Job Interview

[Katheudontas parateroumen]

Hi all,
I have my first attending job interview soon, it's just a zoom with two of the directors of each hospital I could potentially be at. I was just wondering if you all had pointers or suggestions. What are some questions I should be prepared for typically? Is the feel similar to med school/residency/fellowship interviews? Are there any topics that are off limits during this first interview? Do you guys have a list of questions I should be looking for? Any advice would be welcomed. Thank you!

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[grt398]

I'll add some questions from another thread; I will say some are more appropriate for a second interview rather than the initial screening. And overall my experience was that things are much more friendly as they want you to come work for them, you're not in the position of basically begging them for a position like it can feel during med school/residency/fellowship interviews.

"if you’re inpatient for icu nights , and if it’s not you, who is covering icu nights. do you have APP? what is the structure for APP? are you shift work. are you covering pulm consults while doing icu. is your clinic time protected or do you also have to work the hospital. how many patients per day do you see in clinic. what are your ancillary resources in the hospital."

1. How many nights/month are you on call and/or in house (if in the ICU)? Is that directly specified in your contract or is it subject to "the hospital's staffing needs"?
2. How many sites are you covering? Is all your work at 1 clinic + 1 hospital or are there multiple hospitals you may cover?
3. Compensation - how is it determined? Pure RVU? Pure hourly? Base + RVU? If there is an RVU component at all, how is your $/RVU calculated (i.e. is it based on billing vs collections, is it a set % of MGMA or other survey)? And what is the general % of collections vs billed? Cause billing at 90th percentile MGMA working 80 hours/week doesn't matter if the collection rate is 10th percentile. You could ask for a range of cash comp here for new people joining (aka $300-350, $350-400 etc) if they don't want to give you those specifics.
4. What's the minimum number of RVU's you are obligated to generate for the bonus portion (if it exists)? If you're covering multiple hospitals, how does the payor mix vary? Your compensation could be hugely different if as the "new guy" you are staffing the hospital with the worse payor mix.

 

[SurfingDoctor]

I applied for and have only have interviewed applicants who applied for academic positions, so I’m not sure my questions would be much help.

BUT, and this is true for any interview, be engaging. Have a battery of questions about the job, but have general questions about the hospital, area, people in the practice. People you interview with may not want to talk about RVUs (though certainly you should get direct answers from people who know and getting vague answers to direct and pointed questions is usually a red flag) but they may want to talk about their favorite part (pub, park, restaurante) of town.

Having been on the interviewing end and realizing that a lot of time, it’s just finding someone who is a warm body who can generate RVUs and isn’t a psychopath, having an interview that instead feels like a friendly conversation makes the applicant so much more appealing,

 

[Katheudontas parateroumen]

Thanks for the replies this far. Just fyi this is a 100% icu job. This is just the initial phone call interview so I wasn’t sure if I should ask all the things about pay etc now or wait until the site visit when things are more serious? Or are things already serious as I’m getting the phone interview and I should get this stuff upfront before even going to a site visit? I planned on just staying friendly, engaging, etc. I wasn’t sure if these other business questions come when they actually offer you a contract.

 

[lunaire]

Pre-corona, you should get a site visit after the initial phone call. You should email and verify that this is the case with your interview.

For the initial phone call, you should focus more on the job description. When I was interviewing people, this call was mostly to see if the guy seems qualified for the position, has decent communication skills, and has no major red flags. The site visit is when we get into specifics.

You should be ready to talk about your training, experience, overall career goal (wanna work 100h, 30h, calls/no calls, teach/admin/research, etc). You should ask them how many ICU beds, what kind of ICU, what kind of off site coverage you're expected to cover, and what kind of shift they want you to cover.

At the end of the phone interview, you and the program should have an idea if you fit in the position, or not. I would emphasize that you should also make this determination. Make sure you ask enough questions to know what the job actually is.

 

[fiznat]

I've just been going through a lot of this over the past few months (as many of us have been, it seems).

My experience has been that the first call/interview/zoom meeting is largely their "pitch" meeting about the basics. Generally the conversation is about the overall basics of the job - what they do, where they do it, how often they're working, and who you'll be working with. Just the main bullet points. They would typically ask me questions related to my experience (basically was my fellowship busy enough to prepare me, how much ICU I had and what types, whether I'm comfortable with basic procedures, etc) and also my interest ("what kind of job are you looking for," "what are your aspirations" etc). Overall I feel the first meeting like this is just a basic hello and simple screen to make sure we're both interested in the basic structural aspects of the job. Like others have said, I think it helps to just be a normal friendly person and to ask first date questions like they are.

Jobs I was interested in would typically have two or even three more meetings of this type where I met progressively more people. Ultimately the last step was a site visit if we were both interested at that point. Some places tried to avoid talking about money before the site visit but I refused to actually travel anywhere unless I knew at least the basic figures. That policy seemed to work for me because for some places the visit would have been a total waste of my time because they weren't up to par on the pay.

Hope that helps.

 

[Katheudontas parateroumen]

Thank you for the advice! Good to know for expectations wise! In your experience, if you're offered a site visit, do you think that's basically a shoe-in you'll get the job?

 

[grt398]

I don't know if it's a shoe-in...I would say the odds are heavily in your favor, but the in-person visit is certainly about seeing how well you get along with your potential future coworkers in person. There are definitely people who seem fine over the phone, and can "keep it together" for 1-2 hours of telephone interviewing, meanwhile doing an 8 hour site visit where you'll interact with a lot of different people, and likely have lunch with a group, is very different. No one wants to discover they have a "difficult" new hire. Obviously there are places just looking for a "warm body" to fill a slot and don't care...but that may not be the ideal place to work.