Blogging with The Doctor Job

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.