How Should Your Practice Approach Physician Recruitment?
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By the year 2026, a projected 6.5 million medical professionals will leave the field, whilst there will be only 1.9 million new professionals to replace them (Source). Physician recruitment today is harder than ever: whether it’s sourcing, screening, decision making, or credentialing, practices and firms find themselves going through this long-haul process in a hiring environment that is becoming ever scarcer and more competitive.
Let’s examine how your practice can systematically get the physician recruitment process jump started in 3 simple steps.
Step 1: Identify your target candidate audience and specialties
When recruiting new physicians, of course you want somebody that matches your practice’s needs. Rather than try and get the masses to apply, modern recruitment strategies are more complex than ever. To have a successful campaign, your practice will need a strong search criterion that bleeds into its marketing materials and outreach strategies. These components can only come to fruition if your practice decides on a target candidate audience beforehand. In addition to specialty, by narrowing your target audience down to a specific age range, location, or alma mater, your practice will be able to target its marketing and courting efforts more deliberately.
Say your ophthalmology practice is located in the Los Angeles and is one of the many whose physicians are aging into retirement. You want to recruit younger and more local so as to retain talent. Your target audience could be 3rd year residents at UCLA who specialize in ophthalmology. With this information in mind, perhaps a relevant recruitment strategy could be building a snazzy presence on social media, conducting coffee chats in the area, and leveraging the network of the current physicians at your practice.
Step 2: Source your candidates
After you have your target candidate audience in mind, sourcing is the next hurdle. According to the AAPPR, sourcing is one of the largest internal barriers for all healthcare recruiters, and in fact, for practices with <300 providers, it stands as the largest internal barrier. Gone are the days of newspaper and radio ads, modern recruitment standards dictate that you have 3 options when it comes to sourcing.
Option 1: Personal and practice-wide network
- Building not only your practice’s, but also your own personal network is one of the primary ways recruiters go about sourcing today. Saving CVs, building relationships, and maintaining them overtime can be useful even if that person isn’t looking for a career change at this very moment. Eventually the accumulation of contacts and relationships will bear fruit the moment any one of your connections has a change of heart. Your practice’s network is equally as important. Building partnerships and connections with medical schools, hospitals, and physician groups can generate coveted recruitment pipelines that will ensure a constant stream of fresh talent.
Option 2: Recruiting agencies
- Many larger practices elect to go to designated physician recruiting agencies in addition to running an internal effort. According to the AAPPR, 53.6% of practices who responded chose to outsource some of their recruiting efforts to a search agency. Even so, 90.2% of practices with >1000 providers conduct the majority of their physician searches in house. This figure extends up to 98.3% when looking at practices with <300 providers. Recruiting agencies can be helpful as they will employ their own recruiting expertise and practice-wide networks to find candidates for you, but it comes at a tradeoff. First, recruiters usually pocket up to 20-30% of a hired candidates first year salary, so the cost to your practice will likely be higher. Second, cultural fit and brand identity can be difficult for your recruiting agency to grasp: the professionals at your agency don’t work under the same as your own employees (Source).
Option 3: Healthcare provider databases
- Enabling your internal recruitment team with the relevant tools can be a capital efficient strategy to enhance your recruitment efforts. Healthcare provider intelligence tools like Alpha Sophia can serve as a recruitment platform in it of itself. Perhaps you want to hire an ophthalmologist that has vast experience with 67113s, lives in LA, and is not of retirement age quite yet. With an HCP database like Alpha Sophia, your recruitment team will be able to identify the people that meet those exact requirements, conduct due diligence, and reach out via the email and phone number provided. Regardless of whichever platform you choose, being able to slice and dice the universe of HCPs will enable you to put your money where your mouth is when it comes to sourcing, qualifying, and reaching out to your target candidate audience.
Step 3: Qualifying your candidates
After identifying your target candidate audience and sourcing exactly who that is, comes the task of qualifying them. The process of candidate qualification is where your practice’s own judgement comes into play. As a baseline, you want to make sure your candidate has the certifications and can acquire the licenses required to work at your practice. In addition, you might want to view metrics about procedure volume, procedure type, and what tools and machines they are proficient in using. If your practice does decide to go down the path of using an HCP database, tools like Alpha Sophia will have these datapoints readily available at first glance.
Just like that, you’ve slimmed down the whole universe of medical professionals to just a list of high-quality candidates you want to recruit. The next step is to reach out to your list of qualified candidates whether it be through personal contact info from your own network, an arrangement provided by your recruitment agency, or an email you find on an HCP database. Physician recruiting is a grueling process, but by following these steps: identifying your target candidate audience, sourcing your candidates, and then qualifying them, you’ll ensure your practice has the necessary structure to get its recruitment campaign started.
How to use Alpha Sophia to recruit your dream physicians
Your firm runs a handful of ophthalmology practices in Los Angeles, and you get word that a couple of your physicians are planning on retiring in the next 2 to 3 years. To plan ahead, you begin the challenge of finding their replacements today. You’re looking for ophthalmologists that already have some experience—but aren’t too old—and you also understand that the physician community does not like relocating, so you want to find ophthalmologists that are already in LA.
First, you can use Alpha Sophia’s “Practice Location” filter to restrict your search to just Los Angeles
Now, you’ll have a vast list of every physician in Los Angeles, let’s narrow it down to just Ophthalmologists now. You can use the “Taxonomy” filter to slice your list down to ophthalmologists in LA.
Next, let’s set our target age group. Let’s use the “Seniority” filter to now narrow our list down to just ophthalmologists in LA who graduated 5-10 years ago.
Great, we have a list of just young ophthalmologists in LA. Now, say your practice has been quite satisfied with its previous Geffen (UCLA) Med School graduates, and would prefer to recruit from there. You can use the “Education” filter.
Lastly, you realize that one of your physicians who is retiring was the best physician at performing a complex repair of detached retinas, so ideally you need a replacement. Alpha Sophia can filter down by CPT code as well. Use the “Procedure All-payor” filter and find physicians that perform 67113s.
Now, just rank your results by procedure volume to see who performs the most 67113s.
Voila! Using just a few of the many filters that Alpha Sophia offers, you’ve found a comprehensive list of physicians that meet your practice’s recruiting preferences for age, location, taxonomy, education, and even specific procedure type. You can now look into their profiles and reach out to them via an email or phone number that can be found in the person’s “Contact” section.
Don’t forget to come back to see how you can perform deep due diligence and qualification on these candidates using the Alpha Sophia platform!
Use Alpha Sophia for recruiting
