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Must-Know Facts about physician recruiters
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Date: 2007/07/31 17:48
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By: muen
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Status: User
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Karma: 1  
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Forum Junior Resident
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Physicians are not well informed about job search methods and about recruiters, about how they work and about their limitations. Especially residents are generally not aware of the serious disadvantages of working with recruiters. Graduating residents are just stepping out of a purely educational, basically helpful environment, in which they have spent most of their lives. They are naive in business matters and are not aware of the economical pressures that shape recruiter behavior.
This fact sheet below was developed based on years of personal experience with physician recruiters, based on being a candidate looking for a new job as well as an employer looking to hire a new associate for my practice.
Recruiters will deny all of these facts or at least try to gloss them over. Also consider that there are always the "exceptions that confirm the rule". There might be that one recruiter that markets less agressively, that really cares about you etc, but that does not change the big picture.
Recruiters are slick marketers and often will promote themselves as avoiding one of these drawbacks. Sadly, as much as recruiters may try, as nice or good hearted or ethical or hard working and well-meaning they might be, one simple fact will never change: the $ 20,000 fee for recruiter services. No employer will ever pay someone $ 20,000 to fill a vacancy if that position is desirable and easy to fill!
1. Physician Recruiters are hired and paid by employers to fill a vacancy. They are not hired nor paid by the candidate. This is much more important than candidates think. Their loyalty is to the paying party, the employer, not to the searching candidate. They do not get paid to consider the desires, careers or preferences of candidates . Recruiters only get paid if they PLACE the candidate and close the deal. The candidate is only useful if he or she fills the job the recruiter gets paid to fill. A recruiter has made this quite clear here.
2. Recruiters charge $ 20,000 to fill a position. This is the biggest handicap for recruiters, something that no recruiter can overcome. This places recruiters at a severe disadvantage compared to you, the physician, who is looking for a job and applying for a position.
3. 80-90 percent of private practices refuse to work with physician recruiters, since they are very expensive. The usefulness of recruiters in medicine is cut down dramatically by the fact that they cannot reach that 80-90% of the job market - which is most of the private physician job market and pretty much the whole job market in desirable areas.
50-60% of physician jobs are filled through networking, 10-30 through advertising by employers on Job Boards and 15-25% by recruiters. Always remember this.
What do recruiters do in response to this? They tell you that those areas are "oversaturated" and try to lure you to underserved areas, where recruiters do get jobs. Have you ever thought how these attractive areas became "oversaturated"? How did all those colleagues working in desirable locations find their job?
4. What do recruiters actually do all day long? They are salespeople and spend their days working the phone. Recruiters love to give you the impression that they have resources or skills that you don't possess. Once you see what they actually do, you realize that you can do it perfectly well on your own. Recruiters spend part of their day cold-calling practices, groups and hospitals to see if they are interested in their services. Then they pay large fees to NTNJobs, eHealthCareers and numerous other internet boards to post job descriptions. Then they spend a few hours each day cold calling physicians, sending flyers, postcards or e-mails to program directors, specific departments and numerous physicians "fishing" for applicants. No, they don't have secret sources in high positions; they just want you to think that. Candidates will usually respond to recruiters by e-mail, submit their CVs and recruiters then forward these CVs with names blacked out to the potential employers.
Unlike what they sometimes claim, they do not visit practices and they do not get face to face with physicians. Usually they work nationally and seeing offices and physicians would mean travel and would be prohibitively time consuming and expensive.
5. Most recruiters subscribe to a background database, usually the NAPR "Job Bank". Paying subscribers store short profiles of jobs and candiates in these confidential, recruiter-only databases. Since thousands contribute to these databases recruitment becomes more efficient due to sharing of resources and combining efforts. "Maybe my candidate fits your job". Fees are usually split between the recruiter who has the candidate and the one who has the job. The is the same model that realtors use. When a recruiter says "we personalize a search for you", he means he enters your name in the recruiter background database and checks if there is a matching job for you. The only problem is: the whole database is filled with left-over jobs. Jobs in the database have all been entered after they could not be filled by any other means!
6. Unlike what they say in their marketing, recruiters do not screen neither candidates nor employers. Screening does not fill positions and only filling positions gets them paid.
7. Recruiters are salespeople, not helpers. Given the fact that recruiters only get paid their $20,000 if they close the deal, they are highly motivated to sell.
This explains their behavior:
They contact as many physicians as possible per day, hoping to find the one that can fill the job. They try to convince you that the jobs in "Desirable city" are not so desirable and that the countryside jobs they have actually might be better for you.
Recruiters loose interest in you immediately if you insist on a job in very desirable area or if you are looking for part time jobs. Their chances of getting paid in all these scenarios are very low and therefore the interest in you vanishes.
Because of the pressure to sell and the strong competition, all too often the candidate becomes just a number, a meal ticket, a means to fill the job, to close the deal and get paid.
