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If you’re a physician looking for a job and a recruiting firm asks for money to help you secure employment, walk the other way. That’s the first word of advice to doctors from two physician recruiters who collectively boast more than five decades of experience in the profession.

“It’s patently unethical and in most states it’s illegal to ask a physician for payment to assist in placing them,” said Rich Glehan of the Healthfield Alliance in Danbury, Conn. Glehan is ethics committee chairman and a past president of the National Association of Physician Recruiters (NAPR), based in Altamont Springs, Fla.

Physician recruiters are paid by the hiring party, whether that’s a physician group, a clinic or outpatient facility, a hospital or a hospital chain. Martin Osinski, who takes the helm of NAPR this month as the organization’s new president, groups recruiters into three categories:

1. In-house recruiters, who are employed by the hiring party.

2. Retained recruiters, who are paid their fees partly in advance to identify candidates for specific opportunities.

3. Contingency recruiters, who are paid a fee after identifying a candidate for a position and the candidate takes the job. Osinski said that contingency recruiters “have the flexibility to try to find positions for a specific candidate in a location that they’re looking.” Both Osinski and Glehan are contingency recruiters, with Osinski specializing in nephrology. He is president of NephrologyUSA, based in Miami.

“There’s not a lot of training done in residency programs or fellowship programs geared toward looking for a job, so the knowledge that a recruiter can convey is helpful. In addition, I think it’s fair to say that a physician looking for a position in a specific location may not know how to approach that,” said Osinski, adding that a recruiter may help a candidate determine “what they should be looking for, what’s realistic and what’s not.”

In fact, Osinski encouraged physicians to use two or three recruiters. “There’s certainly a different level of recruiting knowledge throughout the different recruiters that one would be working with,” he said. “However, I would limit the numbers of people you would utilize so that your CV isn’t being sent all over the place.”

Both Osinski and Glehan agreed that physicians need to remain in control of their curriculum vitae. If a doctor is considering working with a recruiting firm, then “the CV should never be sent first,” Glehan said. “Either an e-mail or a call should be made to hear what the recruiter has to say about a particular practice opportunity, make sure that it matches what the physician is looking for and then the CV can be sent.” On the flip side, Glehan said, “When a recruiting firm contacts a physician, if the recruiting firm is not willing to describe the practice opportunity in reasonable detail and asks for the doctor’s CV without giving details of a practice, then that’s a red flag.”

Osinski added that a recruiter “can’t blanketly send a CV to everybody in Texas, for example. There has to be a relationship between the recruiter and the hiring party first, and then there’s a relationship between the candidate and the recruiter. As long as everybody’s aware of those relationships, then the recruiter can send the CV.”

A good physician recruiter has a foot in both camps — helping his or her clients find a physician who fits the open position and guiding physicians toward a job that takes advantage of their particular skills and training and matches their career desires. “There’s a fine line between earning a fee and helping the doctor,” Glehan said. Good recruiters, he added, believe their “inherent job” is to orchestrate a match that lasts, not one that requires the doctor to relocate again in two or three years while the recruiter “sits back fat and sassy.”

The NAPR Code of Ethics not only delineates the relationship between recruiters and their clients and between recruiters and physicians, but also the relationships among recruiters themselves — and physicians should be able to recognize if they’re caught in a crossfire prompted by a recruiter who’s being less than aboveboard.

The biggest problem, Glehan said, is when one recruiter undercuts another in the race to put a physician’s CV into the hands of a hiring party. He said “the unwritten rule” is that the recruiter who submits the name first controls that candidate when it comes to that particular hiring party. Unfortunately, some less-than-scrupulous recruiters submit the CV without doing their due diligence, without talking to the doctor and without determining whether he or she is actually right for the job. Such premature moves penalize the more thoughtful recruiters who spend time informing physicians of practice details. “That person who sends the CV in without the doctor’s permission and without the doctor’s knowledge is one of the most significant ethics breaches,” Glehan said. The key for physicians is to work with recruiters who understand the details of an opportunity and can explain those details clearly. That’s a positive sign that the recruiter is working on behalf of both the hiring party and the candidate, he said. Good physician recruiters also understand “the subtleties” of a position – the competition, and the caliber of that competition, in the market; how a practice is valued for the purpose of buying in; and how the specialty interacts with other specialties in the community.

Both Glehan and Osinski said working with a recruiter who’s a member of NAPR protects both physicians and the hiring parties and gives both entities an appeals process outside the courts should a recruiter step outside the lines. “The Code of Ethics is a great tool for providing our members, as well as those people interested in utilizing our services, with a sense of what’s right and what’s wrong,” Osinski said.



May 2008

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