Kevin,MD, quoted part of my post "avoid recruiters" (Thank you!) and received very good comments that are worth repeating here:
First his quote:
AM"Physician recruiters - An OB waxes negative on the experience:
I now believe that most contingency recruiters just do not care. They sell, sell, sell and sell some more. They go for volume, they go for the numbers. The more emails they send out, the more people they contact, the more chances they may have to get an answer and sell one of their jobs. That is why they remind me of used car salesmen and telemarketers. Their ads are just the nice marketing face, and you have to read them with utmost suspicion." End of quote.
And here are three of the four comments:
1. One problem with recruiters is not with them but the jobs that they are recruiting for. From 20 years of observation in my own specialty, I have found that in general, the good people to work for have no trouble filling the positions by old-fashioned networking. Usually the ones who hire recruiters have to do so because something is wrong with the position. Perhaps it is a very poor payer mix, or the institution's management has a reputation of treating doctors poorly. Sometimes they want a physician compliant with their demands for unethical behavior but the local docs will not go along--and the local program directors knowing their reputation for sleaze will not steer graduating residents to them.
In short, most jobs with a recruiter attached aren't worth having in the first place.
# posted by Anonymous : 12:04 PM
This brings out an excellent and very important point. It's not the recruiter, it's the jobs they represent! Due to my blog I have received emails from very upset recruiters that resent what I say about them. One recruiter emphasized that he believes that recruiters are honest, hardworking, good people, that definitely earn their money. He went so far as to say that they are like a band of brothers. I felt he had a point. Personally I usually was treated well by recruiters, but they still never had the job I wanted. And that turned me off in the end.
And the comment is the perfect explanation: it is often not the recruiter, not the person, but the jobs they represent. Recruiter good, job bad...
Nevertheless, I have a beef with recruiters. None of them told me how to get a job in the area I wanted - in Boston and in Miami proper (NO, not "near", not "easy access to", no, actually IN those cities). None of them did as much as hinted at how to find a job there, nobody said "Hey, just mail all the docs in your chosen city a letter and you will reach all of them". That is my problem with recruiters!
2. Yes, the good jobs and positions don't need to rely on a recruiter. You need to be at the right place at the right time and/or know the right person.
I have always thought about returning to Oregon where I grew up so I scan the recruiting jobs out of curiosity. The exact same jobs have been advertised for the last 10 years. That tells me not to touch those with a ten foot pole
# posted by Anonymous : 1:13 PM
Yes, I have been saying them since post#1, good jobs and positions almost fill by themselves! Recruiters do not get them! But you can get them if you mail a letter to everybody in the area where you want to work....
3. Recruiters cost real money, and those practices willing to spend substantially usually have obstacles to overcome in attracting candidates. Sometimes it is nothing more than a remote location where a generalist or specialist would likely have to practice without much support while taking lots of referrals. Sometimes the location has an undesirable climate or a poor socioeconomic atmosphere.
And sometimes recruiters are the agents of serial abusers or are the pitchmen for institutions that promise much but habitually dishonor those promises and just turn to new hires when their old hires get fed up and leave.
It always pays to call the last doctor who left to get the story.
I have chased some doctors across the country when doing due diligence on practices. I am convinced that there is a lot of valuable information that can be had no other way.
# posted by Anonymous : 2:27 PMMonday, June 18, 2007
Recruiters cost real money. that is handicap number one for recruiters. 20K for filling a position? Employers are willing to do a lot, to try a lot of things before they pay 20K...And only those employers that have a problem may be willing to pay it. This is THE recruiter handicap. How are they going to overcome that? How could they? I have not found a satisfactory answer. Somebody explain it to me! An employer has a choice:
Candidate A is qualified and has mailed his CV in himself. No price tag attached.
Candidate B is equally qualified and comes through a recruiter. 20K price tag attached.
Employer decides for... you get three guesses!
That is the basic, basic, basic problem of recruiters. A problem they cannot over come. They have worked around it by massive advertising on one side and by the naivity and ignorance and lack of knowledge of physicians on the other side. Few physician know how easy it is to reach every and all physicians and employers in any given area, be inside a city or be it out in the country. You mail everybody your cover letter and CV, done. No other help needed! Maximum success.
With direct mail you reach 100% of all physicians in any given, any chosen area. Recruiters can reach a maximum of 20%. You, the single, lonely physician is able to reach 5 times more employers than the best recruiters. How do you like that????
Dear colleagues, you can do it, this blog can help! Click here for details!
And if you want someone to help you with the details, click over to "Thedoctorjob.com", they will write and print the cover letter and CV for you. You sign it and drop it in the mailbox. Done
Showing posts with label critic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label critic. Show all posts
Friday, June 22, 2007
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
I admire physician recruiters
Here are the top reasons why I admire recruiters!
They have a "positive mental attitude" (as written by Jim Stone of dochunterdiary.com). They are able to see a "great place to raise a family" and a "great place to build a practice", where I see just, well, Desert Gulch, a place where I would neither want to exile my family nor would want to build a practice. And where in general I would not want to be caught dead after sundown.
They have magical, mystical, truly superior means of transportation, very much like Harry Potter's broom. A town they see as "only a short drive from LA" to me is 75 miles away and it takes me an excruciating 3 hours on a good day to get to the city.
While they can "enjoy all Boston has to offer" from a small town on the New Hampshire border, I get frustrated with all the woods and rocks. And for me the hour plus drive to Boston pretty much takes the fun out of it. I believe one-hour commutes are overrated.
They know much better than I what to do on the Internet. They know that you best use Google to "find physician recruiters where you want to go to" (Healthcarerecruiter blog), while I merely have been able to find employers that offered me jobs.
They know that the "best practices" are located far outside the city, while I sheepishly was looking INSIDE the city for a practice.
They know that it is much more ethical and professional not to tell your clients about your limitations and they know that it is absolutely wrong to refer your clients to someone that might be better able to help them than you are. Meanwhile I am still making the horrible mistake of sending my patients to a specialist or a more appropriately talented or equipped colleague as soon as I cannot solve a specific problem myself.
Imagine that!
Monday, April 9, 2007
Recruiter marketing: Trying to sneak in under the radar (2)
The following article in MomMD is an excellent example for insidious recruiters marketing - sneaking in their sales pitches into non-recruiter websites such as MomMD.
Note that the author is Rebecca Gresham. Note that nothing in the article says who she is or what she does. After reading this article I first I assumed that she is a journalist or a female physician or medical student like most members of MomMD.
Read the article:
By Rebecca Gresham
You're a busy woman; juggling everything from patients and insurance reimbursements to soccer games and family vacations. With a list of to-do's a mile long, it can be difficult-if not down right impossible-to make time to find a new and better practice opportunity when you're ready to move on from your current one. "Working with a recruiter can help you conserve what often feels like your most precious commodity: time," says Kelly Marsh, Director of Marketing for Seaboard Health Care Search in Nashville, Tennessee. Marsh also points out another important incentive working with a recruiter offers. "Search firms generate income by placing physicians at facilities they've contracted with. Since these fees are paid by the facility, the work done on the physician's behalf is free of charge to them." Below are three ways in which working with a physician staffing firm can make you feel like time is definitely on your side.
Very well written, really convincing, it really hits home. Here we have a woman who knows how it feels to be an overworked mom, a woman writing to support other women. The author might be a female journalist, who writes about "career transition", maybe based on her research, maybe based on her own experience. Truly well written, it could be a textbook example right out of the marketing classic "Marketing to Women".
It surprised me that any journalist would promote recruiters as obviously and blatantly as this article does. It surprised me that she did not mention any other methods of finding a job, any other approaches. She does not mention networking, something most women excel in. She does not write about specific tips for networking, whom to contact, what to say, what to look for, how to follow up. She does not mention approaching hospitals directly, she does not mention mailing your CV, she does not mention that there are companies that actually write or rewrite your CV for a low fee, she does not mention that there are companies that mail, fax or email your CV to potential employers, she does not mention anything except "recruiters". I wondered why...So I clicked on her name. By clicking on "Rebecca Gresham" a link to a dot-org website comes up. Harmless enough. Following this dot-org link I landed at "Seaboard Healthcare", which turned out to be a "joint venture" of a hospital and - look at that, who would have thought so ! - a recruiter company! Not enough surprises though - by clicking further onto the page that lists the staff or board of this recruiting company, I find three names, one of them Rebecca Gersham, the director of research of said recrutier company.
So, we have an article written by a recruiter, who acts somewhat like a journalist and quotes a fellow staff member at her own (!) recruitment company. She never mentions that she is a member of the same recruitment firm or a member of any recruitment company for that matter. She tries to sell the reader the usual recruiter sales pitch under the guise of a "objective and neutral" journalist. This is truly shameless cloaking of your own identity for a very clear purpose - to appear more credible. This is truly shameless product placement and abuse of the trust the directors of MomMD have placed in someone.
In my opinion this is misleading and unethical. The lack of ethics apart, the whole sales pitch is dangerous misinformation. Followings these "recommendations" would delay the physician's job search significantly or derail it completely. These "recommendations" only, but only benefit the recruiter - as I have shown in previous posts on this blog.
This shows that recruiters publish articles in the guise of neutral writers to lend credibility to their sales pitch. MomMD has a policy that no direct or indirect advertisements be published in the messages section. Does this apply to the articles as well? It should. Members of MomMD deserve not be be mislead.
Your Matthias Muenzer, MD
Proud MomMD member
Note that the author is Rebecca Gresham. Note that nothing in the article says who she is or what she does. After reading this article I first I assumed that she is a journalist or a female physician or medical student like most members of MomMD.
Read the article:
By Rebecca Gresham
You're a busy woman; juggling everything from patients and insurance reimbursements to soccer games and family vacations. With a list of to-do's a mile long, it can be difficult-if not down right impossible-to make time to find a new and better practice opportunity when you're ready to move on from your current one. "Working with a recruiter can help you conserve what often feels like your most precious commodity: time," says Kelly Marsh, Director of Marketing for Seaboard Health Care Search in Nashville, Tennessee. Marsh also points out another important incentive working with a recruiter offers. "Search firms generate income by placing physicians at facilities they've contracted with. Since these fees are paid by the facility, the work done on the physician's behalf is free of charge to them." Below are three ways in which working with a physician staffing firm can make you feel like time is definitely on your side.
Very well written, really convincing, it really hits home. Here we have a woman who knows how it feels to be an overworked mom, a woman writing to support other women. The author might be a female journalist, who writes about "career transition", maybe based on her research, maybe based on her own experience. Truly well written, it could be a textbook example right out of the marketing classic "Marketing to Women".
It surprised me that any journalist would promote recruiters as obviously and blatantly as this article does. It surprised me that she did not mention any other methods of finding a job, any other approaches. She does not mention networking, something most women excel in. She does not write about specific tips for networking, whom to contact, what to say, what to look for, how to follow up. She does not mention approaching hospitals directly, she does not mention mailing your CV, she does not mention that there are companies that actually write or rewrite your CV for a low fee, she does not mention that there are companies that mail, fax or email your CV to potential employers, she does not mention anything except "recruiters". I wondered why...So I clicked on her name. By clicking on "Rebecca Gresham" a link to a dot-org website comes up. Harmless enough. Following this dot-org link I landed at "Seaboard Healthcare", which turned out to be a "joint venture" of a hospital and - look at that, who would have thought so ! - a recruiter company! Not enough surprises though - by clicking further onto the page that lists the staff or board of this recruiting company, I find three names, one of them Rebecca Gersham, the director of research of said recrutier company.
So, we have an article written by a recruiter, who acts somewhat like a journalist and quotes a fellow staff member at her own (!) recruitment company. She never mentions that she is a member of the same recruitment firm or a member of any recruitment company for that matter. She tries to sell the reader the usual recruiter sales pitch under the guise of a "objective and neutral" journalist. This is truly shameless cloaking of your own identity for a very clear purpose - to appear more credible. This is truly shameless product placement and abuse of the trust the directors of MomMD have placed in someone.
In my opinion this is misleading and unethical. The lack of ethics apart, the whole sales pitch is dangerous misinformation. Followings these "recommendations" would delay the physician's job search significantly or derail it completely. These "recommendations" only, but only benefit the recruiter - as I have shown in previous posts on this blog.
This shows that recruiters publish articles in the guise of neutral writers to lend credibility to their sales pitch. MomMD has a policy that no direct or indirect advertisements be published in the messages section. Does this apply to the articles as well? It should. Members of MomMD deserve not be be mislead.
Your Matthias Muenzer, MD
Proud MomMD member
Wednesday, April 4, 2007
Be very clear about the function of a physician recruiter
When you search for a position as a physician you literally cannot avoid recruiter advertising. They will be in your face no matter where you look, in journals, in magazines and especially on the Internet. It is helpful to be very clear about the exact function of a physician recruiter.
