A letter from a physician recruiter
A comment was left on this website by a physician recruiter in response to my post on ‘Physician Recruiters: Whose side are they on?’ and ‘Physician Recruiters: How to use them to your advantage‘. I think the points he mentioned are worth mentioning in a post. It is only fair for me to allow him to voice his opinion in this forum. Here is what Bob Eskeridge has to say in his own words.
These are good tips for working with a physician recruiter. As a recruiter myself, I’d also like to add the following:
1) Make sure you are working with a Board Certified Physician Recruiter. This will give you a level of assure that (a) they have been doing this for awhile and (b) plan to continue therefore their reputation means much more to them.
2) Make sure your recruiter has a complete and accurate picture of your qualifications, experience, and career goals, and
2) Give the recruiter timely feedback about interviews and progress. We cannot accurately represent you if we do not know what you’re thinking after an interview. Your recruiter should make your job search easier, but they can only do so when they have sufficient, accurate and timely information.
I will admit, I did not know that even physician recruiters have to be board certified. I think I need to dig deeper into it and find out how are they certified and on what criteria. Like Bob mentioned, it does show their commitment to the field of physician recruiting. So we can be sure we are not dealing with fly by night recruiter.
I think his second point on providing a complete and accurate picture to a physician recruiter is logically sound and important. Unless the recruiter knows what kind of physician job a candidate is most likely to accept, he may throw all kinds of stuff i.e. jobs at him. Still if you feel that you communicated your desires but the physician recruiter is not listening, then you need to break that relationship and change the physician recruiter.
May be Bob will agree for an interview for the benefit of our readers. I will shoot him an email.
4 Responses to “A letter from a physician recruiter”
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Board certified? What a laugh! In what? Sales? Deception? "Creative" writing of ads?
Just another attempt of sales people with minimal education to look more credible. Ridiculous.
Dr Muenzer,
I am sad to read your comments.
Am I a salesman? Absolutely! and I love what I do. I get the opportunity to earn what I am worth (well over six figures) without having to deal with insurance claims or malpractice issues. 100% commission sales is the BEST career in the world. No other career can you give yourself a raise anytime you want. My first business was a venture capital backed hi-tech manufacturing company. The VCs decided to sell the company and left the founders with nothing. I will NEVER release control of my future again.
Minimal education? Hmmm…;lets see.
BS, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale
MBA, University of Montana, Missoula (while an officer in the Air Force)
Board Certifications:
CPC – Certified Personnel Consultant
CTS – Certified Temporary Staffing Specialist
PRC – Certified Physician Recruiting Consultant
CERS – Certified Employee Retention Specialist
CSP – Certified Staffing Professional
Continuing Education Requirements – 50 Units every three years. I am currently at 123 units and still have a year left. I set aside 2% of my gross wages for my personal professional development.
I have personally trained three physicians to be physician recruiters. One after retiring from General Surgery, another who got burned by the insurance companies, and the third who decided he did not enjoy practicing medicine any more.
Creative ads? You bet! I have to be creative to get your attention, to give you enough information for you to want to contact me but not so much that you can figure out who it is and contact then directly cutting out the recruiter all together. Yes…it does happen often!
I hope you will read my responses to the questions the moderator sent me. I sincerely hope that you will see the recruiting career field can be an honorable profession.
Respectfully,
Bob Eskridge
Board Certified Physician Recruiter
http://www.eskridge-associates.com
Dear Mr Eskridge:
Recruiting absolutely can be an honorable profession! And it certainly seems that you are one of the honorable recruiters, whom I respect very much. Your description of recruitment is very clear and straightforward and honest. I apologize for the sarcastic tone of my comment.
I have to explain where it comes from: In the past I took the promises of recruiter ads seriously while searching for a position recruiters almost never get: IN an attractive city. It took a while to realize that recruiters usually do not get jobs in areas they call "oversaturated". Then it took me a few more months to find out that I myself could find jobs there very easily in those areas that seem closed to recruiters: with direct mailing or mass mailing. One mailing turned up 6 interviews in that very "oversaturated area" where "we hardly ever get jobs" because "we get jobs where there are more jobs than applicants".
That is in a nutshell my experience. After looking around on the net I felt the avalanche of recruiter websites – 10s of thousands wth literally no critical or even skeptical publications, except maybe "The DoctorJob". I started blogging about my experiences, obviously from a very critical standpoint. There is not much new to blog about once the basic issues are defined and I am not pursuing this much. I had a discussion about this with jim Stone a few months ago, Certainly I know that recruiters can be good, very good, trustworth, honorable and very helpful and with luck can even dramatically improve your career. You are one of the recruiters that stand out, and I apologize again. I do respect you. But the avalanche of screaming internet ads and websites and the "100% sales" tactics that are commonly used and tout recruiters as "the place to start", "the professionals to go to", "the ones with the best jobs" just deserve some correction and emlightening commentary. There are limitaitons on what recruiters can achieve simply by how their work is defined and structured – you get paid to fill open positions. This pretty much excludes that you are helping someone look for a position, let’s say in an "oversaturated area" let’s say with using with direct mail. And those practices in oversaturated areas know that they only need to drop a word in the doctors lounge of teir hospital and fill their position. That is one of the truths that recuiters tend to deny, to forget and especially not to mention to their clients.
That is what I do at my blog "A Physician on Job Search and Practice". Take a bog bottle of Maalox and go to my blog of you have some hours to waste. You will not like it, and you may think it is only the dark side of recruiting, but it is a quite large part of it unfortunately. You, and a hadnful other excelletn recruiters I have come to know over the years are not part of this "dark side", but good people and recruiters unfortunately seem to e exception rather than the rule. I think your observation that once someone is recruting for ten years they do not change might be extremely helpful. This could very well be true!
Respectfully, and again with apologies,
your Matthias Muenzer
Dear Mr. Eskridge:
here is another short summary of my own experiences with recruiters and their ads:
Here are the top reasons why I admire recruiters!
They have a "positive mental attitude" (as written by Jim Stone of dochunterdiary.com). They are able to see a "great place to raise a family" and a "great place to build a practice", where I see just, well, Desert Gulch, a place where I would neither want to exile my family nor would want to build a practice. And where in general I would not want to be caught dead after sundown.
They have magical, mystical, truly superior means of transportation, very much like Harry Potter’s broom. A town they see as "only a short drive from LA" to me is 75 miles away and it takes me an excruciating 3 hours on a good day to get to the city.
While they can "enjoy all Boston has to offer" from a small town on the New Hampshire border, I get frustrated with all the woods and rocks. And for me the hour plus drive to Boston pretty much takes the fun out of it. I believe one-hour commutes are overrated.
They know much better than I what to do on the Internet. They know that you best use Google to "find physician recruiters where you want to go to" (Healthcarerecruiter blog), while I merely have been able to find employers that offered me jobs.
They know that the "best practices" are located far outside the city, while I sheepishly was looking INSIDE the city for a practice.
They know that a good job search starts by contacting a recruiter, one single recruiter, preferably in a small firm (recommended by recruiter Rebecca Gresham on a product-placement article on the otherwise very respectable MomMD), while I erroneously thought that starting your search by contacting recruiters is the equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot.
They know that it is much more ethical and professional not to tell your clients about your limitations and they know that it is absolutely wrong to refer your clients to someone that might be better able to help them than you are. Meanwhile I am still making the horrible mistake of sending my patients to a specialist or a more appropriately talented or equipped colleague as soon as I cannot solve a specific problem myself.