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Find Your Healthcare Dream Job On The Web
Healthcare employment opportunities for physicians are proliferating online. Here’s how to get started.
Need a new healthcare job? You should still contact physician recruiters, check the classifieds, network with colleagues, and perhaps even phone prospective employers. But now, you can also log onto the Internet, where scores of Web sites are posting employment opportunities for physicians.
Many of those sites also offer a gold mine of information about physician compensation, interviewing strategies, and preparing your CV. You can even create a CV on line and send it to dozens of employers at once.
Healthcare employers, recruiters, and others with Internet job postings are attracting phenomenal interest from physicians. The number of doctors we have placed from our Web site has increased fivefold in the last two years. Other site operators with jobs for doctors also expect visitors to grow exponentially in the years to come.
Be this as it may, physician job hunting online is still in its infancy. Think of the Web as another arrow in your quiver, not a replacement for conventional ways to look for a job. On the other hand, expanding your search into cyberspace offers several unique benefits—and several new hassles.
Medical journal and specialty organization sites
Finding physician/ healthcare jobs in cyberspace is easy. First, check the Web sites of the medical journals you read. Just about every journal nowadays has one (it’s often part of thte sponsoring organization’s site). If the journal carries classified ads, you’ll usually find them online as well.
That’s a benefit, because checking classifieds online is more convenient than thumbing through journals, and you don’t need to subscribe to those publications to do it. For starters, online ads are faster. Many sites feature search engines that let you use keywords like "family physician" and "Florida" to narrow your search to ads of Florida employers with FP openings, rather than forcing you to scan all the listings, as you must in a magazine.
Also, classified ads on the Internet may remain online longer than they do in print—or appear earlier.
Physician recruiter and employer sites
You can also type keywords like "physician employment" into the query field of a Web search engine. What you’ll get is an army of medical group practices, hospitals, health systems, integrated delivery systems, HMOs, nursing homes, and surgicenters, as well as physician recruiters, with jobs for doctors nationwide.
This can be a blessing or a curse. If you’re seeking a needle-in-the-haystack position or simply want an overview of jobs being advertised, it’s boon. On the other hand, while the major physician recruitment firms list hundreds of employment opportunities in every specialty throughout the US, most recruiters are mom and pop shops with only a handful of jobs. Ditto for employers: Even a large integrated delivery system may have only five positions to fill at any one time. After you’ve mouse-clicked your way through the first 10 or so sites, with the end of the list nowhere in sight, the appeal of the random-search, more-is-merrier approach quickly fades.
Like the sites of many journals and specialty organizations, those of the largest physician recruiters—among them ours (www.cejkasearch.com) - may also contain valuable job hunting information. For instance, you will find such things as the latest physician compensation surveys, which will give you an idea of what doctors in your specialty are earning these days.
Flat file vs. interactive sites
Most sites you’ll find online are flat-file: They contain the test of classified ads much as you’d find them in print publications. You can often search the ads by certain criteria (such as specialty, job location, and salary range), and you can generally click on a hypertext link to send an e-mail to a prospective employer to learn more.
A growing number of sites—such as those of the American Academy of Family Physicians (www.aafp.org/careers), the American College of Cardiology (www.acc.org), and the Medical Economics Career Center (www.memagjobs.com, a site where physician recruiters can post job openings) — feature something called Web or electronic CVs. Fill out one of these electronic forms online once, and you can e-mail it—repeatedly—to prospective employers who post job opportunities on that Web site. Convenience aside, the more specific you are in the information you send to a recruiter or employer, the more apt you are to get a speedy—or any—response.
If you’re concerned about confidentiality, conduct your searches on your home computer, not the one you use at work. An employer can check your Web browser to see which sites you’ve visited recently. While some Web browsers allow you to delete this record, a copy of it will be stored on your organization’s network server, where an information services manager may notice it and bring it to your boss’ attention.
This article was published by Cejka Search and originally appeared in Medical Economics Magazine. Copyright by Medical Economics Company Inc. at Montvale, NJ 07645. All rights reserved.