Recruiters are hired by an employer that is ready to pay 20,000 commission to have a position filled. Usually that means the position is not that easy to fill. The location might not be desirable, the pay may not be that great, the working environment might leave a bit to be desired, or the need might be very urgent. Good positions are easy to fill without paying someone 20K to go out there and search for months. The function of physician recruiters is to fill the less desirable jobs.
Recruiters are hired by an employer and they are the agents of that employer. The employer pays and therefore the employer calls the shots.
This also means that the recruiter is NOT working for you, the searching candidate. You are not paying for the recruiter. You do not employ or hire the recruiter. You do not call the shots. When you contact a recruiter, you are dealing with someone who is looking to fill a position in order to get paid, not to help YOU FIND a position. You are NOT dealing with someone whose job it is to help YOU, the candidate. A recruiter is NOT YOUR AGENT.
The recruiter is pursuing YOU, he is a "headhunter or "dochunter". You are the hunted. You are not the hunter! You are not in charge. Do not expect a recruiter to behave or function as a "candidate search agent", "search advisor", a "career advisor", a "career consultant". They do NOT get paid for any of that, so why should they do it? Even the most idealistic individual slows down over time when he or she does not get paid. Only the communists believed that humans work out of idealism, and that is why the red empire crumbled and disappeared.
If you have any doubts where the focus of the activity of a recruiter is, go to the very good blog "dochunter.com". Two experienced recruiters Jim Stone and Bob Collins write in good style, have excellent thoughts and I agree with most of what they are saying. When you read their blog you realize that it is about their relationship with their employers - the hospitals and large practices, their issues with filling positions, the difficulties in filling the jobs that are not so fabulous, the attitude problems of the people who hire them and so on and on. Take a look at the blog, it is worth reading. It is all about how to fill that position! It is NEVER about how YOU, the candidate can get WHAT YOU WANT. They might even "persuasively" work with you to make your recognize that what you want is not what you really "need" - I wrote about that quite nervy statement in a previous post. They do not so much care about what you want, they are just make a living getting the employer what the employer wants. What you want does not get them paid! What you want does not put food on their table!
Dear candidate, as soon as YOU hire and PAY a search agent, you can trust him or her to work in YOUR interest. Until then, the plain truth is that recruiters are on the payroll of an employer and that they represent the interest of an employer.
If you really think that a recruiter is "free for you", you believe in the proverbial "free lunch", or in Santa Claus or in the Easter Bunny for that matter!
I am not opposed to recruiters at all. They have the valuable function to fill positions for employers that could not otherwise be filled. I am just opposed to their very misleading marketing that tries to make you, the candidate, believe that they are "your search agents". They even offer to "customize a search for you". And all that "for free". Please!!!
To begin your search by contacting recruiters (plural) limits your choices right from the start down to 10% of all available positions. Networking and direct mail will get you access to 100%. And if you are naive enough to believe that one single recruiter will be your "search agent", then you just racheted your choices down to a extremely poor 5%.
What upsets me the most is that too many graduating residents are not aware of these figures. Too many graduating physicians still believe that using recruiters is an "OK" way to search for a job, that it is a mainstream way to find a job. There is an incredibly crass lack of knowledge and understanding about how the the physician job market works. The employers certainly know how to find candidates, they all know about recruiters and when to hire them. That is not the issue. The problem is that too many candidates, too many residents do not know about the best or even the right way to find jobs! They know something about networking, a bit about where to look for ads, but they do not know enough about ACTIVE search by contacting hosptial and by using direct mail and fax and where to get he addresses of physicains on the Internet for direct mail.
That is why I am writing this blog, that is why I have a website and that is why I support "thedoctorjob.com" - a fabulous service that helps doctors find jobs where they want. If you are looking for a job, skip the recruiters, and go straight to my blog, my website and to "thedoctorjob.com".
Your Matthias Muenzer, MD
Recruiters are hired by an employer that is ready to pay 20,000 commission to have a position filled. Usually that means the position is not that easy to fill. The location might not be desirable, the pay may not be that great, the working environment might leave a bit to be desired, or the need might be very urgent. Good positions are easy to fill without paying someone 20K to go out there and search for months. The function of physician recruiters is to fill the less desirable jobs.
Recruiters are hired by an employer and they are the agents of that employer. The employer pays and therefore the employer calls the shots.
This also means that the recruiter is NOT working for you, the searching candidate. You are not paying for the recruiter. You do not employ or hire the recruiter. You do not call the shots. When you contact a recruiter, you are dealing with someone who is looking to fill a position in order to get paid, not to help YOU FIND a position. You are NOT dealing with someone whose job it is to help YOU, the candidate. A recruiter is NOT YOUR AGENT.
The recruiter is pursuing YOU, he is a "headhunter or "dochunter". You are the hunted. You are not the hunter! You are not in charge. Do not expect a recruiter to behave or function as a "candidate search agent", "search advisor", a "career advisor", a "career consultant". They do NOT get paid for any of that, so why should they do it? Even the most idealistic individual slows down over time when he or she does not get paid. Only the communists believed that humans work out of idealism, and that is why the red empire crumbled and disappeared.
If you have any doubts where the focus of the activity of a recruiter is, go to the very good blog "dochunter.com". Two experienced recruiters Jim Stone and Bob Collins write in good style, have excellent thoughts and I agree with most of what they are saying. When you read their blog you realize that it is about their relationship with their employers - the hospitals and large practices, their issues with filling positions, the difficulties in filling the jobs that are not so fabulous, the attitude problems of the people who hire them and so on and on. Take a look at the blog, it is worth reading. It is all about how to fill that position! It is NEVER about how YOU, the candidate can get WHAT YOU WANT. They might even "persuasively" work with you to make your recognize that what you want is not what you really "need" - I wrote about that quite nervy statement in a previous post. They do not so much care about what you want, they are just make a living getting the employer what the employer wants. What you want does not get them paid! What you want does not put food on their table!
Dear candidate, as soon as YOU hire and PAY a search agent, you can trust him or her to work in YOUR interest. Until then, the plain truth is that recruiters are on the payroll of an employer and that they represent the interest of an employer.
If you really think that a recruiter is "free for you", you believe in the proverbial "free lunch", or in Santa Claus or in the Easter Bunny for that matter!
I am not opposed to recruiters at all. They have the valuable function to fill positions for employers that could not otherwise be filled. I am just opposed to their very misleading marketing that tries to make you, the candidate, believe that they are "your search agents". They even offer to "customize a search for you". And all that "for free". Please!!!
To begin your search by contacting recruiters (plural) limits your choices right from the start down to 10% of all available positions. Networking and direct mail will get you access to 100%. And if you are naive enough to believe that one single recruiter will be your "search agent", then you just racheted your choices down to a extremely poor 5%.
What upsets me the most is that too many graduating residents are not aware of these figures. Too many graduating physicians still believe that using recruiters is an "OK" way to search for a job, that it is a mainstream way to find a job. There is an incredibly crass lack of knowledge and understanding about how the the physician job market works. The employers certainly know how to find candidates, they all know about recruiters and when to hire them. That is not the issue. The problem is that too many candidates, too many residents do not know about the best or even the right way to find jobs! They know something about networking, a bit about where to look for ads, but they do not know enough about ACTIVE search by contacting hosptial and by using direct mail and fax and where to get he addresses of physicains on the Internet for direct mail.
That is why I am writing this blog, that is why I have a website and that is why I support "thedoctorjob.com" - a fabulous service that helps doctors find jobs where they want. If you are looking for a job, skip the recruiters, and go straight to my blog, my website and to "thedoctorjob.com".
Your Matthias Muenzer, MD
Saturday, March 31, 2007
Recruiters tell you what you "NEED". Surprise, it is NOT what you WANT.
Jim Stone, a blogging recruiter, wrote two days ago in his "dochunterdiary" about what he knows he "does well".
Number 3 on his list was:
"Persuasively dealing with physicians to help them differentiate their WANTS from their NEEDS"
And here we go with the recruiter dilemma: "We have those positions to fill - out there in the country. They are a little remote, and we know that they are not the greatest jobs, but we get paid only if we fill them."
Unfortunately most of those pesky spoiled physicians prefer to live in the big city, but we just can't get those jobs. They practically fill by themselves. What do we do now?
Well, let's just try to convince the doctors that "WHAT THEY WANT" is different from "WHAT THEY NEED". Physicians need to be educated about "What they need"!
Can you wrap your mind around this kind of arrogance? A recruiter knows what I need, a recruiter "helps me differentiate between what I want and need"? After 12 years of training and extremely hard work someone is trying to tell me what I really need? What qualifies a recruiter to make a statement about what I need? His common sense, his heart, his humanity? His common sense and humanity should tell a recruiter to leave personal choices of physicians alone, period!
If I want to live in a big city, that is just where I want to live. This is not rational, I know, I know, I know. This is pure fancy, pure emotion. As are most of the truly important and personal decisions in our lives. This is how I decided to marry my wife. There is absolutely nothing wrong with irrational desires. Fulfilling those irrational desires is what makes me happy!
It is very frustrating that recruiters put their desire (want or need?) to sell, sell, sell above everything else. Just because they do not have jobs in desirable locations, they try to change them minds of physicians to make them "fit to the jobs available".
Once recruiters do not have what you want, they try to tell you they you do not really need what you want! What you really need is what they have! WOW!
It's like the legend where the Inn Keeper either cuts off part of your leg if you are too tall for the bed - or puts you on a stretching device and tortures you until you are long enough for the bed. In either case, you suffer and die.
No wonder people dislike recruiters. Trying to "educate" a physician that he may "want the big city", but that he does "not need it" is utter disrespect! Of course I do not "need" the city, I just like it. Hey, all I really need is 2 meals a day, a roof over my head and some clothes!
After the amount of training, work and sacrifice I went through to become a physician, after all that - I just want what I want. And I am going to get it! And if YOU, dear recruiter, do not have what I want, then I do neither want nor need you or your services!
I am going to get that nice job my way: buying all addresses of all doctors in my preferred area with a few clicks on the Internet (Info USA, WebMD or any other list provider), and then I will mail them my polished cover letter and CV and then I will have the job. And if I do not have the time, then "thedoctorjob.com" will do it extremely well for me!
And if that really does not work, then I will open my own practice.
Here is what recruiters need:
Learn to listen.
Respect your candidates and their wishes!
Don't sell, facilitate!
If you can't get a job where the candidate wants to go, be honest and say so!
Tell people how to find the jobs where they want to live and work. Stop pretending that you do not know how to do that. Hey, maybe there could be a fee for that!
And then, in time, you will earn back the respect you have lost. And with the respect will come communication and understanding and repeat business.
Your Matthias Muenzer, MD
Number 3 on his list was:
"Persuasively dealing with physicians to help them differentiate their WANTS from their NEEDS"
And here we go with the recruiter dilemma: "We have those positions to fill - out there in the country. They are a little remote, and we know that they are not the greatest jobs, but we get paid only if we fill them."
Unfortunately most of those pesky spoiled physicians prefer to live in the big city, but we just can't get those jobs. They practically fill by themselves. What do we do now?
Well, let's just try to convince the doctors that "WHAT THEY WANT" is different from "WHAT THEY NEED". Physicians need to be educated about "What they need"!
Can you wrap your mind around this kind of arrogance? A recruiter knows what I need, a recruiter "helps me differentiate between what I want and need"? After 12 years of training and extremely hard work someone is trying to tell me what I really need? What qualifies a recruiter to make a statement about what I need? His common sense, his heart, his humanity? His common sense and humanity should tell a recruiter to leave personal choices of physicians alone, period!
If I want to live in a big city, that is just where I want to live. This is not rational, I know, I know, I know. This is pure fancy, pure emotion. As are most of the truly important and personal decisions in our lives. This is how I decided to marry my wife. There is absolutely nothing wrong with irrational desires. Fulfilling those irrational desires is what makes me happy!
It is very frustrating that recruiters put their desire (want or need?) to sell, sell, sell above everything else. Just because they do not have jobs in desirable locations, they try to change them minds of physicians to make them "fit to the jobs available".
Once recruiters do not have what you want, they try to tell you they you do not really need what you want! What you really need is what they have! WOW!
It's like the legend where the Inn Keeper either cuts off part of your leg if you are too tall for the bed - or puts you on a stretching device and tortures you until you are long enough for the bed. In either case, you suffer and die.
No wonder people dislike recruiters. Trying to "educate" a physician that he may "want the big city", but that he does "not need it" is utter disrespect! Of course I do not "need" the city, I just like it. Hey, all I really need is 2 meals a day, a roof over my head and some clothes!
