenues that a physician can pursue before giving up and joining a fellowship for the wrong reason.

What The Doctor Job has discovered is that these fellows tend to be more dissatisfied and have this illusion that when they get out of fellowship, they’ll easily find a job practicing what they want. However, the reality is that most physician employers will get confused. “Why do you want to practice Internal Medicine if you just spent that last year doing Infectious Disease?” they’ll ask. And the fellow will not have a good answer. It actually makes the physician’s career choices more difficult and is more likely to result in a bad working environment for any physician who gives up and doesn’t put forth the necessary effort into finding a job after residency.

Reason 2: Because the physician wants more money

With some exceptions, this is also the wrong reason to go into fellowship. First of all, let’s examine the logic of the situation. Let’s take an Internist who has been practicing for two years, making an annual salary of $155,000, plus bonuses and benefits of another $25,000. He decides that if he was in Pulmonary Medicine/Critical Care, he’d make much more money, so he quits and joins a Pulmonology/Critical Care fellowship program, where he gets an annual stipend of $36,000. For three years, he struggles to care for his family, losing $144,000 each year of his fellowship. By the time he graduates, he has lost $432,000 that he would have earned if he had just stayed at his current job at the same salary.

Once he gets out, he starts a new job as a Critical Care physician, making an annual salary of $200,000. While this sounds like a good raise, the physicians at his old practice who started with him and didn’t quit to go to fellowship actually make $175,000 plus bonus of $25,000, now. So not only are they making almost the same amount of money, but they didn’t lose $432,000 in potential income!

Now, this isn’t the case with all situations, but if a physician expects a serious lifestyle change and significant income increases, make sure to research before embarking on a fellowship.

Reason 3: Because the physician wants to sub-specialize

Now here is a good reason. Many physicians feel unfulfilled in their current job. If they continue working in their general specialty, they will eventually burn out and leave the practice of medicine completely. Rather than having that happen, going to a fellowship program for a sub-specialty is a good way to revitalize their practice of medicine.

It’s important for the physician to avoid randomly choosing a sub-specialty. Moving from one type of practice to another without researching it will make it just as likely that the physician will be unhappy in the new job. However, if the physician takes the time to research the different fellowship programs that are available and makes a decision based on the area that is the most interesting, there is a much higher chance of continued happiness in the medical profession.

So, in conclusion, if you decide to go to a fellowship, be smart about it. Don’t do it for the wrong reasons, because you’ll likely find yourself in a worse position than before. But if you do it for the right reasons, you should be happy and fulfilled in your career.

Here are just a few of the current clients that we are working with to find a new job:

1. Cardiothoracic Surgeon primarily interested in the Southeast. Cardiothoracic surgery is considered one of the most difficult specialties to find work right now, because of changes in the field, but we’ve worked with many CT Surgeons and have almost a 100% success rate!
2. Nephrology fellow searching in six different states. Since it’s well-known that very few physician recruiters deal with Nephrologists, this client was ecstatic to find our services.
3. Family Practice physician searching for a job after he separates from the military. Family Practice groups are notorious for only hiring through word-of-mouth, and every recruiter he spoke with suggested locations that were hours away from where he actually wanted to live.
4. Internist looking for a hospitalist job in NYC. Physician recruiters only had 3 hospitalist jobs in the NYC Metro Area. We’ve helped clients get over 20 interviews easily.
5. Ob/Gyn physician with over 20 years of experience who wants a part-time, Gyn-only job close to his home in Dallas. Once again, this is a type of job that no recruiter will touch. It’s easy to find, but since these types of jobs are rarely publicly identified, our service is the only way to go.
6. Pediatric resident looking for a full-time job in private pediatrics in Los Angeles. Los Angeles is considered a heavily-saturated market by recruiters. Luckily, with our approach, we help 10-15 clients a month get numerous interviews and several offers within the desirable parts of Southern California.
7. General Practice physician with no Board Eligibility who has been looking for three years for a job. Older GP physicians have found it increasingly difficult to find jobs now that hospitals require Board Eligibility or Board Certification. However, we work with GPs all the time with resounding success.
8. Podiatry resident searching for a job in three states. Very few recruiters work with DPMs, because podiatry groups are notoriously cheap when it comes to recruiting. However, our approach has proven to be extremely useful to podiatrists.
9. Group of three internists who want to buy a practice in New Jersey. We’re helping them send out a letter to every practice in the state.
10. Pathologist leaving her group is searching throughout Texas. We’ll be able to help her find a new lab very easily.

