By: Allison McCarthy, MBA
When selling a practice opportunity, no voice is as strong as the physician’s voice. During the recruitment process, physicians can help convince candidates to select your practice over others. But how can you demonstrate the attractiveness of your opportunity without a physician to deliver the message?
Provide Tangible Examples
Similar to listing key highlights of your geographic area and community, you need to provide a few relevant facts about the opportunity. What candidates want to hear (and what you need to convey) is that your practice environment is pleasing to a physician. Likely, you already have data points to convey just that. Consider listing facts about:
- Tenure: How long have the physicians been practicing with your group? Practice longevity, at a minimum, hints at practice satisfaction.
- Low turnover: See questions above. You can list data for a group, a specialty or medical staff overall.
- Physician satisfaction: Providing scores from formal surveys can affirm the opportunity’s a professional appeal. To make the data even more persuasive, you might have the survey vendors refine the results by specialty years with the organization.
- Physician productivity: Data that highlights high-clinical functionality (operating/procedure room turnover, number of patients per day, number of births per month) coupled with physician lifestyle factors (office hours/week and call coverage requirements) confirms a pleasing practice environment. Add positive clinical quality scores, and you have a formidable message.
Beyond quantitative examples, you can use qualitative insights to get at the “heart” of the practice experience. For example, the ways in which physicians participate in organizational decision-making demonstrates a positive practice culture. Consider highlighting the answers to these questions:
- How many physicians are in leadership positions? How many of those are new recruits?
- Are there task forces, committees or other bodies that help leadership make decisions? How are physicians involved in these groups?
- How often does practice management meet one-on-one with the physicians to glean insights on operations and improvements?
- Is there a fairly flat reporting structure?
For a new recruit, these tidbits concretely illustrate a positive practice environment.
Make the Connection
At some point, you do need an actual physician to assure the recruit about the opportunity and ensure he or she will be a good fit with the practice. Technology allows physicians to be more actively involved into your recruitment messages.
Many organizations post video testimonials on their recruitment websites, social media domains, etc. While the more cynical might call this too “staged,” providing a good cross-section of physicians and a range of content adds credibility to your message.
Taking technological advances further, you can now bring together physicians and recruits from different locations for a “face-to-face” dialogue. Video-calls from the physician’s office or home, as part of the sourcing or candidate screening process, can enable that “credibility-building” conversation without scheduling disruptions.
Differentiating your message is a “must” in today’s highly competitive recruitment marketplace. Using facts to illustrate the pros of your practice environment – from the physician’s perspective – distinguishes and validates your message. Finding resourceful ways to actively include physicians in recruitment discussions further validates the opportunity in a “time-sensitive” way. A little creativity and a few data points can really strengthen your recruitment messages.
Contact Allison McCarthy to learn more about our Physician Recruitment offerings.