After the amount of training, work and sacrifice I went through to become a physician, after all that - I just want what I want. And I am going to get it! And if YOU, dear recruiter, do not have what I want, then I do neither want nor need you or your services!
I am going to get that nice job my way: buying all addresses of all doctors in my preferred area with a few clicks on the Internet (Info USA, WebMD or any other list provider), and then I will mail them my polished cover letter and CV and then I will have the job. And if I do not have the time, then "thedoctorjob.com" will do it extremely well for me!
And if that really does not work, then I will open my own practice.
Here is what recruiters need:
Learn to listen.
Respect your candidates and their wishes!
Don't sell, facilitate!
If you can't get a job where the candidate wants to go, be honest and say so!
Tell people how to find the jobs where they want to live and work. Stop pretending that you do not know how to do that. Hey, maybe there could be a fee for that!
And then, in time, you will earn back the respect you have lost. And with the respect will come communication and understanding and repeat business.
Your Matthias Muenzer, MD
Friday, March 30, 2007
When a recruiter calls....
Whenever you look through recruiter websites, you find notes on the "advantages" of talking to recruiters as well as appeals to "answer that call".
I have put together a few ways of answering recruiter calls. Pick your favorite and practice it:
1. "Thank you for calling! I am actually looking for a job, but really only and exclusively in Manhattan, Downtown LA, downtown Atlanta, downtown Boston, etc etc - (insert your favorite city here) because I have family there and I need to be close to them."
Then hear them squirm and listen to the excuses why their company - that has "the best jobs" and "thousands of opportunities nationwide" - just happen to be out of jobs in that particular location. An instructional approach, teaches you how the recruiter handles a request he or she can never fulfill.
2. "Hey, I heard you get 20K for placing me. What about a deal? You get 60%, I get 40%, after all, without me, there is no placement" This answer qualifies you as a future leading administrative physician executive.
3. "Hey, I have heard you get 20K just for placing me. I propose a deal. You get 20%, I get 80%. Whaddaya say?" This answer shows that you are a future HMO executive.
4. "You say somebody would pay 20K just to have me work for them? I don't believe that, nobody pays that much for me". Too depressive, not recommended. But it is true, people are willing to pay that much to have you work for them. And then they get the 20K back from your collections and then they make much, much more off of your blood sweat and tears.
5. "No, I am not Dr. Watson. But I know Dr. Watson very well, he is the doctor that leads my therapy group here on the psych floor, he is a really nice guy. But you can talk to me, I'll relay him the message...."
6. "A recruiter, you say? You fxxxxxx bxxxxx, the last so called opportunity from your kind turned out to be xxxxxx xxxxxx and xxxxxx xxxx! You are a xxxxxxx xxxxxxxx!" and hang up.
While this is a passionate response and while it is most certainly understandable, this is just not appropriate. Not professional, not recommended.
7. "Take my name off of your list and put me on your companies do-not-call list". Very matter of fact. Fully appropriate. Treat telemarketers as telemarketers. Saves a lot of time, which you then can use to search for a job the right way.
8. "Sorry, I am on the other line answering invitations to several interviews in the area that you said was "oversaturated". Good bye". Excellent answer. Will give the recruiter something to think about.
9. "I am no longer looking, since I already found a job. I mailed my CV directly to a number of physicians and got a job right where I wanted. Maybe you guys should use direct mail too". Also an excellent answer. Will give the recruiter food for thought.
10. "You are asking which of my colleagues is looking for a job? Sure, I can tell you. But first I will send you a contract and each name of a colleague I tell you will cost you 10K". Excellent answer, you are a savvy businessperson. Give them some of their own medicine.
11. "Can you call me when you work pro-bono? I can't stand the thought that those poor hospitals will have to pay 20,000 just to have me work there." You are clearly the son / daughter of a community service lawyer. You are compassionate and feel for the underprivileged. You deserve a job in the big city. Call thedoctorjob.com and you will find it. Don't bother with recruiters, they have only the less desirable jobs.
Your Matthias Muenzer, MD
I have put together a few ways of answering recruiter calls. Pick your favorite and practice it:
1. "Thank you for calling! I am actually looking for a job, but really only and exclusively in Manhattan, Downtown LA, downtown Atlanta, downtown Boston, etc etc - (insert your favorite city here) because I have family there and I need to be close to them."
Then hear them squirm and listen to the excuses why their company - that has "the best jobs" and "thousands of opportunities nationwide" - just happen to be out of jobs in that particular location. An instructional approach, teaches you how the recruiter handles a request he or she can never fulfill.
2. "Hey, I heard you get 20K for placing me. What about a deal? You get 60%, I get 40%, after all, without me, there is no placement" This answer qualifies you as a future leading administrative physician executive.
3. "Hey, I have heard you get 20K just for placing me. I propose a deal. You get 20%, I get 80%. Whaddaya say?" This answer shows that you are a future HMO executive.
4. "You say somebody would pay 20K just to have me work for them? I don't believe that, nobody pays that much for me". Too depressive, not recommended. But it is true, people are willing to pay that much to have you work for them. And then they get the 20K back from your collections and then they make much, much more off of your blood sweat and tears.
5. "No, I am not Dr. Watson. But I know Dr. Watson very well, he is the doctor that leads my therapy group here on the psych floor, he is a really nice guy. But you can talk to me, I'll relay him the message...."
6. "A recruiter, you say? You fxxxxxx bxxxxx, the last so called opportunity from your kind turned out to be xxxxxx xxxxxx and xxxxxx xxxx! You are a xxxxxxx xxxxxxxx!" and hang up.
While this is a passionate response and while it is most certainly understandable, this is just not appropriate. Not professional, not recommended.
7. "Take my name off of your list and put me on your companies do-not-call list". Very matter of fact. Fully appropriate. Treat telemarketers as telemarketers. Saves a lot of time, which you then can use to search for a job the right way.
8. "Sorry, I am on the other line answering invitations to several interviews in the area that you said was "oversaturated". Good bye". Excellent answer. Will give the recruiter something to think about.
9. "I am no longer looking, since I already found a job. I mailed my CV directly to a number of physicians and got a job right where I wanted. Maybe you guys should use direct mail too". Also an excellent answer. Will give the recruiter food for thought.
10. "You are asking which of my colleagues is looking for a job? Sure, I can tell you. But first I will send you a contract and each name of a colleague I tell you will cost you 10K". Excellent answer, you are a savvy businessperson. Give them some of their own medicine.
11. "Can you call me when you work pro-bono? I can't stand the thought that those poor hospitals will have to pay 20,000 just to have me work there." You are clearly the son / daughter of a community service lawyer. You are compassionate and feel for the underprivileged. You deserve a job in the big city. Call thedoctorjob.com and you will find it. Don't bother with recruiters, they have only the less desirable jobs.
Your Matthias Muenzer, MD
one experience with iHirephysicians
There is a good idea out there that someone turned into a web service: If you are a doctor searching for a job, we email and fax your CV to all registered recipients in an area code of your choice. For free, or for a fee, and then we promise to make it more effective by emailing plus faxing it.
Sounds good. I tried iHirePhysicans, it didn't work. And now I get email notifications every other day of internal medicine jobs in Texas and Wyoming - something I really need like a hole in the head.
The idea is good. Why not email your cover letter and CV? Simply because physicians as a group are embarrasingly far behind with email and internet. Some of us have realized how convenient, efficient and easy it is, but most of our colleagues are still in the telephone era, or - hey, much more advanced - in the fax era.
Also, email is easily considered spam and deleted. At least I delete most emails of senders I do not know.
Other doctors are still in the phase where you switch from one email provider to the next. I had my yahoo address for 10 years now.
There is little guarantee that your CV will arrive looking as you would like, well unless you send it as PDF. Although I believe everybody can open a Word document with all formatting intact.
So, those are reasons why it may be too early for email campaigns. But, wait, maybe in two to three years.
Until then, stay away from iHirePhysicians. Good old mail seems to still be the best way to get your cover letter and CV in front of potential employers.
And, 73 emails sent, and no answer? How come? How reliable were those email addresses? Who gathered, collected them? Did they check them?
I believe it is best to get all mailing addresses of all the doctors in your field and in your target area and send them all your cover letter and CV on nice paper.
Your Matthias Muenzer, MD
Sounds good. I tried iHirePhysicans, it didn't work. And now I get email notifications every other day of internal medicine jobs in Texas and Wyoming - something I really need like a hole in the head.
The idea is good. Why not email your cover letter and CV? Simply because physicians as a group are embarrasingly far behind with email and internet. Some of us have realized how convenient, efficient and easy it is, but most of our colleagues are still in the telephone era, or - hey, much more advanced - in the fax era.
Also, email is easily considered spam and deleted. At least I delete most emails of senders I do not know.
Other doctors are still in the phase where you switch from one email provider to the next. I had my yahoo address for 10 years now.
There is little guarantee that your CV will arrive looking as you would like, well unless you send it as PDF. Although I believe everybody can open a Word document with all formatting intact.
So, those are reasons why it may be too early for email campaigns. But, wait, maybe in two to three years.
Until then, stay away from iHirePhysicians. Good old mail seems to still be the best way to get your cover letter and CV in front of potential employers.
And, 73 emails sent, and no answer? How come? How reliable were those email addresses? Who gathered, collected them? Did they check them?
I believe it is best to get all mailing addresses of all the doctors in your field and in your target area and send them all your cover letter and CV on nice paper.
Your Matthias Muenzer, MD
Thursday, March 29, 2007
MomMD makes a bad recommendation
Mom MD has an article on their webiste:
"Physician recruiters - making career transition a snap". This article desperately needs a comment. It presents the typical recruiter sales pitch: If you want to switch careers, call a recruiter. He or she will be your exclusive search agent, will go out there, find and review offers for you and present the best ones to you, saving you time and effort - and it's free.
This statement could not be more wrong and could not be more dangerously misleading!
Based on my personal experience as a physician both looking for a job and looking to hire a new associate I very strongly recommend using recruiters only as a last resort or, even better, not using them at all.
Too few jobs are accessible through recruiters:
85-90% of practices decline to work with recruiters, according to a telephone survey of 1000 practices. Even the most optimistic estimates done by recruitment firms calculate that only 1/3 of jobs are filled through recruiters! By starting your job search or career transition with a recruiter, you limit yourself to about 20% of available jobs.
Recruiters repeatedly have told me that they do not get jobs in areas with “more applicants than jobs", which applies pretty much to every desirable area in the US. "The function of recruiters in the physician marketplace is to fill the less desirable positions".
By starting your job search with recruiters you limit yourself to the less desirable jobs.
Employers usually try to fill jobs through word of month, then, months later, through advertising in print media and with direct-by-employer ads on the Internet. Only if that fails, will the usual employer resort to calling a recruiter. By this time, months to a year have passed already since the position became available.
By starting your job search with a recruiter, you limit yourself to the jobs that have been available for quite a while. A few people have looked at the job. A great job would have been gone by that time. You limit yourself to the leftovers.
The $ 18-20,000 to pay a recruiter for finding the candidate have to come from somewhere. In fact, this amount is usually budgeted as expense or overhead and is attributed to the incoming physician. It will most likely impact her or his salary, in a more or less silent way. And don't believe anybody who tries to tell you otherwise. By starting your job search with recruiters, you likely get a job that pays less.
By starting your job search with a recruiter, you place yourself at a severe disadvantage.
It would be even worse if you actually limited yourself even further and selected one single recruiter as your "search agent"! Recruiters do not all belong to the same network and they do not all share their job opportunities. Now you have limited yourself to a fraction of the less desirable jobs, to the leftovers and to the less well paying jobs.
And recruiters do not "network for you", no matter what they advertise - there is no such thing. All they do is type your short profile into a general recruiter database and check if there is another recruiter job in that database that might loosely fit. That is what they call "networking".
So, why on earth would a good, reliable, well meaning website such as MomMD publish such nonsense?
Most likely this is the result of a lack of knowledge. Writers, publishers, journalists fell prey to recruiter marketing. Jouirnalists mean well and try to inform. When researching a topic, they turn to sources that are available and approachable. We physicians usually are neither readily available nor interested in talking or writing on the subject of "career change" or "job search". Recruiters are very available. They want to get their sales pitch out there, as often as possible. They welcome journalists, they court them, they look for them, they aggressively go after any kind of PR. After all, they live off it.
