Physician Recruiting Software

Physician Recruiting: How software and technology can help with the process of finding the right physician for your practice.

Unless your practice exists in a vacuum, it will experience growth and change just like any other business. Chances are, at some point, that you will need to hire one or more new employees to help service your patients. The better plan you have, the easier this process will be for you and for your fellow medical staff. The proper use of technology will make recruiting the right physician for your practice more manageable. Planning your physician recruiting strategy will also help minimize the legal issues that you are faced with along the way.

Normally, you either realize that your office is understaffed because of a high patient per professional ratio, or you may need to replace a departing physician. Before you even place the ad, start planning. Your first step should be determining your practice’s needs. Do you really need to recruit a new physician? Can your existing staff be optimized to better serve your patient base? Is everyone working to their fullest potential? Do you need short term physician help or will this doctor be with you for the long term? All of these questions should be answered and all staff should know why a new physician is needed.

The next step, even before placing a job ad, is to take a look at the current job description and make sure that it accurately describes what your new physician’s duties will be. Make sure that the physician job description describes all of the job requirements and lists all of the tasks associated with the job. Always include information about overtime if it may be required. Make sure to list all of the qualifications that you are looking for in your new physician. Make sure that you separate the basic qualifications from the “nice to haves”.

Once y0ou know what type of physician you need and what type of qualified professional will be best to fill it, let the search begin! The most important thing about any type of recruiting, be it physician recruiting or secretarial recruiting, is making sure that you have the proper tools in place to help you do your job. You wouldn’t use a golf club to hammer a house frame together, so don’t use antiquated or incorrect methods to recruit for and hire employees.

One of the tools that can help with the recruiting process is some type of tracking system that will help you to measure the effectiveness of job postings. When you post a job, there are many locations that you can use. The key is to make sure your job posting is reaching a pool of qualified physicians who are a good target for your type of practice. There is no magic formula. In days gone by, putting an ad in the paper would result in you receive hundreds of resumes from physicians ready to work at your practice. However, these days the internet has changed the way that we perform physician recruiting activities. There are many niche job boards where your practice can post it’s opening for a physician. You may also decide to post your opening on a specialty society career page on their website. Furthermore, there are many non-specialty websites like www.careerbuilder.com and www.nationsjob.com that may be good places for you to post your available physician opening.

When you place ads with several different sources, make sure that you use some sort of system to ensure that you are getting good, qualified candidates as a direct result of that posting. An easy thing to do is to invest, even for the short term, in a web-based physician recruiting software system to organize all of the resumes that you receive. Physician recruiting software will store the resume, date received, personal information, and source of every candidate that you get. Some even make it easy to forward the CV or resumes to the tracking system so that you do not have to manually enter all of the data yourself, you just click a button. Quality physician recruiting systems also provide a plethora pf reporting and metrics features to help you determine where you candidates are coming from and what the best methods are to use to hire them in the future. Many web-based systems allow you to sign up for a month-to-month subscription, so you don’t even have to make a long term commitment if you are only going to hire one physician in the foreseeable future.

In short: Make sure to give consideration to suing a quality physician recruiting software package so that you can easily organize and track the resume and correspondence with each candidate that responds to your job postings.

Hopefully, once you determine the best locations at which to post your openings and get them out there, you will be flooded with resumes of qualified candidates who you would like to interview. Before you complete the first interview with the physician, make sure that your practice has a standardized job application for each prospective physician candidate to complete. The application should give each candidate spaces to record their work history and also their references. Make sure to once again ask how the applicant heard about the opening. To ensure that no discrimination charges occur later down the road, avoid asking questions about race, religion, marital status, and other things of a personal nature. Make sure that you have your application reviewed by your practice’s attorney before asking physicians to fill it out.

Consider putting your application online. This is another way that technology can be used to help you in your physician recruiting process. Quality physician recruiting software will interface seamlessly with your website’s career page, and the applicant will be filling out the online application and entering into the recruiting system for your record without even knowing it. This really cuts down on paper (easily lost on your desk at your busy practice) and confidentiality issues. Most physician recruiting software is password protected, therefore only those of you who are supposed to see the resumes actually will. We all know what happens if they sit on a fax machine.

Once you have had each physician fill out an application and come in for an interview, you will begin the process of selecting the right physician for your practice. This may involve a series of interviews with different medical staff. It could be setting up a site visit for the prospective physician to ensure that they know how your practice operates and they know what to expect on a daily basis. The key is not to surprise your new physician on their first day. Make sure he or she knows what to expect. Once you have determined that a particular physician is interested in working with your practice, and that you like them as well, CHECK REFERENCES. Make sure that you call on the references listed by the physician on the job application. Ask a lot of questions. Ask if they would re-hire the physician. Record the responses to each question. Here is another great use of physician recruiting software: record the questions you asked each reference and what their response was to you. That way the appropriate office staff can evaluate the candidate further. Also, do not neglect to verify that the physician has not been sanctioned by the OIG. It’s a simple mouse click away. Go to http://www.oig.hhs/gov and perform the check online.

When you settle on the candidate who is the best fit for your practice, it is time to make an employment offer. Once again, here is an area in your recruiting process where technology can help you. Use the internet to help make sure that your offer letter is worded well. Try visiting www.shrm.org. This is the home page for the Society of Human resources Management, and there are many resources and templates for offer letters, and also links to other sites to help you make sure that your offer letter contains all of the legal language necessary to protect you and your practice. Also, if you have chosen to use physician recruiting software, make sure to attach a copy of the offer letter that you presented to your candidate, record the date it was sent, and the candidates response. If your candidate responded via email, make sure to attach that email to his or her profile that you set up in your recruiting system. Do this weather the physician accepts or rejects your offer. That way, you have all of the history tracked in the same place, and you have access to the information for next time. If the physician turned down your offer for a specific reason, you will know not to target similar candidates in your next search.

In conclusion, technology has changed the face of recruiting every type of employee, including physicians. Use the tools that are out there to help you in your search for the perfect doctor to help your practice grow and prosper.