Comments on: The high cost of physician recruiters

By: Adam

Adam — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 21:16:44 +0000

Steve, not all recruiters are as thorough and concerned for client’s welfare as they are interested in trying to fill a spot as quickly as possible. As you are fully aware, there are many recruiters out there who give ethical recruiters a bad name.

By: Steve Bianco

Steve Bianco — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 07:37:13 +0000

I am a partner in retained physician recruiting firm. I have worked in this business and industry for five years. Before that, I was a fortune 500 company executive.
I was startled by Britt’s comments. It is true that our clients hire us to find a physician that will be a good fit for their location and community, many of them in more rural locations. However, we spend an extensive amount of time learning everything we can about the opportunity from the personalities of the other physicians in the community to the quality of the school system that the physician’s children will be attending, so that we accurately represent the opportunity we are filling. At the same time, we spend an average of 50 hours in screening potential candidates and their spouses for every position that we fill. During this process, we develop a model of the appropriate type of physician we are seeking from professional goals, community requirements, financial goals and of least importance, location requirements.
When we finally do place a physician in a location, it is not only a great choice for our clients, but for the physician as well. The monies that we earn are, in most cases, earned back by our clients (many of them hospitals) who generate more revenue in 2 weeks of admissions from the new physician than they end up paying us in fees for our services. Many of them have been looking for a physician for months if not years and we are hired to resolve the challenge they face.
Lastly, the physicians we place are usually still happily working in the same community 5-10 years later.
I have personally aided many physicians in finding that perfect opportunity after they had already made their first job taking mistake when they completed their residency and/or fellowship training. That was the one the based solely on location. If location is the only factor they needed to be concerned with, they could go into real estate instead, because that is the only industry it works in.
Lastly, opportunities in more smaller metropolitan areas and in rural locations are not only the perfect fit for many physicians, they also pay alot more than in large metropolitan areas!

By: Marty

Marty — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 23:55:28 +0000

Thanks again for your input.

By: Nimish

Nimish — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 23:21:21 +0000

I would suggest that it’s not the fee that makes the placement fall through, but a poor match between candidate and client, or a flaky client or candidate, or a hospital that won’t perform credentialing, or any number of non-fiscal reasons.

The reality of the situation is that many groups manage their money poorly and don’t necessarily spend their income in the best way. Additionally, since most of them are partnerships, getting the partners to agree to part with income to hire someone else can be difficult. Maybe $5-7K would be more appropriate, but that’s money that could be paying for a car or a house or children’s education.

By: Marty

Marty — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 23:02:37 +0000

Thanks for the input Nimish.

Two follow-ups:

1) If the fee were low enough would it be safe to say that not as many placements would fall through?

2) I’m a CPA, and it seems to me that when you factor in the opportunity cost to a physician in terms of staff/partner time spent recruiting, advertising costs, etc., the inflection point would be a little higher than $3k. Maybe around $5k – $8k. Am I missing something?

Marty

By: Nimish

Nimish — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 22:45:05 +0000

Marty, those are good questions. Here’s what I suggest for the answers:

1) Because for the recruiter, the reward has to outweigh the risk. Many placements fall through, so the fee has to be high enough to make it worthwhile.

2) I think that the fee would have to be under $3,000 for many groups to want to spend any type of money.

By: Marty

Marty — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 21:46:38 +0000

The points raised are all very interesting.

Two questions:

1) Why don’t recruiters lower their fees and make their money on volume?

2) What would the fee per placement need to be before a paradigm shift could take place in the 90 plus % of practices that don’t use recruiters?

Marty

By: Adam

Adam — Sun, 03 May 2009 21:19:35 +0000

Will, thank you for the comment.

We definitely admit that recruiters have benefits in certain circumstances. The problem lies with recruiters who aren’t ethical or who try to shop candidates around blindly and unsolicited but make their candidates think that they have a position.

Any job seeker should just be informed to make sure that their job search works out for them, not for the recruiter.

By: Will

Will — Sat, 02 May 2009 15:26:50 +0000

As someone who spent years as a recruiter, although not in the medical field, and now publishes publications with corresponding job board for physician and medical professionals, I don’t think there’s one right answer here. One thing I am certain of, however, is the vilification and negative hyperbole about recruiters is completely unwarranted and offbase.

The Doctor Job’s business model is intrinsically opposed to the recruiter model, so I understand why TDJ would promote their model’s strengths against the weaknesses of the recruiter model. Others that have commented here, just seem to have a long standing beef with recruiters for some unknown reason.

