By: Allison McCarthy, MBA | amccarthy@barlowmccarthy.com

I was recently in and out of LaGuardia Airport with a rental car for client work.  While I hadn’t experienced travel logistics in this location before, I certainly had expectations based on prior experience.

After deplaning, I asked at the Welcome Center where to find the rental car shuttle given the lack of signage or other direction. The representative asked which vendor and then directed me to the “purple bus.”  I assumed this would take me to the rental car facility, but the bus dropped us off on a neighborhood street.  No signage. No communication.  And only because I saw another traveler walk toward a shuttle bus did I realize I needed to do the same.  Ultimately it required two buses to get to the rental car facility, along with frustration and being perturbed.

I wondered if physician prospects are similarly dismayed when trying to identify practice openings with some health care systems.  Go to the web site, find the Careers page, and look for more information.  Except what is presented is some generic text and a button that says, “Apply Now.” When clicking the button, you’re then asked to complete a form and provide contact information – still no information on what positions are available or the ability to email or call someone to get the details.  Just a blind form to complete to get anything meaningful.

Airports like LaGuardia likely have so much volume there is little concern about being user-friendly.  But health care systems today must be inviting to physician prospects to win in this competitive recruitment environment.  With so many opportunities available to physicians, these clinicians don’t need to work very hard to find something of interest.  Any organization not making it easy to provide practice opportunity information will be easily bypassed for other more welcoming organizations.

As hospitals and groups consolidate into health systems, I often find these larger entities have diluted their visibility in the physician recruitment market. It’s not intentional. The problem is that IT and Marketing have so many other priorities that enhancing a Physician Careers page falls to the bottom of the list.

While the rental car agencies around LaGuardia may not need to worry about being user-friendly, health care systems working to recruit doctors must be.