And so it is not surprising that recruiter Marsh pretty much reads off the recruiter “press kit”. And recruiter Marsh actually pitches the dream of any recruiter. Following her "recommendations" would literally guarantee her the commission. While this serves her wallet well, it severely handicaps and delays the jobs search for the candidate. It will make the career transition everything but a snap. This recommendation helps ONLY the recruiter. Sadly, this is what naive and uninformed journalists print all to often.
It is time to correct this recruiter sales pitch ad to reveal what is really behind it. This nonsense has the same relevance for your job search as one of those "get rich quick" infomercials that air at 04.00 AM.
Please MomMD, save your readers the disappointments and the frustration that are guaranteed to result from following recruiter Marsh's "recommendation". Please make their career transition truly a snap by following my active search recommendations. They were earned in time and are based on experience and objective research. Unlike the recruiter infomercial, they do work. You can do it yourself, or you can have a company such as "TheDoctorJob.com" do it for you.
The best, most powerful and most successful way of finding a job
Decide where you want to work and live.
Buy a list of all addresses, phone number and fax number of the physicians in your specialty in that area. You can do this online by going to InfoUSA.com, to WebMD or to MMS (the marketing arm of the AMA) at mmslists.com. You can drill down very accurately to the selection of physicians you need. Go on InfoUSA.com and try it. It typically costs 75 cents for an address with telephone and fax number.
Have your CV and cover letter written or at least reviewed by a professional writer, e.g. Quintcareers.com (NOT by a recruiter, even if they claim to see many CVs a day). This will cost another $200-300.
Mail-merge your cover letter with the address list to create personalized letters.
Mail your cover letter and CV to all doctors in your target area.
You may also fax your cover letter and CV (or maybe just your cover letter) to all physicians in your target area. Do this using JBlast.com, a fax broadcast system that allows you to Mail-Merge your letter with your list of addresses with the same ease as Word. You can literally fax your letter to hundreds of physicians with a single click. This costs about 6-10 cents per fax. Please consider the laws about unsolicited faxes - you are doing this at your own risk.
The response rate will be 1-2%, sometimes even up to 4%. This means that if you mail or fax 1000 letters, you will receive about 10-20 responses. The more physicians you contact, the more interviews you will get.
This is the least expensive and most effective, most successful way to find a job - and you can find it exactly where you want it. Obviously, you may repeat this after a few months if it does not work the first time.
And use "passive" search methods in addition, to comliment your active search, so that you do not miss anything.
“Passive” means you do not actively approach potential employers, but you look on websites and in journals for offers. Here are the best places to search for job postings on the Internet and in journals. They are the best because they have a large number of offers and a high number of direct-by-employer offers:
NTNjobs.com: This website used to be the "ACOG job website" referred to until 2005. It has a large number of direct-from-the-employer ads. The Jobs are listed in a convenient way: alphabetically by state and location.
At Practicelink.com you will find jobs advertised by hospitals and health care systems. Very often these are good jobs in practices and offices. Answering these ads will put you in touch with "in-house recruiters" that will pass on your CV and information to the employers / private practices.
HealtheCareers.com, the new website that ACOG links to. It has a good number of direct-from-employer ads. You can access it directly on the web or through the ACOG website.
Besides these two there are several thousand (!) other websites that mostly cater to recruiters, some of whom even proclaim to be "specialize" in ObGyn, but they rarely are useful. All-purpose websites such as Monster.com or Careerbuilder.com are utterly useless.
Look in widely distributed print publications (throw away journals) such as in
Contemporary Ob/Gyn,
Ob/Gyn Management or Obgmanagement.com,
Ob GynNews or Ob.Gyn.News.com The green journal also has good ads, but they are a bit expensive for private practices.
c. Check the websites sites of large hospital chains such as Humana, Tenet Health, Columbia, UHS, HCA (Hospital Corporation of America). Go to their website, e.g. Tenet Healthcare.com, click on “Career center”, then on “For Physicians”. Fill out the inquiry form, and you will receive answers. You will also find contact information to as many individual hospitals as you want – choose your area. HCA, another large hospital company, owns hundreds of hospitals. They do their own recruiting (in-house recruiters) and/or help their affiliated physicians and groups to hire doctors.
d. Create a Google Alert to help you in your search. 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.
Please spread the knowledge about these truly effective job search methods, so that fewer of our colleagues end up as victims of the recruiter marketing nonsense.
Your Matthias Muenzer, MD
"Physician recruiters - making career transition a snap". This article desperately needs a comment. It presents the typical recruiter sales pitch: If you want to switch careers, call a recruiter. He or she will be your exclusive search agent, will go out there, find and review offers for you and present the best ones to you, saving you time and effort - and it's free.
This statement could not be more wrong and could not be more dangerously misleading!
Based on my personal experience as a physician both looking for a job and looking to hire a new associate I very strongly recommend using recruiters only as a last resort or, even better, not using them at all.
Too few jobs are accessible through recruiters:
85-90% of practices decline to work with recruiters, according to a telephone survey of 1000 practices. Even the most optimistic estimates done by recruitment firms calculate that only 1/3 of jobs are filled through recruiters! By starting your job search or career transition with a recruiter, you limit yourself to about 20% of available jobs.
Recruiters repeatedly have told me that they do not get jobs in areas with “more applicants than jobs", which applies pretty much to every desirable area in the US. "The function of recruiters in the physician marketplace is to fill the less desirable positions".
By starting your job search with recruiters you limit yourself to the less desirable jobs.
Employers usually try to fill jobs through word of month, then, months later, through advertising in print media and with direct-by-employer ads on the Internet. Only if that fails, will the usual employer resort to calling a recruiter. By this time, months to a year have passed already since the position became available.
By starting your job search with a recruiter, you limit yourself to the jobs that have been available for quite a while. A few people have looked at the job. A great job would have been gone by that time. You limit yourself to the leftovers.
The $ 18-20,000 to pay a recruiter for finding the candidate have to come from somewhere. In fact, this amount is usually budgeted as expense or overhead and is attributed to the incoming physician. It will most likely impact her or his salary, in a more or less silent way. And don't believe anybody who tries to tell you otherwise. By starting your job search with recruiters, you likely get a job that pays less.
By starting your job search with a recruiter, you place yourself at a severe disadvantage.
It would be even worse if you actually limited yourself even further and selected one single recruiter as your "search agent"! Recruiters do not all belong to the same network and they do not all share their job opportunities. Now you have limited yourself to a fraction of the less desirable jobs, to the leftovers and to the less well paying jobs.
And recruiters do not "network for you", no matter what they advertise - there is no such thing. All they do is type your short profile into a general recruiter database and check if there is another recruiter job in that database that might loosely fit. That is what they call "networking".
So, why on earth would a good, reliable, well meaning website such as MomMD publish such nonsense?
Most likely this is the result of a lack of knowledge. Writers, publishers, journalists fell prey to recruiter marketing. Jouirnalists mean well and try to inform. When researching a topic, they turn to sources that are available and approachable. We physicians usually are neither readily available nor interested in talking or writing on the subject of "career change" or "job search". Recruiters are very available. They want to get their sales pitch out there, as often as possible. They welcome journalists, they court them, they look for them, they aggressively go after any kind of PR. After all, they live off it.
And so it is not surprising that recruiter Marsh pretty much reads off the recruiter “press kit”. And recruiter Marsh actually pitches the dream of any recruiter. Following her "recommendations" would literally guarantee her the commission. While this serves her wallet well, it severely handicaps and delays the jobs search for the candidate. It will make the career transition everything but a snap. This recommendation helps ONLY the recruiter. Sadly, this is what naive and uninformed journalists print all to often.
It is time to correct this recruiter sales pitch ad to reveal what is really behind it. This nonsense has the same relevance for your job search as one of those "get rich quick" infomercials that air at 04.00 AM.
Please MomMD, save your readers the disappointments and the frustration that are guaranteed to result from following recruiter Marsh's "recommendation". Please make their career transition truly a snap by following my active search recommendations. They were earned in time and are based on experience and objective research. Unlike the recruiter infomercial, they do work. You can do it yourself, or you can have a company such as "TheDoctorJob.com" do it for you.
The best, most powerful and most successful way of finding a job
Decide where you want to work and live.
Buy a list of all addresses, phone number and fax number of the physicians in your specialty in that area. You can do this online by going to InfoUSA.com, to WebMD or to MMS (the marketing arm of the AMA) at mmslists.com. You can drill down very accurately to the selection of physicians you need. Go on InfoUSA.com and try it. It typically costs 75 cents for an address with telephone and fax number.
Have your CV and cover letter written or at least reviewed by a professional writer, e.g. Quintcareers.com (NOT by a recruiter, even if they claim to see many CVs a day). This will cost another $200-300.
Mail-merge your cover letter with the address list to create personalized letters.
Mail your cover letter and CV to all doctors in your target area.
You may also fax your cover letter and CV (or maybe just your cover letter) to all physicians in your target area. Do this using JBlast.com, a fax broadcast system that allows you to Mail-Merge your letter with your list of addresses with the same ease as Word. You can literally fax your letter to hundreds of physicians with a single click. This costs about 6-10 cents per fax. Please consider the laws about unsolicited faxes - you are doing this at your own risk.
The response rate will be 1-2%, sometimes even up to 4%. This means that if you mail or fax 1000 letters, you will receive about 10-20 responses. The more physicians you contact, the more interviews you will get.
This is the least expensive and most effective, most successful way to find a job - and you can find it exactly where you want it. Obviously, you may repeat this after a few months if it does not work the first time.
And use "passive" search methods in addition, to comliment your active search, so that you do not miss anything.
“Passive” means you do not actively approach potential employers, but you look on websites and in journals for offers. Here are the best places to search for job postings on the Internet and in journals. They are the best because they have a large number of offers and a high number of direct-by-employer offers:
NTNjobs.com: This website used to be the "ACOG job website" referred to until 2005. It has a large number of direct-from-the-employer ads. The Jobs are listed in a convenient way: alphabetically by state and location.
At Practicelink.com you will find jobs advertised by hospitals and health care systems. Very often these are good jobs in practices and offices. Answering these ads will put you in touch with "in-house recruiters" that will pass on your CV and information to the employers / private practices.
HealtheCareers.com, the new website that ACOG links to. It has a good number of direct-from-employer ads. You can access it directly on the web or through the ACOG website.
Besides these two there are several thousand (!) other websites that mostly cater to recruiters, some of whom even proclaim to be "specialize" in ObGyn, but they rarely are useful. All-purpose websites such as Monster.com or Careerbuilder.com are utterly useless.
Look in widely distributed print publications (throw away journals) such as in
Contemporary Ob/Gyn,
Ob/Gyn Management or Obgmanagement.com,
Ob GynNews or Ob.Gyn.News.com The green journal also has good ads, but they are a bit expensive for private practices.
c. Check the websites sites of large hospital chains such as Humana, Tenet Health, Columbia, UHS, HCA (Hospital Corporation of America). Go to their website, e.g. Tenet Healthcare.com, click on “Career center”, then on “For Physicians”. Fill out the inquiry form, and you will receive answers. You will also find contact information to as many individual hospitals as you want – choose your area. HCA, another large hospital company, owns hundreds of hospitals. They do their own recruiting (in-house recruiters) and/or help their affiliated physicians and groups to hire doctors.
d. Create a Google Alert to help you in your search. 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.
Please spread the knowledge about these truly effective job search methods, so that fewer of our colleagues end up as victims of the recruiter marketing nonsense.
Your Matthias Muenzer, MD
Friday, March 23, 2007
Should physician recruiters tell you about their limitations?
If one of my patients has a problem that I cannot solve myself, I acknowledge the problem my patient has, and I tell her who can solve it. Then I give her the name, address and telephone number of colleague who can solve it. Anything else would be unacceptable and unethical.
Should not recruiters inform us that they are not able to find jobs in attractive cities or about anywhere where there are more applicants than jobs? They do not. Recruiters are fully aware that jobs are first advertised by word of mouth, then in print media and on the Internet as direct-by-employer ad, and if all this is not successful, months later, a recruiter is called.
Do recruiters refer you to someone else you can find you a job in the area you want, such as in Los Angeles, New York, San Franciscio, Miami or Seattle? NO!
Why do we not apply the same kind of standards to physician recruiters that we apply to ourselves?
For several years, every recruiter who has contacted me has heard my request "I want a job in Attractive City only, nowhere else. And only one, just one single veteran recruiter ever said, "Listen, a recruiter cannot help you there, we do not get those jobs, you have to do it yourself. Just call all the offices".
Rather than helping you achieve your careeer goal, out of a sense of responsibility, recruiters tend tell you that the good jobs are "not available".
