By: Tony Barlow | tbarlow@barlowmccarthy.com

When it comes to “sales” type roles, physician recruiting included, timing is incredibly important. And if you didn’t believe in the art of timing, the pandemic has hopefully cleared that up! How do you choose the “right time” to reach out when your target audience (healthcare providers) is front and center in the pandemic? Did your team discuss this over the past 12 months? This is just one current, obvious example about the importance of timing, let’s take a look at a few more examples.

Candidate sourcing is an area where the timing question is most impactful. Trying to establish that very first contact with a prospective physician is one of the greatest challenges that recruiters face. Turning cold leads into warm leads and then prospects takes time, patience, and of course good timing. As we dive deeper, I want to look at this subject from two lenses, a macro lens and a micro lens.

From a macro perspective we would consider criteria like what times of the year are best for recruiting. The most obvious example here is with recruiting residents. It is no secret that August, September and even October are excellent times to reach out to final year residents and fellows. A lot of decisions are made at the beginning of the residents last year. But just because these may be the optimal times to reach out, they certainly aren’t the ONLY times to reach out. There are a number of reasons that would force a resident to wait to make a decision or make a decision much earlier than their final year. If you are timing your sourcing outreach only around the best months, you may be missing out on any number of good prospects. It is why at Barlow/McCarthy we’ve had good success building our sourcing strategy around a steady flow of messages for our clients. Being consistently in the prospect’s inbox has been a huge key to success.

Let’s get a little more granular and look at the micro level. This would be attributes like, days of the week or time of the day for outreach. With our email sourcing product, we put a special emphasis on finding the right day and time to send messages. While you may be able to find rough guidelines on the internet, I can tell you that messaging to physicians is not the same as messaging to consumers. You maybe already know that! 😊 After doing messaging for clients across the country and for a wide range of specialties I’m convinced there is no secret formula or hard and fast rule. The only way to nail down the best days and times is to study your data, taking a deep dive into the metrics after each email. Ideal date and time will vary by region and by specialty. As a simple example primary care physicians have vastly different schedules than surgeons, we need to time our messages to them differently as well. As a guidepost, my approach is to try to have my message hit their inbox while they are sitting down at their computer. Easier said than done but it gives a starting point and a framework to get started!

When working in a competitive environment like recruitment sourcing, little things matter! Timing out communication whether that is a cold call, email or text message is important and worth some attention. Spend some time looking through your data and create a solid plan for when you are going to push messages out.

If all this feels like more work than you want to do. 😊 Please just reach out! I would love to talk with you about how our sourcing products can help make your life easier. You can find me at tbarlow@barlowmccarthy.com.