So, as you can see, this is just a sampling of some of our clientele. The Doctor Job is able to help physicians in every specialty and every location, no matter what type of job they’re searching for.

If you have questions about whether or not The Doctor Job can help you find your perfect job, please feel free to ask in the comments.

Let’s start this post with a very simple point: Yes, you have a right to an ego.

Physicians are in one of the most respected professions in the world. Your job is the continuation of human life - a noble concept that immediately gives you the right and the privilege to feel proud of yourself. Every doctor in the world should realize how important their roles are, and having an ego is an important part of that.

So, while your ego is a good thing because your profession is a noble one, and the contributions physicians make to society are innumerable, let’s talk about the times when it’s a bad thing.

1. Physicians looking for a job

When you are looking for a new job, or your first job out of residency or fellowship, you have no need for (or right to) an ego. You are among your peers, which means that you are all equals. You are not better or worse than the people who are interviewing you. Your schedule is not more important than the schedule of the physicians who will be interviewing you. And you might be surprised to find out that less than 10% of physician employers will pay for an interviewing physician to come visit! Throwing your ego around will only serve to make you look unprofessional, hard to work with, and undesirable as a potential employee or partner.

2. Physicians taking care of their patients.

In our time talking to physician employers to find out what they do and do not like, one of the biggest dislikes is an egotistical physician who thinks that treating her patients is below her. While the medical profession is a noble one, it is noble because of the selfless nature of it. Rolling up her sleeves, a physician must dive in and get her hands dirty to make sure that each patient is treated and cared for equally. Physicians who refuse to touch patients that might be dirty or have an odor don’t belong in any type of primary care field. Your ego is earned from the constant pursuit of the betterment of health care. You are not entitled to it as soon as you have the MD or MBBS or DO or DPM. If you are a physician solely to make money, you may have been misinformed. Once you calculate the number of hours that go into a normal physician’s work week and figure out their annual salary and how little money some of the health care organizations actually pay for procedures, physicians don’t make very much money without working very hard. The more a physician’s ego gets in the way of practicing and caring for patients, the harder it will be to earn the money that the physician so rightfully deserves.

3. Avenues where the physician does not have expertise.

Defer to experts in fields other than medicine. While most physicians understand this and let attorneys practice law, mechanics fix their car, and hairstylists cut their hair, there is a definable percentage of physicians who let their ego convince them that they know everything. Clearly, this isn’t limited to the medical profession - there is a certain percentage of the human population who think that they know everything. But this is an articles about physicians, and the point still remains valid. Whether it’s quantum physics, replacing an alternator, finding a job, or grammar and sentence structure, there are experts out there who can assist you if you let them.

When you are a resident or a fellow at a program, there is a tendency to rely on your seniors for all of your advice in the real world. While this can be helpful in many arenas, it can also hurt you. Many seniors only know what they learned from their seniors who learned it from their seniors and so on and so on. So little advice, when it comes to your job search, is based on real world knowledge and actual facts that too many residents and fellows graduate with the wrong information and make the wrong choices from the very beginning of your career.

This will be a multi-part series that will explore the world of recruiting and job searching and provide you with real-world, factual advice that is designed to help you make the most of your medical career. Each part will examine one element of job searching and specifically recruiting:

Part One: Do physician recruiters know the job market?

While the good physician recruiters are a part of an excellent organization like NAPR, or the National Association of Physician Recruiters, and are provided with resources to help them figure out the way to make the most out of each recruiting opportunity they have, every recruiter in the country neglects the market that comprises 85-90% of the job market: word-of-mouth.

While it is true that most large hospitals and managed care organizations will employ a recruiter to assist with most of their placements, hospitals make up around 5-10% of the physician employers out there. There are literally thousands of clinics and practices that are smaller, offer more of a partner-track type position, and don’t have the budget to use recruiters except in the most dire circumstances.

It is a well-known fact that most of these smaller groups don’t advertise positions on job boards or with recruiters. Many of them are not used to modern technology (outside the use of their medical equipment, of course), so the idea of using e-mail and a job board is a foreign concept. Did you know that among professionals, physicians are the least technologically capable? While the newer residents and fellows graduating may have a good handle on technology, the number of physicians 30 and older who do not frequently use e-mail or a computer is very high - much higher than the representative group among lawyers, engineers, and other professional and graduate-educated groups.

With this inability or lack of desire to pay the fees that a physician recruiter might charge, and the shunning of communications technology, these positions remain well-hidden, and only through accidental contact or an aggressive job search strategy, can a resident or fellow find these jobs. And since these jobs tend to pay better than similar jobs with recruiters in the same area, these are jobs that are definitely worth finding.

