By Allison McCarthy, MBA
When you consider how many leads it can take to land a recruit, you realize how critical prospecting is to physician recruitment success. Today’s contracted doctor may have been:
- 1 of 5 site visits conducted
- 1 of a dozen or so telephone screened candidates
- 1 of 100 email pushes sent
Our greatest challenge can be making the time to prospect. We find ourselves busy with screening leads, organizing interviews or getting involved with other hospital initiatives, and time dedicated to prospecting can get slack. But if we don’t spend time generating leads, then we don’t have physicians to interview or site visits to arrange. And we don’t generate leads unless we make prospecting a consistently active part of our work week.
Let me qualify what I mean by prospecting. While some might consider prospecting to include sending out direct mail, placing an ad or posting an opportunity on a web based job bank, I consider those activities “marketing” or promotion. To me, prospecting is proactive selling done by sending out personalized emails, making telephone calls to a targeted list, soliciting interest at a career fair, etc… It’s the actual reaching out to a lead versus waiting for a lead to come to you.
For many, prospecting – as I define it – can be “anxiety” provoking. Rather than admit it’s uncomfortable, many will justify not making the effort because it might “pester” or “offend” target physicians. They can suggest that these approaches “just don’t work,” or that attention is needed on other elements of the recruitment continuum so no time is left for that type of prospecting.
The benefits of proactive prospecting are many – both for yourself and for the organization, including:
- Focused effort on the “ideal” prospect versus “any” prospect
- Higher quality leads that move through the rest of the recruitment process more efficiently
- Feedback about how your practice opportunity resonates in the marketplace
- Market testing your messages to find those critical few that work
- Communication that “gets through” to your target audience – even if they’re not ready to say yes today
Realistically, maybe there isn’t enough time for you to personally do the amount of prospecting that you know the organization needs. Prospecting can also be fulfilled successfully by outside firms – as long as they are representing YOU and not their own firm. A part time resource could be added to the team more cost effectively than having you personally spend the time on those efforts. The bottom line is that the investment needs to be made. Only by proactively soliciting interest in your practice opportunities to your desired target prospects will you have enough qualified candidates to ensure a successfully completed recruitment assignment.
The start of a new year is a perfect time to look back at what you have been doing and either adapt your own time commitment or retain resources to get it done. Marketing or promoting your practice opportunities is not the same as selling those opportunities. Selling is a time and resource intensive effort. But it’s the surest way to fill your recruitment pipeline with the most desirable leads to fit your open positions.