Some observations/rants:
1) Medical recruiters are lazy. You go back 2-3 years in your emails, you'll find that the recruiters are spamming almost the exact same list of undesirable "90 miles from metro Wyoming!" type jobs. When one called me up the other day and offered a bunch of lousy jobs, I actually told them that they should call all physicians in city X that I'm actually interested in, ask if they are hiring, and then if yes, make some deal to represent them as a recruiter. That would actually be useful to me, because I am always at work during business hours. I really don't even care if I offended the recruiter with this suggestion, because there's so many of them out there, all very passive, all waiting around for the business to come to them, all spamming the same emails over and over again. 😴 I'm not saying it's all bad; there's some good jobs in there. But it could all be a lot better, IMO.
2) People/listings that sound like Borat. There was an undesirable job at a university hospital in a rather desirable city. I was put in touch right away with one of the attendings in the department who was in charge of hiring. He spent like 20 minutes talking about the city, and then talking about the university and the medical center, how much investment these had, how big they were, etc. There's only so much you can say about a place before it ends up sounding ridiculous, kind of like Borat when he starts talking about how "Kazakhstan has greatest potassium, world's record for largest box!"
No one cares if your hospital built 3 new buildings in the last 10 years because every hospital in the country has done that. And I didn't even need to hear any of that **** because I was already sold on the location. What bothered me though is when I asked him specifics about the job, he could not answer basic questions like "how many consults a day are there?" and "how large is the inpatient unit?" These were extremely pertinent to the job at hand. He just struck me as a complete boob and I'm not doing business with someone like that. But it's not just that guy though, a lot of these job listings that you get will have 6-7 paragraphs about the location, about the hospital, about all the wild crazy outdoors stuff you supposedly can do, but ZERO about the actual job itself. They won't even say if it's inpatient or outpatient.
3) University job listings are arrogant. Most people in my field don't want university jobs. I'm actually willing to consider one. But they're so arrogant in some of their listings. "Please forward personal statement, CV, and 3 blind letters of recommendation to Dr. So-and-so III." Are you joking? 😱 It takes a lot of work to ask for, and get sent out, letters of recommendation. Most of the time you talk to someone about a job and the conversation goes nowhere. Maybe one in 10 times each side finds the other to be compatible enough to lead to the next step of a potential interview. Sure, maybe then you can ask for letters, once the talks are a little bit more advanced, or at least once there actually have been "talks". What's the sense in asking every potential applicant out there for letters though? We know you're not even going to read these letters in any kind of serious detail. Is it just to stroke your ego? But don't think for even one second that you can make these graduating residents jump through hoops the same way you can for college students or medical students. We've all got 6 figure job offers as soon as we hit the last year of residency. And you're offering us a job that pays 40% less than what we can make in private practice. Doesn't make a whole lot of sense to put burdensome requests upon us right at the onset of consideration for these jobs, that most of us don't want anyway. I'm just saying. 😎
1) Medical recruiters are lazy. You go back 2-3 years in your emails, you'll find that the recruiters are spamming almost the exact same list of undesirable "90 miles from metro Wyoming!" type jobs. When one called me up the other day and offered a bunch of lousy jobs, I actually told them that they should call all physicians in city X that I'm actually interested in, ask if they are hiring, and then if yes, make some deal to represent them as a recruiter. That would actually be useful to me, because I am always at work during business hours. I really don't even care if I offended the recruiter with this suggestion, because there's so many of them out there, all very passive, all waiting around for the business to come to them, all spamming the same emails over and over again. 😴 I'm not saying it's all bad; there's some good jobs in there. But it could all be a lot better, IMO.
2) People/listings that sound like Borat. There was an undesirable job at a university hospital in a rather desirable city. I was put in touch right away with one of the attendings in the department who was in charge of hiring. He spent like 20 minutes talking about the city, and then talking about the university and the medical center, how much investment these had, how big they were, etc. There's only so much you can say about a place before it ends up sounding ridiculous, kind of like Borat when he starts talking about how "Kazakhstan has greatest potassium, world's record for largest box!"
No one cares if your hospital built 3 new buildings in the last 10 years because every hospital in the country has done that. And I didn't even need to hear any of that **** because I was already sold on the location. What bothered me though is when I asked him specifics about the job, he could not answer basic questions like "how many consults a day are there?" and "how large is the inpatient unit?" These were extremely pertinent to the job at hand. He just struck me as a complete boob and I'm not doing business with someone like that. But it's not just that guy though, a lot of these job listings that you get will have 6-7 paragraphs about the location, about the hospital, about all the wild crazy outdoors stuff you supposedly can do, but ZERO about the actual job itself. They won't even say if it's inpatient or outpatient.3) University job listings are arrogant. Most people in my field don't want university jobs. I'm actually willing to consider one. But they're so arrogant in some of their listings. "Please forward personal statement, CV, and 3 blind letters of recommendation to Dr. So-and-so III." Are you joking? 😱 It takes a lot of work to ask for, and get sent out, letters of recommendation. Most of the time you talk to someone about a job and the conversation goes nowhere. Maybe one in 10 times each side finds the other to be compatible enough to lead to the next step of a potential interview. Sure, maybe then you can ask for letters, once the talks are a little bit more advanced, or at least once there actually have been "talks". What's the sense in asking every potential applicant out there for letters though? We know you're not even going to read these letters in any kind of serious detail. Is it just to stroke your ego? But don't think for even one second that you can make these graduating residents jump through hoops the same way you can for college students or medical students. We've all got 6 figure job offers as soon as we hit the last year of residency. And you're offering us a job that pays 40% less than what we can make in private practice. Doesn't make a whole lot of sense to put burdensome requests upon us right at the onset of consideration for these jobs, that most of us don't want anyway. I'm just saying. 😎
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