One type of physician that understands this better than the MDs and DOs are the DPMs. Podiatry residents have been forced to come up with creative ways to find a job, because physician recruiters very rarely represent or place podiatrists. In fact, most podiatry residents know that the best way for them to find a job is to open up the phone book and start sending resumes out. This is one area where an MD and a DO could definitely learn from a DPM.

To get back to the point at hand: There are so many groups out there that don’t advertise, especially in major cities and metropolitan areas, that they make up 85-90% of the job market.

That’s 85-90% of the physician job market that is unadvertised and unavailable through even the best physician recruiter!

With this sizable chunk of the job market being unknown to recruiters, they have to rely on hiring data for the 10-15% of the market that is available to them. This means that any time you hear a recruiter say that a market is saturated, or that there are no jobs there, he or she is only talking about 10% of the market. The other 90% of the market is wide-open to the savvy physician.

So, do physician recruiters know the job market? To an extent, yes. When you’re talking about working for a large HMO or a multi-state health care network, they will be aware of positions available and hiring freezes. But what they won’t know (and they don’t want to tell you they don’t know this) are the thousands of other jobs with employers that won’t use recruiters. They’re out there, and this means that for you, the job market is wide open!

Subscribe today (using the link on the right) to receive email updates of this blog, and learn more about what you need to know to find a job, what your seniors don’t know, and what your program director isn’t telling you! Part two in this series will be forthcoming over the next several days.

Just thought I’d post another great story I heard today.

Dr. B finds a job after two years

Dr. B was an Ob/Gyn physician who had been practicing for about ten years before he took a leave of absence to take care of his wife, who had cancer. That was in 2004. Two years later, after she passed away, he decided to return to the practice of medicine full-time because he was clearly too young to retire.

As you might imagine, the physician recruiters were not too responsive. He would see jobs online, apply, only to hear absolutely no responses. Understandably so, he was getting quite frustrated with the concept. It didn’t help matters that he was searching for a job in Miami, which is considered a saturated market by recruiters.

We spoke with Dr. S in August of 2006. We prepared 1600 resumes for him to send out to every practice and contact in the Miami-Dade Metro Area (including Fort Lauderdale, Palm Beach, and the surrounding areas). As it sometimes happens, we didn’t hear from him after sending him his package. Clients can get busy and take some time before they let us know how they did with their search. Here, for your reading pleasure, is a quick excerpt of the email he sent us yesterday, almost 7 months later:

As I continue to celebrate one of my best days ever, I wanted to personally thank you and your company for helping me obtain my dream job. When you advertised that your company’s goal was not to just find the physician a job, but to find the perfect job, I was suspicious to say the least. After talking with you over the phone, I was reassured. However, the greatest proof is in my new employment. Today I signed a great contract with a large, prestigious Ob/Gyn practice.

Your processes initially lead to so much success that I found myself unable to answer the phone calls fast enough. I had to place doctors on hold to answer new calls and ultimately I was unable to even document whom I was speaking with. Many others sent interview requests directly through email. I spoke with approximately 30+ physicians or physician groups. I interviewed with 10 after the initial telephone screens and received strong offers from my top four choices. Ultimately, I made the final decision with the negotiating power of having the other three strong offers.

Once again, thanks and I will advertise your service as all who will listen.

It’s hearing those types of stories that make us very happy here at The Doctor Job. It’s just further proof that if any physician, resident, or fellow is serious about searching for a job, we are the only way for them to make sure they get the best job in an area. Good luck, Dr. B, and I hope you have a wonderful remainder of your career.

Terry is one of the staff of writers for The Doctor Job. Do you need your personal statement edited, or do you need help in writing one from the beginning? Click here for more information.

You can find a similar article with samples of personal statements, on The Doctor Job main site by clicking here.

Writing a Personal Statement

Guide for Medical Students and FMGs

When your entire career is about learning to practice medicine, it’s sometimes hard to believe that your success or failure hinges on something where you’re not trained: writing your personal statement. Even if you are a skilled writer, it can be hard to choose a topic and to write about yourself in a way that resonates with others.

Writing a personal statement to get into a residency or fellowship program does not have to be a painful process. This is the one opportunity you have to sell yourself in your application that is unfettered by cold hard facts and figures. Your personal statement gives you an opportunity to make yourself more real and personal to the program directors who will have to choose you out of the hundreds of residency program applicants.

