Hi, guys! I wanted to share some insight I learned at a team training last week. I work for a large hospital company (it owns a few hundred hospitals across the U.S.), and we had a guest speaker (the head of physician recruiting) talking with us for about an hour about the general state of the union, per se, with regard to hiring physicians. Some pretty interesting tidbits, and I thought I’d pass them along here…
- There IS a physician shortage, and will be for many years to come. However, most people don’t count the midlevel providers when they speak around this, so the ‘shortage’ statistics are over-inflated.
- Our company (and I would imagine many others, as one seems to follow another in markets like this) has launched a strategic employment direction towards hospitalists and ER doctors. We are employing them like crazy all over the country, and internal med physicians are getting far more incentives than they did when I first started paying attention to these things (about 7 years ago). Back then, all the ‘extras’ like student loan reimbursement, sign ons, etc. were thrown mostly to specialists… not the case anymore. IM/PCP/ER/Hospitalist is where the focus is for at least the next 5 years.
- The focus is now on “quality” like never before. We’ve started giving personality assessments as part of the interview process (many corporations do this) to measure any potential ‘red flags’ in a candidate’s personality. We can do deals all day long with people who aren’t good doctors. Those people are beating down our doors and are easy to find. We have to fish through and look beyond the resume… which is why a deal can take longer now.
- If the first thing out of a candidate’s mouth is money, we move on. Part of measuring a ‘quality’ doctor is assessing their commitment to people. Their heart for patients. If the quality is there, the money will follow.
- Sometimes, if our recruiters are at all unsure about a candidate’s personality, they will delay things a bit in order to do some more background checking and assessment. If the candidate gets ‘pissy’ (for lack of a better word) about this process, we may likely move on. If the candidate shows frustration, attitude, or ‘jerk’ like behavior to us in a professional engagement, we can’t be at all sure how they will treat our patients.
- Once we sign a deal with a doctor, we are stuck with them for awhile. So we have to make sure that it’s a good fit, and that the candidate is going to represent our company in a way that has integrity, compassion, and competence. Our recruiters will take as long as they need to in order to determine those things. Because it’s better to recognize a bad deal AHEAD of time than get stuck with it down the road. Patience is the key word. Because everyone is better off (the hospitals and the candidate) if time is taken to make sure that the deal is the right choice.
- The average time that passes from the point a physician is referred to the point the contract is signed: 220 days. Average time from drafting the contract to actually starting work: 120 days. Again–patience is key. If they know that the candidate is high quality and they just can’t risk losing him/her…this can obviously move a lot faster. But that depends a lot on how that candidate represents himself/herself and what the references have to say about their attitude, work ethic, personality, etc.
- The bottom line is that we want to hire doctors who are 1)committed to quality care and to the patients first; 2)willing to work as hard on their own success as we do; 3)willing to invest in the community and stick it out for more than a year or two.
**As he was concluding, he came to me and specifically told me that he hoped I could read between the lines of what he was saying and glean some encouragement about my journey. Basically, he said that people who go to med school and become a doctor later in life often do it for different reasons than someone right out of college. He said that ‘non-traditional’ doctors tend to be more passionate about the job, tend to love what they do, tend to understand the business parts more, and tend to have the right overall perspective. He said those physicians don’t have an attitude of entitlement, but rather understand that a job is earned–not given. He winked and said, “You are JUST the kind of candidate that we recruiters hope for. Because we know that you’ll be committed. We know you’ll work hard. We know you want it for the right reasons.”
So there you go… for what it’s worth, I thought it was great.
I think there is some encouragement in that for all of us…