8. Physicians can easily find more jobs than any recruiter. Physicians can find employers willing to hire them, there is very little knowledge needed for this. Doctors are easy to find, they are all listed in multiple databases. Since physicians are so easy to reach, candidates do not need the help of recruiters. Medicine is not an appropriate field for recruiters. Read here how you personally can find more jobs than any recruiter. Since physicians applying to a practice independently, without a recruiter, do not have a 20,000 price tag attached, they become the preferred candidate. It is much easier for a physician to find jobs than it is for a recruiter! Recruiters vehemently deny this in public, but admit it privately.
9. Recruiters are not "free for the candidate". This is a common marketing myth. Yes, the employer formally pays the fee. But the employer will recover the money from the employed candidate. If you do not believe this, you are dreaming! There is no such things as a free lunch. Gettign a job through a recruiter usually means a lower salary or fewer benefits. Although the true price of working with a recruiter is less visible and much higher: you get a less desirable job!
10. Recruiters may have many jobs, but they do NOT have great jobs. Recruiters have the left overs. The most attractive jobs are never advertised and are filled by word of mouth or direct mail. The moderately attractive jobs are advertised in print and on the Internet. Only those jobs that employers just cannot fill, even though many physicians look at them and decline, are handed over to recruiters to fill.
After all, why would any employer pay 20,000 to a recruiter if a job can be filled with $400-800 of advertising in a few journals?
11. Physician recruiters advertise using their own language: for example "easy access to", "a short drive to" means the locations is 1 to 2 hours from an attractive city. "Easy access to city A and B" is even worse, this job is in the dead middle between 2 separate suburban areas. "A great place to raise a family" means there is absolutely nothing to do in that town.
Much more important is what recruiters do NOT mention, such as high turnover of associates, low salary, high-buy-in adn other hidden drawbacks.
But how can a recruiter find out in a 10 minute phone conversation what goes really on in a practice or hospital? They can't and the candidate is the one who suffers the consequences.
Recruiters also tend to consciously "forget" drawbacks of jobs, since the disclosure would hurt the sale.
12. Recruiters advertise insidiously by masquerading as "job search experts" and "advisers". This kind of marketing is much more dangerous, since it is often not recognized as the advertisement it is. This misleading marketing includes posing questions such as "How do you choose the recruiter that is right for you?” The implication of this question is that there is actually a recruiter that is right for you. Posing this question is similar to "Should I shoot myself in the left or right foot?" NO, you should not shoot yourself at all, and NO, you should not use a recruiter at all!
Often recruiters post tidbits of helpful info on their websites, such as links to licensing boards, short 5 point lists on what to watch out on your CV, but that is all marketing fluff to attract you. This info is never complete and truly useful.
Anytime you read - anywhere - that someone recommends recruiters or even considers them a good alternative to networking, you are dealing with either a recruiter or someone who just does not know how the job market works.
13. Recruiters are NOT advisors, helpers, career counselors, CV writers or job market experts. They are ually neither qualified nor versed in any of these matters. They may read a lot of CVs, but that does not make them experts at writing or editing them. They will not take the time to go over your CV and advise you. They check your CV for one single question, and one question only: Can I sell this candidate?
They are not experts in the job market, even though they spend their time trying to fill job vacancies. Recruiters know only a small segment of the job market, the segment that is available to them. Do not trust their opinions in that matter, their opinions are shaped by the marginal 10-20% of jobs they are aware of.
14. Worst of all: recruiters do not disclose their limitations. They will not tell you that they cannot get jobs in desirable cities and locations. They will not tell you that they cannot get jobs with desirable practices. They will not tell you about alternative ways of finding jobs. This is a serious ethical issue - imagine a physician not treating a patient, just because he personally is unable to perform a certain surgical procedure! We send our patients to someone else who can help them. Recruiters never do that. Physician recruiters simply tell you that the great areas where you are looking for a job are "oversaturated". In reality this means "unreachable for recruiters who charge 20K to fill a job". They will never tell you: "Just mail a letter to every doctor in Desirable City and you will get a job", they instead tell you "Call back in a few weeks, maybe I have something then". The obvious idea is to keep you as a client and maybe get that commission later, in blatant disregard of what you want and need!
Summary: Do not use physician recruiters!
The better way to find a job is a simple and very successful method: mailing a letter to every physician in the area where you want to work. See my blog for a most detailed description.
All this is coming up after recruiters serving the physician community for 20 years. Why?
Personal computers and the internet have changed our lives. Contact information for physicians, once hard to find, expensive and somewhat cumbersome to obtain for a private person, can now easily selected, bought and downloaded on the web within a few minutes. A PC can easily produce hundreds of customized, personalized letters and the new internet fax services allow us to fax a letter to thousands of doctors with a few clicks.
That, together with internet job boards that are becoming easier to navigate and with physicians and hospitals becoming more computer savvy, leads to a future of job searching directly without middlemen. Candidates will more and more contact employers directly.
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