Blogging with The Doctor Job

Among those of you who surf the Internet, know what a blog is, and check your email more than once a month, it seems logical that mass e-mailing your resume to as many people as possible would be an appropriate way to find a job.

It’s not. Why?

1. Because when it comes to physicians, you are still in the minority. Among professionally educated adults, more physicians are computer illiterate than almost any other profession. That means that, especially over the age of 40, the percentage of physicians who check email regularly and use the Internet is very low. Usually, the physicians who do check their email are fairly proficient with it, but by limiting yourself to email, you will risk missing out on the majority of physicians, which means the majority of opportunities.

2. Because SPAM filters make mistakes. If the physician recipient uses a subscription email program like Earthlink or Comcast or Roadrunner, that provider may have built in protection against Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE) without his or her knowledge. This might mean that your non-commercial email might get caught and filtered before the recipient ever gets to know it existed! Additionally, if the physician uses a local SPAM filter through Outlook or Thunderbird, or a free e-mail account like Hotmail, Yahoo! or Gmail, e-mail will get filtered directly into a junk e-mail folder. Rather than being diligent and checking this folder for mistakenly filtered email, many recipients (not just physicians) clear this out or ignore it indefinitely. This means that if your email had a keyword the filter didn’t like (job, opportunity, career, and employment being keywords notoriously used in SPAM), your resume might never get seen by a human.

3. Attachments are bad, but text is worse. If your recipient is part of a large group, school, university or organization, be aware that many overzealous IT departments set up email so that attachments are not downloaded or are stripped before being received. This means that your resume will disappear into the ether. The alternative is to paste your resume into the actual email as text. As you can imagine, the problem with this is the formatting. Not only does it look horribly unprofessional but it is also likely that the screwed up formatting will make it confusing to read.

These three reasons should help you realize that phone calls, faxes, and letters in the regular mail are the most efficient way of finding a job the intelligent way. You could just send your resume to recruiters and let them worry about it, but then you’d be missing out on the unadvertised positions that make up 90% of the jobs out there, and that would mean your job search would fail before it even started.