If you look at this from a job seeker’s prospective, it’s easy to see that all methods can be useful at different times, under different circumstances and for different reasons.

First of all, it’s true that many hiring authorities are willing to pay big bucks to a recruiter to deliver pre-screened, cream of the crop candidates, because they don’t have the time or inclination to do the initial legwork. For candidates, a recruiter’s representation is often the key to getting their foot in the door. Another benefit to using a recruiter is that they can be representing you and your skills while keeping your identity confidential up until the interview — very handy if you’re trying to keep your search on the down-low and out of the view of your current employer.

On the other hand, sometimes hiring authorities just will not pay recruiting fees, so recruiter representation is useless in that case. It is also true that many jobs are filled via referral before they are ever publicized, which a recruiter may or may not be helpful for. The Doctor Job model is potentially effective in either of those cases. If you’re actively looking for a job in a specific geographical location and you don’t care who finds out you’re looking, then TDJ is a great model.

There are also job boards to peruse and respond to and/or post your CV on as well as doing your own direct mail/ call campaigns and just networking in your sphere of influence.

The bottom line is there are no absolute right answers and no magic bullets when it comes to this stuff. As a hiring authority you should use what ever tools you have time and budget to use in order to recruit the best possible candidate for your position and make a hire. As a physician, or any job seeker for that matter, you should use everything at your disposal to find the best position and negotiate the best salary you can.

Any and all methods touched on can be appropriate and effective, it’s all dependent on other circumstances and objectives and all this tit-for-tat about it is counterproductive to the overall objective that we all have – connecting caregivers and medical facilities. If we all remember that primary objective and work to achieve that, there’s money in it for all.

Will

By: obgynthoughts

obgynthoughts — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 16:13:10 +0000

Kevin, you seem too willing to compromise your personal success in order to save a few dollars.
First, the cost of recruiters, as I have mentioned in a short post above, is that you get the “left-over” jobs. The best jobs as well as the good jobs fill very easily before any recruiter is needed and before any recruiter is ever contacted. This is my personal experience looking for a job in Boston and Miami. When recruiters continued to tell me “the areas are oversaturated” I kept on hearing from my fellow residents and colleagues that they got jobs in those “oversaturated” areas. Physicians know the attractive hospitals and practices in the area. They feel them out and if a job opens, they are right there and take it. Jobs at Harvard hospitals in Boston never, ever go through recruiters. have you heard recruiters calling you for jobs at Yale, Duke etc? HA!
The jobs at the highly successful, moneymaking practices in Boston, Manhattan and Miami never go through recruiters – and here I cannot tell you numbers, but I have heard it over and over again in the last 5 years that I have been following this. Other doctors nearby know about these jobs and call the offices and hospitals as soon as there is a rumor or hint. In addition, most of the large attractive cities have medical schools and residency programs and the employers stay in touch with the residency program directors and call them regularly to hire the promising candidates.
This is called “the hidden market” and this hidden market is huge, actually larger than the obvious market. Recruiters do not have access to this market and therefore, those of us who are uniformed enough to trust recruiters, which seems to include you, do not have access to these jobs. Young physicians sadly are often unaware of these facts and are blinded by recruiter marketing and actually believe that the recruiters have not only “many jobs” but also “good jobs”.
Recruiters overall have the left over jobs.
Second, to your cost problem. Yes, the Doctor Job costs a few thousand. That might seem a larger sum to you, but it will be dwarfed by the downsides of recruiter jobs.
There is a way of doing this yourself and i have been blogging about the method used by the Doctor Job very very extensively in my blog “A Physician on Job Search and Practice”. I describe all the details, down to the smallest comma, on how to do it yourself. there is a link to my blog from this website , by the way.
And, I have tried it myself and have succeeded. using my method and the Doctor Job method I got multiple offers in “oversaturated areas”, and I got the really good ones.
In defense of the DoctorJob I have to say that doing it yourself may be cheaper, but it also a bit of work. If you have the time, go ahead and do it yourself. If you are pressed for time, the DoctorJob is a great alternative, a great service, a great value.
And, I am in no way affiliated with the DoctorJob nor related nor in any other way associated with this company. nevertheless, having run against walls with recruiters to no end and then seeing what the Doctor job is doing and doing it succcessfully myself, i can only recommend their method and applaud their work. The DoctorJob is a phantastic service and method and deserves to be widely known. recruiters are essentially obsolete and the fact that they are still in business is based of the lack of information of candidates, the sad belief that saving a few thousand after residency is of any benefit at all and the fact that there are many, many employers who have suboptimal jobs and have to pay for recruiters to fill them.