Post jobs and find jobs for FREE on Sermo - a 60,000 and growing online physician community

I love Sermo, for many, many reasons. The community is physicians-only, it is free, you may even earn a bit of money by giving your opinion and it is a great community. Responses are many, diverse, friendly, supportive, interesting, funny. Sermo has a great humor section. What started in 2006 with just a few people is now a vibrant 60,000 physician community and continues to grow by about 1000 a month.

Here is one more reason to love Sermo: Recently they have started a job board - FOR FREE. And it will stay free. So, this is my new favorite in the physician job market. Please take look at Sermo.com, and if you are a physician, register for free and and look around. Go to the posts in your specialty, go to the "general interest section" and go to the job board.

The Founder and CEO introduced the job board with the below quoted post in Sermo. And, not to my surprise, I found that my opinions on the physician job market and in particular on physician recruiters are widely shared by my fellow physicians!

Quote start:

From the Founder: Return to Professional Courtesy - SermoJobs

Being the son of a physician I remember very vividly the role of professional courtesy. While I was always blessed with access to incredible physicians, dentists, and orthodontists, I can recall several occasions where professional courtesy became a topic of great discussion between my parents. To my father, and ultimately myself, it represented something much more meaningful; the willingness and desire of physicians to help one another in any way that they could.

Almost a year ago, when Sermo started to consider the features, services, and products that our community would find valuable, a Jobs Board quickly became a topic of great discussion. It has always been clear that a large physician community could benefit from a very powerful "network effect" if all physicians could use the medium for their collective interest. Then members of this community repeatedly posted jobs and contacted me about their strong interest in a jobs board. Then our Chief Medical Officer started talking about this in terms of a return to professional courtesy and it hit me. This community wants to cut out the third parties. Physicians want to connect to one another, network, discuss, and ideally resurrect the professional courtesy that was once so central to our profession. Sermo could do that As we researched the concept of a jobs board, the community was very consistent in the feedback:

• Demand for physicians is soaring, especially of late. The necessity to resort to recruiters is becoming all the more common.

• Physicians are frustrated by the intrinsic conflicts of interest that third parties (recruiters, head hunters, etc.) bring to the recruiting process.

• With so many financial pressures on physicians, the 10-33% of starting salary paid out to recruiters is increasingly unbearable.

• There is no single resource where physicians can present and discuss employment opportunities to and with one another.

Sermo Jobs is a free resource to all active physician members of the community and will not be accessible to any for-profit third parties. I can, however, foresee a model where physician employers such as hospitals, IPAs, and institutions could eventually participate, perhaps in a way similar to our client postings.

Job postings will benefit from the same community moderation and discussion that have made Sermo so successful. Should the author choose to engage in commentary around their posted job, they will not be identified as the author but their real Sermo user name will appear. This system allows the individual physician to independently choose if they would like to reveal their Sermo user name.

Sermo encourages the philosophy of physician professional courtesy and shared benefit between the job poster and applicant. It is our hope that when a candidate accepts a job position the two parties will share any financial resource that would have been spent as a recruiting fee thus keeping more money in the pockets of hard working physicians.

Daniel Palestrant, MD
Founder & CEO
Sermo, Inc

Quote End.

Thank you, Dr. Palestrant and thank you Sermo Team, for this great opportunity to pass on jobs directly from physician to physician. This is exactly what I wished for and predicted in the age of the Internet. No middlemen, no third parties that distract more than they help. Direct contact from physician / employer to physician.

Professional courtesy. Now we are talking!