One example from the Cejkasearch website: "If you have your heart set on Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Francisco, or Seattle, join the club. That's the problem: Such highly desirable locations in terms of lifestyle may be highly undesirable from a professional standpoint. Large metropolitan areas are either already swamped with managed care or about to be. And because competition for jobs is intense, practice opportunities are fewer, compensation may be less, and your financial future may be shakier than in less populous locales."
Or, in plain English: "City not good, country side good! Where you want to be, not good, where we have jobs, good!"
On recruiter blogs you will read musings about "what do you the doctor really need to be happy, do you really have to be in the big city, could you do with less, could you not live in the countryside?".
This lack of responsibility for a client is what really turned me against recruiters. I find it discouraging that recruiters do not intend to help you, they do not intend to give you advice, they do not feel any responsibility towards you or your career. No matter what their emails, brochures and websites say.
After years of dealing with recruiters I am convinced that they are just interested in the "quick buck". Here is an enlightening posting on a blog by a former recruiter:
Before I started my coaching business, I learned the traditional selling process while working in recruiting and sales for a national consulting firm. To say that I am familiar with prospecting would be an understatement. While working there, I burned up the phone lines each day, constantly dialing the phone in search of potential clients. The headset became a permanent fixture on my head as I "smiled and dialed" for dollars and for fresh prospects.
On an average day, I made around 100 phone calls and spent at least 3 hours actually on the phone (time spent dialing the phone or taking a break in between calls didn't count towards my daily activity goal). As part of that routine, I left multitudes of messages, dialed hundreds of wrong numbers and heard the phone slammed down in my ear - all in search of the next prospect, that potential candidate who was ready to hear my shtick about new "practice opportunities."
......Aside from reaching a certain activity goal each day, the purpose of my incessant dialing of the phone was clear. I was on the hunt for a certain number of prospects that could possibly fill the practice opportunities (jobs) our team represented. For any given job, I hoped to find at least 4-5 prospects in hopes that one of them would work out and actually take the job. If not, then I was back to the drawing board, since my compensation was directly tied to the number of interviews and number of placements (jobs filled) that I could help make happen.
Many days, I often wondered how our firm could do things differently - to better reach the prospects and potential clients in our target market. I knew there had to be a better, more effective (and efficient) way to build relationships with our potential clients. To establish trust and credibility, so that they contacted us when they were ready for our services, instead of us hounding them until they either cried "uncle" or changed their phone number.
Many of us on the team had ideas on how we could improve our sales cycle and produce even better results. No such luck. These suggestions fell on deaf ears, as "management" was not interested in changing the process. Based on their responses, it seemed that the executive team had no interest in actually developing relationships with our candidates and clients. They were focused on the short term - finding as many deals to increase profits today, regardless of the negative backlash it created both within the company and among potential candidates. But that's another story for another time...
This is an excerpt from a posting on the blog of Michael Port "Book yourself solid". I do not have to anything to add. It could not be clearer.
Fortunately for job seekers, Direct Mail and companies like "Thedoctorjob.com" make it easy for you to get a job just where you want it.
Your Matthias Muenzer, MD
Should not recruiters inform us that they are not able to find jobs in attractive cities or about anywhere where there are more applicants than jobs? They do not. Recruiters are fully aware that jobs are first advertised by word of mouth, then in print media and on the Internet as direct-by-employer ad, and if all this is not successful, months later, a recruiter is called.
Do recruiters refer you to someone else you can find you a job in the area you want, such as in Los Angeles, New York, San Franciscio, Miami or Seattle? NO!
Why do we not apply the same kind of standards to physician recruiters that we apply to ourselves?
For several years, every recruiter who has contacted me has heard my request "I want a job in Attractive City only, nowhere else. And only one, just one single veteran recruiter ever said, "Listen, a recruiter cannot help you there, we do not get those jobs, you have to do it yourself. Just call all the offices".
Rather than helping you achieve your careeer goal, out of a sense of responsibility, recruiters tend tell you that the good jobs are "not available".
One example from the Cejkasearch website: "If you have your heart set on Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Francisco, or Seattle, join the club. That's the problem: Such highly desirable locations in terms of lifestyle may be highly undesirable from a professional standpoint. Large metropolitan areas are either already swamped with managed care or about to be. And because competition for jobs is intense, practice opportunities are fewer, compensation may be less, and your financial future may be shakier than in less populous locales."
Or, in plain English: "City not good, country side good! Where you want to be, not good, where we have jobs, good!"
On recruiter blogs you will read musings about "what do you the doctor really need to be happy, do you really have to be in the big city, could you do with less, could you not live in the countryside?".
This lack of responsibility for a client is what really turned me against recruiters. I find it discouraging that recruiters do not intend to help you, they do not intend to give you advice, they do not feel any responsibility towards you or your career. No matter what their emails, brochures and websites say.
After years of dealing with recruiters I am convinced that they are just interested in the "quick buck". Here is an enlightening posting on a blog by a former recruiter:
Before I started my coaching business, I learned the traditional selling process while working in recruiting and sales for a national consulting firm. To say that I am familiar with prospecting would be an understatement. While working there, I burned up the phone lines each day, constantly dialing the phone in search of potential clients. The headset became a permanent fixture on my head as I "smiled and dialed" for dollars and for fresh prospects.
On an average day, I made around 100 phone calls and spent at least 3 hours actually on the phone (time spent dialing the phone or taking a break in between calls didn't count towards my daily activity goal). As part of that routine, I left multitudes of messages, dialed hundreds of wrong numbers and heard the phone slammed down in my ear - all in search of the next prospect, that potential candidate who was ready to hear my shtick about new "practice opportunities."
......Aside from reaching a certain activity goal each day, the purpose of my incessant dialing of the phone was clear. I was on the hunt for a certain number of prospects that could possibly fill the practice opportunities (jobs) our team represented. For any given job, I hoped to find at least 4-5 prospects in hopes that one of them would work out and actually take the job. If not, then I was back to the drawing board, since my compensation was directly tied to the number of interviews and number of placements (jobs filled) that I could help make happen.
Many days, I often wondered how our firm could do things differently - to better reach the prospects and potential clients in our target market. I knew there had to be a better, more effective (and efficient) way to build relationships with our potential clients. To establish trust and credibility, so that they contacted us when they were ready for our services, instead of us hounding them until they either cried "uncle" or changed their phone number.
Many of us on the team had ideas on how we could improve our sales cycle and produce even better results. No such luck. These suggestions fell on deaf ears, as "management" was not interested in changing the process. Based on their responses, it seemed that the executive team had no interest in actually developing relationships with our candidates and clients. They were focused on the short term - finding as many deals to increase profits today, regardless of the negative backlash it created both within the company and among potential candidates. But that's another story for another time...
This is an excerpt from a posting on the blog of Michael Port "Book yourself solid". I do not have to anything to add. It could not be clearer.
Fortunately for job seekers, Direct Mail and companies like "Thedoctorjob.com" make it easy for you to get a job just where you want it.
Your Matthias Muenzer, MD
Monday, March 19, 2007
Understand what happens BEFORE a job is ever advertised !
For young physicians searching for a job it is very helpful to know what goes on in the mind of a practice owner before a job is advertised.
Usually the practice owner has a growing practice and works more and more, harder and harder and starts to get tired. He starts delegating more, may hire additional staff, and then after many months, the thought arises that he might need an additional physician to prevent burn out. He may toss that idea around in his head for a few months, since it is not an easy decision. Then he may talk to his wife about it, or to a partner in the practice. Then, when the decision gets ahead, he might talk to his accountant and think about the cost of a new physician. Then he may make a detailed business plan with a cost analysis for an additional colleague in the practice. Then, after one or several more months to about a year he may make the final decision "Yes, I will hire a new physician".
Then he will ask around in the hospital for a few weeks, put the word out, mention it to the colleagues who cover his call, then maybe to the head of the department, maybe to the medical director if he happens to know him better. He might, after one or two months, contact the closest University and he may speak to the residency program director "Any good residents that might be interested in joining me?".
Then, if after a few months, if nobody materializes, he might advertise in one of the journals. Usually an ad yields several CVs. Maybe one of the candidates is a fit and the search is over. Maybe nobody has the right qualification and the right chemistry. Then he may advertise again in the same journal, or maybe now in all three or four commonly used journals, or he may advertise, hopefully on NTNjobs.com or healthecareers.com. It is now 3 months after the first ad was placed.
And here is the important point: ONLY AFTER ALL THIS WAS NOT SUCCESSFUL, will he consider, for the first time consider, calling a recruiter. Why? Very simple, there are 20,000 solid green reasons NOT to call a recruiter....
Between perceiving the need for an additional physician and the advertisement usually 6-12 months pass by and then another 6 months at least until the owner will consider giving the job to a recruiter.
This means that you, the smart uptodate physician, who searches jobs actively by using direct mail or a direct mail service such as Thedoctorjob.com have a window of 12-18 months to find a job before everybody else knows about it! By the way, many recruiters know this and routinely send their ads out to practice owners hoping to catch just the right moment - but don't worry, there are those 20,000 reasons that work very much in your favor!
Imagine that! Your CV just seems to pop out of nowhere and lands on the doctors desk. Surprise, a qualified, willing physician looking for a position right where the practice owner is and right now, at this fortunate moment!
I am not kidding. I had these reactions "God must have heard my prayers", "It is most fortunate that you sent my your CV at this time" "Your CV reaches me at a great time".
So, you are truly welcome if you send out your cover letter and CV, you actually relieve the practice owner of further searching, or at least you raise that hope. And, your CV shows up without any competition, at the right moment. You cannot have better chances than that!
That is why services like Thedoctorjob.com can advertise high success rates. I have tried it with the do-it-yourself method and had the above surprising results. It works like a charm, I can highly recommend it!
The function of physician recruiters is to fill the less desirable jobs! When a recruiter calls, stop and think: Do I really want a less desirable job?
Good luck and happy searching!
Your Matthias Muenzer, MD
Usually the practice owner has a growing practice and works more and more, harder and harder and starts to get tired. He starts delegating more, may hire additional staff, and then after many months, the thought arises that he might need an additional physician to prevent burn out. He may toss that idea around in his head for a few months, since it is not an easy decision. Then he may talk to his wife about it, or to a partner in the practice. Then, when the decision gets ahead, he might talk to his accountant and think about the cost of a new physician. Then he may make a detailed business plan with a cost analysis for an additional colleague in the practice. Then, after one or several more months to about a year he may make the final decision "Yes, I will hire a new physician".
Then he will ask around in the hospital for a few weeks, put the word out, mention it to the colleagues who cover his call, then maybe to the head of the department, maybe to the medical director if he happens to know him better. He might, after one or two months, contact the closest University and he may speak to the residency program director "Any good residents that might be interested in joining me?".
Then, if after a few months, if nobody materializes, he might advertise in one of the journals. Usually an ad yields several CVs. Maybe one of the candidates is a fit and the search is over. Maybe nobody has the right qualification and the right chemistry. Then he may advertise again in the same journal, or maybe now in all three or four commonly used journals, or he may advertise, hopefully on NTNjobs.com or healthecareers.com. It is now 3 months after the first ad was placed.
And here is the important point: ONLY AFTER ALL THIS WAS NOT SUCCESSFUL, will he consider, for the first time consider, calling a recruiter. Why? Very simple, there are 20,000 solid green reasons NOT to call a recruiter....
Between perceiving the need for an additional physician and the advertisement usually 6-12 months pass by and then another 6 months at least until the owner will consider giving the job to a recruiter.
This means that you, the smart uptodate physician, who searches jobs actively by using direct mail or a direct mail service such as Thedoctorjob.com have a window of 12-18 months to find a job before everybody else knows about it! By the way, many recruiters know this and routinely send their ads out to practice owners hoping to catch just the right moment - but don't worry, there are those 20,000 reasons that work very much in your favor!
Imagine that! Your CV just seems to pop out of nowhere and lands on the doctors desk. Surprise, a qualified, willing physician looking for a position right where the practice owner is and right now, at this fortunate moment!
I am not kidding. I had these reactions "God must have heard my prayers", "It is most fortunate that you sent my your CV at this time" "Your CV reaches me at a great time".
So, you are truly welcome if you send out your cover letter and CV, you actually relieve the practice owner of further searching, or at least you raise that hope. And, your CV shows up without any competition, at the right moment. You cannot have better chances than that!
That is why services like Thedoctorjob.com can advertise high success rates. I have tried it with the do-it-yourself method and had the above surprising results. It works like a charm, I can highly recommend it!
The function of physician recruiters is to fill the less desirable jobs! When a recruiter calls, stop and think: Do I really want a less desirable job?
Good luck and happy searching!