Here are some concepts to keep in mind when creating your personal statement:

1) The ideal personal statement will give the reader a sense of “you” and will focus on some unique and impressive personal facts that will make you stand out among all of the other physician applicants. It will also convince the residency or fellowship program director of your commitment to your chosen specialty or subspecialty, as well as your ability to succeed as a practicing physician in that specialty.

2) Unlike other fields, it is not necessary to be 100% perfect in your writing style in the medical profession; however, poor grammar and bad spelling will make the program director think that you don’t care enough to put the effort in, and that if you can’t even write a complete sentence well, how can you really be a valuable resident? Good residents and fellows publish and do research, and that requires intelligence that a program director looks for when reviewing personal statements. If you’re a foreign medical graduate and English is not your first language, have someone review your statement who can make sound proofreading and editing advice.

3) When writing your personal statement, it is more important to avoid alienating anyone, even at the expense of not winning someone over. Subsequently, when developing the thesis for your personal statement, be a bit more conservative if you have two choices, especially if you’re using the same statement or a version of the same statement when applying to a number of residency or fellowship programs. It is highly preferable to have a statement that has mass appeal, rather than one that might alienate a majority.

Your thesis statement

When you applied to medical school, everyone told you not to say “I want to be a doctor so I can help people.” It was a cliched response and it’s just as trite now. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to help people - it’s just that this reason is not unique - it’s the same reason for everyone!

Being a doctor is all about helping people. But when developing your thesis statement, try to approach it from a different angle. For example, if you are pursuing a specific specialty, why? What personal story or example do you have that makes you personally want to become that specific type of physician? There is no right or wrong answer, but there are trite answers and unique ones.

Imagery is paramount.

Anecdotes are the best way to demonstrate your rationale in a personal statement. Telling a program director that you like a specialty or that you’re good at a procedure is not nearly as effective as describing past events that have shaped your desire and illustrate those points. For example:

1) Two pounds makes me think of a book, or a cup of coffee, or a package of sugar. But until my sister was born, it never made me think of a person. I can still picture how huge the doctor’s hands looked next to her prematurely born, tiny body. Knowing that those hands bore the responsibility of saving her life and keeping her alive, and watching the physician work tirelessly to keep her healthy during those important first few days, I realized how much I wanted to be a physician and do what he does.

2) My sister was prematurely born, and as a result, I would like to help children like her by training in neonatology.

When used as a hook to start your personal statement, an anecdote can quickly pique the interest of a program director, which will allow you to keep them interested enough to read the entire thing.

How are you unique?

Imagine two people walking down a street at the exact same time. These two people will have experienced their walk in completely different ways. The people they encountered, what they saw when they walked, what they were listening to or doing while they walked, their ultimate destination - these all add up to give them each something completely unique about the same walk! The same applies to medical students and foreign medical graduates. Even if you attended the same school, or came from the same country, or want to go into the same specialty, every applicant will have a unique perspective and unique circumstances that shaped your motivations, personality, and strengths.

One of the biggest weaknesses of personal statements written by physicians is that they are too vague - do not neglect to add detail! Be specific when describing your experiences, education, and background. If you volunteered for an association, how many hours did you work? During your rotations, how many patients did you see? What type of technology or procedures did you get comfortable with?

It’s these types of details that will let you differentiate yourself from every other applicant to the residency program

It will be difficult.

Writing a personal statement that is not boring, trite, or obvious is not easy. Do not brush off your personal statement or take it lightly - program directors around the country consider this to be an invaluable insight into your motivations and your personality. A good personal statement can put your career on the right path. A bad one can give a program director the wrong idea about your ability to practice medicine and be a valuable addition to his/her residency or fellowship program. If you are concerned about your writing efforts and want to make sure that you get into the best program possible, the expert writing staff at The Doctor Job have written and edited hundreds, if not thousands of personal statements. They know what will work and what won’t, and they can make sure that the cornerstone to your ERAS application is a boon, not a liability.

We have some exciting plans for The Doctor Job in the near future. First of all, we’ll be splitting our three main services into three separate websites. Going to the main site will still provide you with choices, but our personal statement services for medical students and foreign medical graduates (FMGs) will be a separate site, with its own branding and design.

Secondly, the main site highlighting our job finding services for physicians, residents, and fellows, will be redesigned entirely to offer more testimonials, a link to our Better Business Bureau profile, and a clearer explanation of how our services work, with graphical illustrations for those doctors who don’t have time to read in-depth materials. We’ll also be offering different pricing options, including full-service mailings where busy physicians or residents don’t have to do a thing other than go on interviews and get offers! Sometime soon, as well, we plan on revealing a new payment plan option with financing - 6 or 9 months with no interest and no payments!

