Physician job search on the Internet - a few small tricks

Here are a few innovative uses of the Internet when searching for a job.

Create a Google Alert to help you in your search. Google alerts can be found in your Google account. Should you not have one already, then you need to get one. Get an email account at Gmail.com, then sign in and look for "My account" or "other services". Should Google be your homepage, then go to "more services" and you will find the alerts.

An alert is a search that is run automatically for you every day or every week etc. You can for example search for "physician opportunity ObGyn San Diego" and "ObGyn job San Diego" Physician need ObGyn San Diego" etc. You can create as many alerts as you want, then track them over a few days and weeks. Delete the ones that do not yield results, keep the ones that work. Every day you will find the results of these searches in your Gmail inbox. this way I found several excellent hints and tips. Often you find recruiter ads, but you may be able to find who is searching through a recruiter and contact them directly. If you know the city or county well, where you are searching, you can read between the lines of the recruiter ads and often figure out who exactly is advertising. Or, once you know that someone in a certain city, town or county is searching through a recruiter, you can simply mass fax everybody in that city, town or county and you are likely to find the one practice that is advertising through a recruiter. I have done exactly this more than once with good success.

Also, if you have a Google homepage, you can very easily set up a separate tab for job search. Open a new tab and then go to the "add stuff" button and look for "Job search" buttons and gadgets, which are essentially search engines fields that will be on a specific tab of your home page. You can search Indeed.com, one recommendable search engine and others with truly a few clicks. Others that I have on my job search tab are: www.Oodle.com, then http://gjsearch.googlepages.com/ or "Job Search Universe". You can even set up your "own custom search engine" - supposedly, but I do not understand how. Maybe you do.

LinkedIn might be a thought. Try registering and making connections to the area where you are looking. Sometimes connections work in funny ways. I was talking to an accountant of a physician whose practice I was considering buying, when he told me that another ObGYn had suddenly died and that his practice was up for sale. Too late, two other local colleagues had already scooped it up. Maybe LinkedIn or another social networking site may get you where you want to go.
Quote from the Toronto Star, copied from the LinkedIn Press pages: "LinkedIn is free and it’s one of the best networks. First, you join and create a personal profile. Second, you invite all your friends and associates to join. Your network will grow quickly as you recruit members who recruit members. ‘From a job hunter’s standpoint, LinkedIn represents an opportunity of a lifetime to establish a powerful network of influential colleagues and friends,’ says Guerilla Marketing for Job Hunters by Jay Conrad Levinson and David Perry.” But remember that this is mainly networking in the business world, not in medicine.

Decipher recruiter ads, skip the middleman and contact the employers directly. Recruiters do not tell you where exactly the job is until you have sent them your CV and THEY have presented your CV to the employer. Then they have secured the right to be paid! If they told you where it is, you could just call and get the job. Often solo recruiters or smaller companies describe the location of a practice by inserting text literally copied from local tourist agency material. For example, Fort Lauderdale is often described as a place with "23 miles of pristine white beaches", a line taken directly from the visitors bureau leaflet.

In February 07 I saw an ad about a "Miami suburb with a Venetian pool with 820,000 gallons of water" - and anybody who has ever taken a tourist tour in Miami has made a stop at the gorgeous Venetian Pool in Coral Gables. If you google the "820,000 gallons" of water, you get Coral Gables and the Venetian Pool. Sometimes it is that easy to find out where the jobs are. So, google those sentences and you will often find out within a few minutes where the jobs are. Then go to the yellow pages, get the phone number of the local hospitals and contact the physician liaison at these hospitals to see who is hiring. Voila! $20,000 saved, and you can hint at this fact during the salary negotiations and maybe get a better salary or moving money, better benefits, etc.

Often, you will read a sentence like "affiliated with a 231 bed hospital". You can find hospitals with number of beds by going to the American Hospital Directory (AHD.com), then clicking on the state and then going down the list until you find a match. You can also go to MedlinePLus, then to the hospital directory. To find more hospital directories, click over to Pam Pohly's website and see a long list of hospital direcetories.

Nevertheless recruiting companies are catching up and are beginning to figure out what Google can do. The most detail you will get on the website of more advanced companies is "multispecialty practice in Georgia looking to hire".