Your Matthias Muenzer, MD
More help with deciphering physician recruiter ads
I forgot one term in recruiter ads that is easily misunderstood. This contributed to my disappointment in recruiter jobs. It's "metro area". I was thrilled when I come across ads featuring jobs in a "metro area in Massachusetts" and thought, metro area means population over 500,000. At least, that is "metro" for me. If I hear metro areas I think of Atlanta, New York City, Denver, Houston, Boston etc. To my great surprise, recruiters use the (formally correct) metro definition of the US department of statistics. And they define metro area as an area with a population of 50,000, in words fifty thousand. No wonder the recruiters advertise "metro" jobs and no wonder I was disappointed. I had not expected to find out that that "metro" job was in Worcester or Lawrence instead of Boston. And I bet I was not the only one disappointed. So, remember, Podunk is a "metro area". And, yes, recruiters have jobs in "metro areas"! They are right!
By the way, when I speak to my colleagues about recruiters, I usually get grumbling answers and spontaneous reactions like "Oh, they're the worst" - which stands in strange contrast to what the recruiter websites want to make you believe. On recruiter websites you read testimonials from "satisfied physicians", who usually have a first name and a letter as a last name, such as "Jonathan L from Arizona" who supposedly said: "You guys are the best, your service was phenomenal" and similar things. Were are these happy recruiter clients? I can't seem to find them! And I keep asking around collecting ideas for this blog. Maybe because I work in the city of Boston? And maybe because the recruiter clients mostly work in a Masachusetts "metro area" - somewhere out there far away? They all work "close enough" to Boston, "near" Boston, with "easy access" to Boston! NO colleague at my hospital found his or her position through a recruiter, not a single one.
The function of recruiters in the physician job market is to fill the less desirable jobs. When a recruiter calls, ask yourself: Do I really want a less desirable job?
Your Matthias Muenzer
By the way, when I speak to my colleagues about recruiters, I usually get grumbling answers and spontaneous reactions like "Oh, they're the worst" - which stands in strange contrast to what the recruiter websites want to make you believe. On recruiter websites you read testimonials from "satisfied physicians", who usually have a first name and a letter as a last name, such as "Jonathan L from Arizona" who supposedly said: "You guys are the best, your service was phenomenal" and similar things. Were are these happy recruiter clients? I can't seem to find them! And I keep asking around collecting ideas for this blog. Maybe because I work in the city of Boston? And maybe because the recruiter clients mostly work in a Masachusetts "metro area" - somewhere out there far away? They all work "close enough" to Boston, "near" Boston, with "easy access" to Boston! NO colleague at my hospital found his or her position through a recruiter, not a single one.
The function of recruiters in the physician job market is to fill the less desirable jobs. When a recruiter calls, ask yourself: Do I really want a less desirable job?
Your Matthias Muenzer
Saturday, March 17, 2007
Why do you dislike physician recruiters?
Since three years I teach Obstetrics and Gynecology to the residents of a Family Medicine Program in Boston. Two years ago I started giving a lecture on "How to Find Your Ideal Job" after I learned about the advantages of the direct mail method.
My present recommendation to my students is the following: Figure out where you want to live and work, buy the addresses of all docs in the target area from a list service, polish your cover letter and CV and mail it to all the doctors on your list. Or have a service like "Thedoctorjob" do it for you! I have summarized this method earlier in this blog.
After my second lecture one of the faculty members asked me: "Why are you so negative about recruiters?” Here is the answer…. Well, it was a long learning process over years, with not just a few, but many dozens of big and small bad experiences and big and small disappointments. And when I looked at the balance between the good experiences, which I can count on one hand and the hundreds of bad experiences, my sentiments will be easy to understand.
I started out with a great attitude towards recruiters, and with great hope. Here are these people that "hundreds", no "thousands of jobs nationwide", that have "the best jobs", that "personalize a search for you", that can find "The perfect practice for you" and so on.
I was living in Boston and wanted to stay there. And with Boston I meant really Boston, inside the I-95 ring. So I sent my CV to more and more recruiters but strangely, even the recruiters that advertised jobs where you can "Enjoy all Boston has to offer" "Boston suburbs" etc did not have jobs within the I-95 ring. The "Boston suburbs" turned out to be very creative defined, since it was Methuen, Framingham, Worcester, Plymouth etc. Not my exact definition of suburb. Driving distances in ads were routinely understated; places "30 minutes from the city" always were an hour away. Would that have something to do with the fact that none of the recruiters turned out to be familiar with Boston?
Oh, and then there actually was a job IN Boston, and I rushed to find out what it was. Obstetrics only, and underpaid. At the time the usual starting salary was 150-160, this employer offered 120. This was the first of many, many experiences that later let me conclude that "within-city-limits" jobs coming through recruiters had serious flaws.
Recruiter jobs were never great, there was always something off, and the jobs always seemed to have a flaw, some drawback, not just in location. When going out from the inner city there is a distance where my comfort zone ends. And that was usually the area where the recruiter jobs started! I wondered why...And I grew more and more cynical when reading the oh-so-promising ads!
A few years later I went on another job search, and this time it lasted over 4 years. I wanted a position in (gasp!) Miami. I found Physicianwork, registered and again was very excited and hopeful – over 75 jobs in Florida! There had to be something in Miami among them! For starters, it is very frustrating to guess where jobs are, the typical recruiter jobs are cryptic and vague. I understand the reasons for this very well, the location of the job and name of the employer is the only chip a recruiter has! But it is still frustrating. I would have liked to screen the jobs by location and salary – and that is exactly what they never tell you. Pathetic! The clouded salary may not all be the recruiter’s fault, but they usually do not nudge the employers enough to post a salary range. I sometimes suspect they are afraid to “lock themselves in” by mentioning a salary range. Or maybe it is not “good to talk about money” or “nobody should know what you earn”, since it is “private”. All nonsense.
I also found out while searching on Physicianwork, that many jobs are listed multiple times by multiple recruiters and recruiting companies. Great…
And the same frustrating game started all over again. “Oh, no I do not have anything in Miami”, But what about Lakeland, and Tampa, and Jacksonville, and the panhandle and, and, and. Lots of jobs, just not where I wanted one.
Then I listed myself in Physicianwork as looking “strictly in Miami, nowhere else”, not Fort Lauderdale, not Naples, not Orlando, no Tampa. After all, I have family in Miami…
This did not deter recruiters from sending me literally countless emails advertising jobs in Florida – anywhere in Florida, except where I wanted one. It started to sound like Miami was the new Boston. The jobs all started where my comfort zone ended.
And apparently none of the many, many recruiters that sent me emails responding to my profile that said “Miami only” obviously had read my profile or – hey maybe they did not care?! I now believe they do not read the profiles, but just collect the addresses and send out the emails hoping I might change my mind, or hoping they can sell me something else. They actually act very much like spammers.
Sometimes the spamming style emails were pretty crass. I had just spoken to a recruiter in person and explained that I was looking really only in Miami, sorry, really nowhere else…and to my surprise next day I get an email about a remote California location (“home of the California puppy”, of course far away from the action, “a short drive” of 75 miles from LA). It really makes you wonder – what is it? Did the recruiters not hear me? Did they not care? Did they not take me seriously?
Sometimes I think what would happen if I treated my patients that way – “Dear Mrs Jones, I don’t care if you just want the pill, here, read this leaflet on hysterectomy”
And then, I started answering my emails with: “Thank you for contacting me, but I am searching exclusively in Miami”. Bam, I get the “Miami area” emails, ads and job postings. The “Miami area” suddenly seemed to stretch from the Keys to West Palm Beach. What kind of map are these people looking at? What are their concepts of distance? Do they ever commute? One excited recruiter told me that I could live in Miami, but work slightly north of Fort Lauderdale. Another one who has never been on I 95 in rush hour…
Then I started to add one more sentence to my answer to all those recruiter emails:
“I am only interested in Miami, and only in a practice that has a phone number starting with the area code 305” Aaaahhhh, that usually worked, and it even brought me a grin and chuckles from a recruiter during a phone call. He seemed to understand exactly why I was saying it. At least now the number of email about Naples and Orlando went down.
Quite a few times I got the answer “I do not have anything in Miami at this time, but I’ll call my clients I that area to see if they have something” Oh, yeah, buddy. And, sure enough, none of these “clients” ever had anything – just what I had suspected to begin with.
And now, here is the outstanding, rare, single, amazing experience with a recruiter – an actual, true and honest answer: “If you want to work to find a job in Miami, you have to call the practices yourself, one by one. And if it does not work the first time, then try again in three months”. I was blown away, a recruiter that actually does not try to convince me that Podunk is better, but gives me a tip how to land a job in the city I want.
This, my dear readers, happened only once, one single time, on one lonely occasion, one remarkable afternoon, in several years of searching, after literally thousands of emails and several dozens of calls and telephone conversations! The truth! The first true tip from human being to human being, no salesmanship. It happened ONCE.
Do you begin to understand why I do not like recruiters?
You cannot believe how many emails I received and still receive about jobs from West Virginia to North Carolina to Indiana and Idaho, even jobs in other fields of medicine like anesthesia and pediatrics! The recruiters who are sending me these emails really read my profiles, my registrations and my emails well!
And all this fits in so perfectly with one of their marketing slogans “we personalize your job search”. Sure, it was really, really personal – Idaho instead of Miami!
By now I believe that recruiters just do not care. They sell, sell, sell, and they go for volume, and they go for the numbers. The more emails they send out, the more people they contact, the more chances they may have to sell one of their jobs. They may think, oh well that email was a little off, but who cares…That is why they remind me of used car salesmen and telemarketers. The ads are just the nice marketing face. By now, I do not believe a word. They sell, that’s it. And they do not care if you find the job you want or if your career is delayed for that matter. I wish I had known from the start.
And then, I found “Thedoctorjob.com” They explained what they do – direct mass mailing. They have a very informative website. After reading the info on their website, suddenly the behavior of recruiters made sense and it became clear why they did not have the jobs I wanted – and why they never will!
I tried the direct mail myself, and it worked like a charm. One mailing and I had seven interviews and three job offers. In a city that was “oversaturated”, where there were “no jobs”. Later I tried mass faxing with the same success. And mailing and faxing is so easy, the lists are readily available on the Internet, there are services that review and improve your cover letter and CV and ….of course there is “Thedoctorjob.com” that offers all this in one neat package for a very reasonable price.
And, no, I am not related, I am not part of the company, they do not pay me (I wish), I am not on commission, nothing – I just love the idea, the method and above all the results.
Dear reader, if you like what I wrote, please spread the word. Save your colleagues and friends the frustration I had to go through. Do them a favor, tell them about “thedoctorjob.com” and show them my blog with the description of the method.
The function of the physician recruiters is to fill the less desirable jobs – but they won’t tell you that! Stay away from them!
My present recommendation to my students is the following: Figure out where you want to live and work, buy the addresses of all docs in the target area from a list service, polish your cover letter and CV and mail it to all the doctors on your list. Or have a service like "Thedoctorjob" do it for you! I have summarized this method earlier in this blog.
After my second lecture one of the faculty members asked me: "Why are you so negative about recruiters?” Here is the answer…. Well, it was a long learning process over years, with not just a few, but many dozens of big and small bad experiences and big and small disappointments. And when I looked at the balance between the good experiences, which I can count on one hand and the hundreds of bad experiences, my sentiments will be easy to understand.
I started out with a great attitude towards recruiters, and with great hope. Here are these people that "hundreds", no "thousands of jobs nationwide", that have "the best jobs", that "personalize a search for you", that can find "The perfect practice for you" and so on.
I was living in Boston and wanted to stay there. And with Boston I meant really Boston, inside the I-95 ring. So I sent my CV to more and more recruiters but strangely, even the recruiters that advertised jobs where you can "Enjoy all Boston has to offer" "Boston suburbs" etc did not have jobs within the I-95 ring. The "Boston suburbs" turned out to be very creative defined, since it was Methuen, Framingham, Worcester, Plymouth etc. Not my exact definition of suburb. Driving distances in ads were routinely understated; places "30 minutes from the city" always were an hour away. Would that have something to do with the fact that none of the recruiters turned out to be familiar with Boston?
Oh, and then there actually was a job IN Boston, and I rushed to find out what it was. Obstetrics only, and underpaid. At the time the usual starting salary was 150-160, this employer offered 120. This was the first of many, many experiences that later let me conclude that "within-city-limits" jobs coming through recruiters had serious flaws.
Recruiter jobs were never great, there was always something off, and the jobs always seemed to have a flaw, some drawback, not just in location. When going out from the inner city there is a distance where my comfort zone ends. And that was usually the area where the recruiter jobs started! I wondered why...And I grew more and more cynical when reading the oh-so-promising ads!