Finally, for those employers who want to employ our placement services, we will tie in with our subsidiary company, YourPhysicianRecruiter. That way, we’ll be able to clearly and quickly help any physician who is looking for a job or a program, regardless of the situation!

So, stay tuned over the next few months as we reveal these exciting new changes!

Hi, I’m Sean, one of the several client counselors for The Doctor Job. We hear from our clients all the time about success they’re having after using our services, so I’m going to start posting them on a regular basis for your review. Maybe you too can join the ranks of thousands of satisfied physicians who have found a great job!

Dr. P finds an Outpatient job in Chicago

This client we spoke with was a third-year resident graduating from a great program in the Midwest. He was an Internist on an H-1B visa looking for a sponsorship job in the Chicago area. As you can imagine, physician recruiters had been telling him that Chicago was saturated and directed him to positions in Nebraska, Wisconsin, and Kansas. They might have been great jobs, but they weren’t where his wife was, and they weren’t where he wanted to be!

So this client came to The Doctor Job. He had us do the entire mailing, so we prepared 1742 resumes to go in the mail all at once! The letters went in the mail on January 3rd from our Central Florida mailroom. By January 8th, he had received 10 phone calls or emails. By January 16th, he had received 35, and by January 23rd, he had received a total of 62 phone calls or emails from interested employers in Chicago! And not a single one of those employers was advertising for physicians anywhere or using physician recruiters.

He narrowed it down to about 15 places that he was the most interested in and went on a round of interviews about three weeks ago. He was in Chicago for an entire week during his vacation and went on three interviews a day. It was exhausting, but we were here to provide interview counseling and support every night.

All his time and effort paid off. He got offers from 8 different practices, all with contracts that will allow him to get his green card as soon as he’s eligible. The salaries he has been offered are ranging between $125,000 to $195,000, plus bonus, and these are for outpatient-only practices with little to no call!

He was very concerned about using our services in the beginning because he had heard from so many physician recruiters that the Chicago market is closed to physicians or residents looking for clinical jobs. We explained, of course, that recruiters only know about the 10% of employers who are willing to pay their fees. This means that they don’t know about 90% of the market! That’s a huge chunk of the market to make the assumption that a market is “saturated”, don’t you think?

Well, we’ll just say good luck to Dr. P, and I hope he enjoys his career and enjoys working a mile away from his wife. Stay tuned until next time with more success stories!

Hi, my name is Terry, and I’ll be posting about physician resumes (or CVs, as they’re known) and cover letters for the foreseeable future. For now, though I just wanted to introduce myself, let you know that you can always leave comments with questions and that we’re happy to provide free advice on making your resume and cover letter as excellent as possible.

Five things to keep in mind about your physician CV:

1. Unless you have someone committed to reading it, longer than two pages is too much. The employer reviewing your resume is very busy and will allocate less than 30 seconds to your resume. Keep a longer version with all of your publications and presentations for an interview, but give a brief resume (which should just be a summary of your medical career, not an extensive life history) to employers and physician recruiters to get the most impact.

2. Your age, your spouse, your SSN, your kids - all things that do NOT belong on a physician’s resume anymore. Your resume is designed to give a picture of your professional career, not your personal life.

3. Likewise, your hobbies and interests are the least important thing on your resume. While they’re good if you need to fill space, consider using details from your residency or fellowship (if you’re a resident or fellow), or details about your practice if you’re a practicing physician to fill the necessary space and provide more in-depth information about your skills and abilities.

4. References do not belong on your resume, either! You don’t want every employer out there calling your references. You should bring them on a separate sheet of paper when you go in to interview, and only provide them if you are interested in working at that practice or hospital. That way, only the employers for whom you want to work will get your references.

5. Finally, for many employers, your resume will be the first thing they see. Don’t make it the last. Take the time (or ask your spouse) to review your resume carefully, getting rid of misspellings, poor grammar, and strange capitalizations. If you are a foreign medical graduate, this will be the most difficult step, so you may want to seek the advice of a resume service, an American colleague, or your program director. While you don’t have to have perfect grammar, an unprofessional resume gives a bad impression. The employer will think “If she doesn’t care enough about her career to put the effort into the resume, is she really going to put the effort into her career as a physician?”

Stay tuned for more advice about resumes and cover letters, along with other tips and tricks from the other authors here at Blogging with The Doctor Job!