Blogging with The Doctor Job

If you are going to put your resume on a physician job board, here is an important tip for keeping your sanity. Without proper email maintenance, you will likely miss important emails and waste time on the useless ones. There’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to easily and cleanly keep track of who you want to talk to and who you don’t.

Intelligent Email Maintenance

When you put your information up on a job board, you are going to get inundated with emails. This is not an exaggeration. You will literally get hundreds of emails from physician recruiters.

Many physicians will just create a throwaway email account for each job board, or each time they look for a job. This is a waste of time and effort. If you follow these steps, you can keep your Inbox clean and your sanity intact without missing any important job-related emails.

1. Use Gmail. If you don’t already have an account, set up a new one. Make your username something professional, like “drjohnsmith@gmail.com” or “johnsmithmd@gmail.com”.

2. Go to the job board of your choice. Create a new account there, and when it asks you to provide your email address, don’t give your actual email address! Instead, add a “+” and the name of the job board to the first part of your email address. For example, if your email address is “johnsmith@gmail.com”, and the job board is PhysicianWork, the email address you use should be “johnsmith+physicianwork@gmail.com”.

3. Fill out the rest of the information normally, then return to Gmail.

4. Click on “Settings” on the top right of the page.

5. Click on the “Filters” tab.

6. Select “Create a New Filter”.

7. In the field for “To:”, write the job board name. In our example, it would be “physicianwork”.

8. Go to “Next Step”.

9. Check the boxes that say “Skip the Inbox” and “Apply the Label”. Go down to “New Label”, and type in the name of the job board.

10. Click “Create Filter”.

And that’s it! From now on, when email comes in from that job board, it will be automatically archived and labeled. It won’t clog up your Inbox, but you can easily see all of the messages from that particular job board. At the bottom left of your Gmail screen, you’ll see a module called “Labels”. When you have new email matching that label, the label’s name will become bold and show in parentheses the number of new messages. Just click the label to view those emails! And now, repeat this for each job board that you want to submit your resume to. By keeping different labels for different job boards, you’ll be able to easily and quickly keep your notes and emails organized.