A few years later I went on another job search, and this time it lasted over 4 years. I wanted a position in (gasp!) Miami. I found Physicianwork, registered and again was very excited and hopeful – over 75 jobs in Florida! There had to be something in Miami among them! For starters, it is very frustrating to guess where jobs are, the typical recruiter jobs are cryptic and vague. I understand the reasons for this very well, the location of the job and name of the employer is the only chip a recruiter has! But it is still frustrating. I would have liked to screen the jobs by location and salary – and that is exactly what they never tell you. Pathetic! The clouded salary may not all be the recruiter’s fault, but they usually do not nudge the employers enough to post a salary range. I sometimes suspect they are afraid to “lock themselves in” by mentioning a salary range. Or maybe it is not “good to talk about money” or “nobody should know what you earn”, since it is “private”. All nonsense.
I also found out while searching on Physicianwork, that many jobs are listed multiple times by multiple recruiters and recruiting companies. Great…
And the same frustrating game started all over again. “Oh, no I do not have anything in Miami”, But what about Lakeland, and Tampa, and Jacksonville, and the panhandle and, and, and. Lots of jobs, just not where I wanted one.
Then I listed myself in Physicianwork as looking “strictly in Miami, nowhere else”, not Fort Lauderdale, not Naples, not Orlando, no Tampa. After all, I have family in Miami…
This did not deter recruiters from sending me literally countless emails advertising jobs in Florida – anywhere in Florida, except where I wanted one. It started to sound like Miami was the new Boston. The jobs all started where my comfort zone ended.
And apparently none of the many, many recruiters that sent me emails responding to my profile that said “Miami only” obviously had read my profile or – hey maybe they did not care?! I now believe they do not read the profiles, but just collect the addresses and send out the emails hoping I might change my mind, or hoping they can sell me something else. They actually act very much like spammers.
Sometimes the spamming style emails were pretty crass. I had just spoken to a recruiter in person and explained that I was looking really only in Miami, sorry, really nowhere else…and to my surprise next day I get an email about a remote California location (“home of the California puppy”, of course far away from the action, “a short drive” of 75 miles from LA). It really makes you wonder – what is it? Did the recruiters not hear me? Did they not care? Did they not take me seriously?
Sometimes I think what would happen if I treated my patients that way – “Dear Mrs Jones, I don’t care if you just want the pill, here, read this leaflet on hysterectomy”
And then, I started answering my emails with: “Thank you for contacting me, but I am searching exclusively in Miami”. Bam, I get the “Miami area” emails, ads and job postings. The “Miami area” suddenly seemed to stretch from the Keys to West Palm Beach. What kind of map are these people looking at? What are their concepts of distance? Do they ever commute? One excited recruiter told me that I could live in Miami, but work slightly north of Fort Lauderdale. Another one who has never been on I 95 in rush hour…
Then I started to add one more sentence to my answer to all those recruiter emails:
“I am only interested in Miami, and only in a practice that has a phone number starting with the area code 305” Aaaahhhh, that usually worked, and it even brought me a grin and chuckles from a recruiter during a phone call. He seemed to understand exactly why I was saying it. At least now the number of email about Naples and Orlando went down.
Quite a few times I got the answer “I do not have anything in Miami at this time, but I’ll call my clients I that area to see if they have something” Oh, yeah, buddy. And, sure enough, none of these “clients” ever had anything – just what I had suspected to begin with.
And now, here is the outstanding, rare, single, amazing experience with a recruiter – an actual, true and honest answer: “If you want to work to find a job in Miami, you have to call the practices yourself, one by one. And if it does not work the first time, then try again in three months”. I was blown away, a recruiter that actually does not try to convince me that Podunk is better, but gives me a tip how to land a job in the city I want.
This, my dear readers, happened only once, one single time, on one lonely occasion, one remarkable afternoon, in several years of searching, after literally thousands of emails and several dozens of calls and telephone conversations! The truth! The first true tip from human being to human being, no salesmanship. It happened ONCE.
Do you begin to understand why I do not like recruiters?
You cannot believe how many emails I received and still receive about jobs from West Virginia to North Carolina to Indiana and Idaho, even jobs in other fields of medicine like anesthesia and pediatrics! The recruiters who are sending me these emails really read my profiles, my registrations and my emails well!
And all this fits in so perfectly with one of their marketing slogans “we personalize your job search”. Sure, it was really, really personal – Idaho instead of Miami!
By now I believe that recruiters just do not care. They sell, sell, sell, and they go for volume, and they go for the numbers. The more emails they send out, the more people they contact, the more chances they may have to sell one of their jobs. They may think, oh well that email was a little off, but who cares…That is why they remind me of used car salesmen and telemarketers. The ads are just the nice marketing face. By now, I do not believe a word. They sell, that’s it. And they do not care if you find the job you want or if your career is delayed for that matter. I wish I had known from the start.
And then, I found “Thedoctorjob.com” They explained what they do – direct mass mailing. They have a very informative website. After reading the info on their website, suddenly the behavior of recruiters made sense and it became clear why they did not have the jobs I wanted – and why they never will!
I tried the direct mail myself, and it worked like a charm. One mailing and I had seven interviews and three job offers. In a city that was “oversaturated”, where there were “no jobs”. Later I tried mass faxing with the same success. And mailing and faxing is so easy, the lists are readily available on the Internet, there are services that review and improve your cover letter and CV and ….of course there is “Thedoctorjob.com” that offers all this in one neat package for a very reasonable price.
And, no, I am not related, I am not part of the company, they do not pay me (I wish), I am not on commission, nothing – I just love the idea, the method and above all the results.
Dear reader, if you like what I wrote, please spread the word. Save your colleagues and friends the frustration I had to go through. Do them a favor, tell them about “thedoctorjob.com” and show them my blog with the description of the method.
The function of the physician recruiters is to fill the less desirable jobs – but they won’t tell you that! Stay away from them!
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Who needs a physician recruiter? (3)
Recruiters fill about 10-15% of all physician jobs.
What 10-15% are those? The most attractive, the top ten or the least attractive, the bottom 10?
Who do you think needs to pay someone $20,000 to find candidates - the employers with the attractive jobs or the employers with the not so attractive jobs??
As a former recruiter said:
The function of recruiters in medicine is to fill the less desirable jobs!
And therefore: The next time a recruiter calls, ask yourself: Do I want a less desirable job?
The Internet should over time make recruiters unnecessary. Employers post jobs on several well known job boards, candidates post their CVs on those boards as well, they find each other. Happy end.
I do not see any reason to introduce a third party into this quite simple process, especially when the third party are non-physicians with modest understanding of our work and especially when the third party consists of salespeople that all too often behave like a cross between a used-car salesman and a telemarketer.
The Internet "happened" to the travel agents, Zillow may do it to the realtors, and where is the software, website or job board that is going to do it to the physician recruiters?
My very first experience with recruiters was enlightening: I was invited to a "job fair" where "ObGyn departments" would be "looking for candidates". Even though I was sceptical (at the time ObGyn was very popular and they would certainly not need to show up on job fairs), the recruiter confirmed repeatedly on the phone and by mail, that yes, there would be ObGyn job offers. After taking a day off and traveling by train for several hours - no ObGyn jobs, just peds and internal medicine. I had the distinct impression the recruiter just wanted me to show up to impress the employers with the number of candidates her could mobilize.
And that was my introduction to physician recruiters many years ago. But it was only the first in a long series of disappointments with this "profession".
Remember: The function of phycisian recruiters is to fill the less desirable jobs!
And when a recruiter calls, think: Do I really want a less desirable job?
What 10-15% are those? The most attractive, the top ten or the least attractive, the bottom 10?
Who do you think needs to pay someone $20,000 to find candidates - the employers with the attractive jobs or the employers with the not so attractive jobs??
As a former recruiter said:
The function of recruiters in medicine is to fill the less desirable jobs!
And therefore: The next time a recruiter calls, ask yourself: Do I want a less desirable job?
The Internet should over time make recruiters unnecessary. Employers post jobs on several well known job boards, candidates post their CVs on those boards as well, they find each other. Happy end.
I do not see any reason to introduce a third party into this quite simple process, especially when the third party are non-physicians with modest understanding of our work and especially when the third party consists of salespeople that all too often behave like a cross between a used-car salesman and a telemarketer.
The Internet "happened" to the travel agents, Zillow may do it to the realtors, and where is the software, website or job board that is going to do it to the physician recruiters?
My very first experience with recruiters was enlightening: I was invited to a "job fair" where "ObGyn departments" would be "looking for candidates". Even though I was sceptical (at the time ObGyn was very popular and they would certainly not need to show up on job fairs), the recruiter confirmed repeatedly on the phone and by mail, that yes, there would be ObGyn job offers. After taking a day off and traveling by train for several hours - no ObGyn jobs, just peds and internal medicine. I had the distinct impression the recruiter just wanted me to show up to impress the employers with the number of candidates her could mobilize.
And that was my introduction to physician recruiters many years ago. But it was only the first in a long series of disappointments with this "profession".
Remember: The function of phycisian recruiters is to fill the less desirable jobs!
And when a recruiter calls, think: Do I really want a less desirable job?
Sunday, March 11, 2007
More "physician recruiter speak"
Did you ever wonder why recruiter "opportunities" are rarely located in attractive cities? Recruiter "opportunities" mostly seem to be in locations described as ...
..."A great place to raise a family".
What this truly means is - there is really nothing else to do in that place except raising a family! Maybe watching satellite TV. It's a guarantee for boring. If you are married and like the countryside, you may consider it, but if you are single and looking to meet someone, or if you enjoy theater, opera, live music, cafes and similar aspects of urban life, don't even think about it. If you hear "a great place to raise a family" - run!
Did someone ever describe New York City or LA or Boston or Miami as a great place to raise a family?
...having "Low pollution" - sure, rural areas have low density, low concentration of cars and therefore low pollution. Did pollution ever bother you when visiting Manhattan?
...having "Low crime" - sure, the last few criminals fled the place due to boredom.
And last, not least, recruiters always add that sentence that the location is "a great place to build a practice" - apparently just the fact that they are offering a job and are willing to shell out 20K is sufficient proof of that. But please do not ask for any real proof, such as a marketing analysis. Sentences like these are just thrown in to make you feel better.
Always remember:
"The function of recruiters is to fill the less desirable jobs"
And the next time when a recruiter calls, stop and think "Do I really want a less desirable job?"
..."A great place to raise a family".
What this truly means is - there is really nothing else to do in that place except raising a family! Maybe watching satellite TV. It's a guarantee for boring. If you are married and like the countryside, you may consider it, but if you are single and looking to meet someone, or if you enjoy theater, opera, live music, cafes and similar aspects of urban life, don't even think about it. If you hear "a great place to raise a family" - run!
Did someone ever describe New York City or LA or Boston or Miami as a great place to raise a family?
...having "Low pollution" - sure, rural areas have low density, low concentration of cars and therefore low pollution. Did pollution ever bother you when visiting Manhattan?
...having "Low crime" - sure, the last few criminals fled the place due to boredom.
And last, not least, recruiters always add that sentence that the location is "a great place to build a practice" - apparently just the fact that they are offering a job and are willing to shell out 20K is sufficient proof of that. But please do not ask for any real proof, such as a marketing analysis. Sentences like these are just thrown in to make you feel better.
Always remember:
"The function of recruiters is to fill the less desirable jobs"
And the next time when a recruiter calls, stop and think "Do I really want a less desirable job?"
Who needs a physician recruiter (2)?
You do, if you....
1. Have absolutely no clue how the physician job market works.
2. Do not mind getting a $20,000 income reduction.
3. Do not mind working in a second rate location
4. Do not mind taking a job that a few other people have declined.
Always remember: The function of physician recruiters is to fill the less desirable jobs!
Before you answer that recruiter call ask yourself:
"Do I want a less desirable job?"
1. Have absolutely no clue how the physician job market works.
2. Do not mind getting a $20,000 income reduction.
3. Do not mind working in a second rate location
4. Do not mind taking a job that a few other people have declined.
Always remember: The function of physician recruiters is to fill the less desirable jobs!
Before you answer that recruiter call ask yourself:
"Do I want a less desirable job?"
What do those terms in physician recruiter ads really mean?
After speaking to physician recruiters and responding to their emails for over 7 years I realize that one of the challenges of becoming a physician recruiter must consist in re-learning English and adopting "recruiter speak", a different version of English, where words assume different meanings. To help you translate "recruiter speak" into everyday English, I am listing a few typical recruiter phrases below - and explain what they really mean:
“At no cost to you”……………………so they want you to believe, but if not you, who else is going to pay? The cost of recruitment will be paid by the employer, who has already factored it in into your "cost", into the overhead that is attributable to you. Rest assured that the recruitment costs will be silently deducted from your salary - and most likely you will never be told.
“We help you with your resume”……something which is occasionally advertised, but somehow never happens. No one ever helped me, not even with feedback such as "this or that is good / not good". The only, really only feedback in all those years was “your CV is just fine”. Once I submitted it to a professional CV writer it changed drastically – for the better. All the recruiters I asked for help with my CV did not respond to the request.
“We help you with your interview”. Nope, has not happened for me in all those years. And physician recruiters actually could help candidates in a meaningful way. They could reveal to the candidate what the true requirements of the employers are, what they are really looking for, what they need and what they do not need or want. Not a single recruiter told me any information of this kind. All the “help” I received was “Dr. Soandso is waiting for your call, let me know how it went”. They are salespeople, not advisors, they are not in the business of helping you, they are simply selling you an "opportunity".
“We screen our candidates” ………if you have a pulse and a license, you have passed the screening test. Well, well, well…an older colleague of mine had tremendous difficulties personally and financially after a divorce and lost his license in Massachusetts since he was unable to pay the abusive malpractice insurance of 70,000. He needed to leave the state. He was over 60, teeth in bad repair, a very long time since residency training, no particular honors, awards etc. He posted a profile on "physicianwork.com" and within two days had received 60 responses from recruiters who were only too happy to “help him find a job”. My colleague was overjoyed that recruiters apparently did not care about his age or drawbacks. This is another proof that recruiters simply work on closing a deal and getting the money, no matter with whom. They are not selective about candidates and they are not selective about practices. They take what they can get. It’s all sales, sales, sales. Remember, for a recruiter you are a meal ticket, or a 20K check, however you want to see it.
“We screen our practices”…………nobody, but absolutely nobody screened my practice when I was hiring. When I was looking for a candidate, recruiters asked me about 4 or 5 questions about my practice, nobody came to visit me or see the practice. If you show willingness to pay, you have passed the screening.
"We match perfect candidates with perfect practices" I think that prefect candidates do not need recruiters, they are approached by employers directly, they have a good network and find their jobs that way or they create their own jobs (a few of my colleagues at Harvard did that). So, perfect candidates do not need a recruiter. Should you truly need a recruiter to find a job, then there might be something suboptimal about your CV, about your past or even about you! At least you do not know the best job search techniques, as described in my blog and as offered by “TheDoctorJob.com “ or “Doccafe.com”.
Oh, and “perfect practices” are not commonly located in Podunk. Whereas a significant portion of recruiter “opportunities” are located in Podunk. Physician recruiters have to describe the locations of their practices in some way that masks the lack of attractiveness. And so, locations of practices are mostly described as “Close enough to” - followed by the name of the city where you wish you could find a job.
Recruiters seem to get these impressions of "close enough" by looking at a cheap, small globes, where New York and Philadelphia actually seem to touch each other. In reality, once you personally are in an area described as "close enough to" you realize it is a long, long drive of usually one and a half to two hours to the city you wish you had a job.
The other common description of practice location is “Easy access to”. Again a grandiose euphemism. It means you drive for 20 minutes through winding streets and forests, over hills, through little villages to the Interstate ramp, and then you take another “easy ride” lasting 60 minutes to the city you wish you lived in.
Another common location is described as “Easy access to city A, city B and city C”. Wow, access to three cities! in reality this is even worse: the location of the practice is in the dead middle between these three cities, outside of the suburban areas of all three cities, outside of the range of all three commuter transport systems, in a nowhere land, in an area not belonging to any of the three cities, where nobody really wants to live if they can avoid it - which is exactly the reason recruiters get the task of luring you into that area.
Physician recruiters may cite driving distances to the city you wish you had a job. They may write “30 minutes from” = oh yes, but those thirty minutes always seem to be clocked at 4 AM on a Sunday morning in a state police cruiser with blue lights flashing and driving well above any legal speed limit. At least double the time for a realistic estimate!
Always remember what a former recruiter said: “The function of recruiters is to fill the less desirable jobs”.
Before you answer that recruiter call, think: “Do I want a less desirable job?”
“At no cost to you”……………………so they want you to believe, but if not you, who else is going to pay? The cost of recruitment will be paid by the employer, who has already factored it in into your "cost", into the overhead that is attributable to you. Rest assured that the recruitment costs will be silently deducted from your salary - and most likely you will never be told.
“We help you with your resume”……something which is occasionally advertised, but somehow never happens. No one ever helped me, not even with feedback such as "this or that is good / not good". The only, really only feedback in all those years was “your CV is just fine”. Once I submitted it to a professional CV writer it changed drastically – for the better. All the recruiters I asked for help with my CV did not respond to the request.
“We help you with your interview”. Nope, has not happened for me in all those years. And physician recruiters actually could help candidates in a meaningful way. They could reveal to the candidate what the true requirements of the employers are, what they are really looking for, what they need and what they do not need or want. Not a single recruiter told me any information of this kind. All the “help” I received was “Dr. Soandso is waiting for your call, let me know how it went”. They are salespeople, not advisors, they are not in the business of helping you, they are simply selling you an "opportunity".
“We screen our candidates” ………if you have a pulse and a license, you have passed the screening test. Well, well, well…an older colleague of mine had tremendous difficulties personally and financially after a divorce and lost his license in Massachusetts since he was unable to pay the abusive malpractice insurance of 70,000. He needed to leave the state. He was over 60, teeth in bad repair, a very long time since residency training, no particular honors, awards etc. He posted a profile on "physicianwork.com" and within two days had received 60 responses from recruiters who were only too happy to “help him find a job”. My colleague was overjoyed that recruiters apparently did not care about his age or drawbacks. This is another proof that recruiters simply work on closing a deal and getting the money, no matter with whom. They are not selective about candidates and they are not selective about practices. They take what they can get. It’s all sales, sales, sales. Remember, for a recruiter you are a meal ticket, or a 20K check, however you want to see it.
“We screen our practices”…………nobody, but absolutely nobody screened my practice when I was hiring. When I was looking for a candidate, recruiters asked me about 4 or 5 questions about my practice, nobody came to visit me or see the practice. If you show willingness to pay, you have passed the screening.
"We match perfect candidates with perfect practices" I think that prefect candidates do not need recruiters, they are approached by employers directly, they have a good network and find their jobs that way or they create their own jobs (a few of my colleagues at Harvard did that). So, perfect candidates do not need a recruiter. Should you truly need a recruiter to find a job, then there might be something suboptimal about your CV, about your past or even about you! At least you do not know the best job search techniques, as described in my blog and as offered by “TheDoctorJob.com “ or “Doccafe.com”.
Oh, and “perfect practices” are not commonly located in Podunk. Whereas a significant portion of recruiter “opportunities” are located in Podunk. Physician recruiters have to describe the locations of their practices in some way that masks the lack of attractiveness. And so, locations of practices are mostly described as “Close enough to” - followed by the name of the city where you wish you could find a job.
Recruiters seem to get these impressions of "close enough" by looking at a cheap, small globes, where New York and Philadelphia actually seem to touch each other. In reality, once you personally are in an area described as "close enough to" you realize it is a long, long drive of usually one and a half to two hours to the city you wish you had a job.
The other common description of practice location is “Easy access to”. Again a grandiose euphemism. It means you drive for 20 minutes through winding streets and forests, over hills, through little villages to the Interstate ramp, and then you take another “easy ride” lasting 60 minutes to the city you wish you lived in.
Another common location is described as “Easy access to city A, city B and city C”. Wow, access to three cities! in reality this is even worse: the location of the practice is in the dead middle between these three cities, outside of the suburban areas of all three cities, outside of the range of all three commuter transport systems, in a nowhere land, in an area not belonging to any of the three cities, where nobody really wants to live if they can avoid it - which is exactly the reason recruiters get the task of luring you into that area.
Physician recruiters may cite driving distances to the city you wish you had a job. They may write “30 minutes from” = oh yes, but those thirty minutes always seem to be clocked at 4 AM on a Sunday morning in a state police cruiser with blue lights flashing and driving well above any legal speed limit. At least double the time for a realistic estimate!
Always remember what a former recruiter said: “The function of recruiters is to fill the less desirable jobs”.
Before you answer that recruiter call, think: “Do I want a less desirable job?”
Who needs a physician recruiter?
Definitely not you!
Residents about to graduate and looking for a job are inundated by recruiter emails and phone calls.
Since physicians see their job search as a temporary "pain in the neck" they do not know much about it, and this lack of knowledge is abundantly taken advantage of by physician recruiters.
Out of 100 available jobs out there 100, or the full amount, are accessible to personal networking (you knew that) as well as to direct mail (you most likely did not know that!), about 30 are posted in journals and magazines and about 10-15 are available to recruiters. Yet, since a recruiter's income depends on it, they peddle their jobs and "services" like nobody else. Judging by the noise they make on the internet you might be mislead into believing that recruiters have a meaningful place in your job search. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Before returning a recruiter call, know this:
A. They charge around $20,000 (actually an average of 18,000).
B. They get paid when and only when you sign the contract with the new employer (this applies to contingency recruiters, the most commonly encountered type).
These two facts are at the root of all shortcomings of physician recruiters. These shortcomings do not change, they are inevitable, invariable, no matter how nice and "professional" they may appear on the phone:
Since they are expensive, 80-90% of practices refuse to work with recruiters (result of a phone survey of private practices. Working with a recruiter, you lower your chances by 80-90%.
Good practices in desirable locations will not work with recruiters, since they can get candidates without paying a fee. Do you think a practice in Boston with an office with harbor view needs a recruiter? Can you guess why so many recruiter jobs are not "in" but "near" or at "one hour drive to" the city you would like to work and live?
Recruiters usually do not get the jobs that are "in", they get the jobs that are "outside".
Since they are expensive, practice owners will recoup the money spent on a recruiter by deducting it (usually silently) from your first year income. Recruiters definitely will not tell you about this, since it would be bad for business and they try to keep up the myth that their services are "at no cost to you" (meaning the candidate). One recruiter even told me that it was part of the contract that the employer should not mention this to the candidate.
Since they only get paid when you sign on the dotted line, they tend to sell you to the practice and the practice to you, without regard of a "match".
Always remember what a former recruiter told me:
"The function of the Physician Recruiter in the job market is to fill the less desirable jobs"
This is a very polite statement, I would have worded it differently.
Before answering that recruiter call ask yourself: "Do I really want a less desirable job?"
There are infinitely more effective ways of finding a job. These ways are discussed in my blog.
Residents about to graduate and looking for a job are inundated by recruiter emails and phone calls.
Since physicians see their job search as a temporary "pain in the neck" they do not know much about it, and this lack of knowledge is abundantly taken advantage of by physician recruiters.
Out of 100 available jobs out there 100, or the full amount, are accessible to personal networking (you knew that) as well as to direct mail (you most likely did not know that!), about 30 are posted in journals and magazines and about 10-15 are available to recruiters. Yet, since a recruiter's income depends on it, they peddle their jobs and "services" like nobody else. Judging by the noise they make on the internet you might be mislead into believing that recruiters have a meaningful place in your job search. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Before returning a recruiter call, know this:
A. They charge around $20,000 (actually an average of 18,000).
B. They get paid when and only when you sign the contract with the new employer (this applies to contingency recruiters, the most commonly encountered type).
These two facts are at the root of all shortcomings of physician recruiters. These shortcomings do not change, they are inevitable, invariable, no matter how nice and "professional" they may appear on the phone:
Since they are expensive, 80-90% of practices refuse to work with recruiters (result of a phone survey of private practices. Working with a recruiter, you lower your chances by 80-90%.
Good practices in desirable locations will not work with recruiters, since they can get candidates without paying a fee. Do you think a practice in Boston with an office with harbor view needs a recruiter? Can you guess why so many recruiter jobs are not "in" but "near" or at "one hour drive to" the city you would like to work and live?
Recruiters usually do not get the jobs that are "in", they get the jobs that are "outside".
Since they are expensive, practice owners will recoup the money spent on a recruiter by deducting it (usually silently) from your first year income. Recruiters definitely will not tell you about this, since it would be bad for business and they try to keep up the myth that their services are "at no cost to you" (meaning the candidate). One recruiter even told me that it was part of the contract that the employer should not mention this to the candidate.
Since they only get paid when you sign on the dotted line, they tend to sell you to the practice and the practice to you, without regard of a "match".
Always remember what a former recruiter told me:
"The function of the Physician Recruiter in the job market is to fill the less desirable jobs"
This is a very polite statement, I would have worded it differently.
Before answering that recruiter call ask yourself: "Do I really want a less desirable job?"
There are infinitely more effective ways of finding a job. These ways are discussed in my blog.
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