Finding Mr. or Ms. Right for your hospital
Don't hire another MD until you read our list
It's a tough market out there for hospitals and practices looking for physicians - especially primary care practices. Doctors have their choices of plum jobs, and that makes finding the right candidate for your practice even more difficult. But there are ways to ensure your search is successful, says David Cornett, senior vice president of production of Cejka & Co. in St. Louis, a nationally known physician recruiting firm.
· Know your organization's goals.
Practices that don't have a strategic plan start one step behind, he says. Not only will having a plan help your practice to be more successful, but it gives you a better understanding of your market, your competition, and what you will have to offer a candidate to get him or her in the door.
And Cornett adds, you can be sure that a savvy doctor will want to know where your practice is headed.
· Know why you are recruiting.
"If you have a physician retiring, it doesn't mean you have to replace him," Cornett says. "If you are going after some managed care contracts, you have to understand how that relates to your staffing needs. You have to know if you are growing or not. And do you really need a physician, or would a mid-level professional do the trick? Don't hire as a knee-jerk reaction. Make sure you identify and justify your need."
Cornett says a good candidate will also be interested in the whys.
Part of knowing why you are looking for a physician involves defining the position, says Kathy Greenwalt, physician recruiter at Guthrie Clinic in Sayre, PA. She has overseen a 100-physician increase in her 235 physician practice over the last three years.
"Do you want a potential partner, or not? If it is family practice, do you want the person to do obstetrics or not? What is the call schedule going to be? If you can't answer these questions, then you won't succeed in your search." She says. "The candidates want to know these things."
· Know what you want.
You have to sit down and ascertain what kind of experience and personality traits you want in an ideal candidate, Cornett says. "Are you a team-oriented, collaborative group, or are you a confederation of independent physicians who share central services?"he asks. "Some groups have a laid-back approach to medicine; they may have side interests and are given the freedom to pursue them. Others are very aggressive Type A practices that work 60 or 70 hours a week."
Greenwalt says you should talk your physicians through what they want out of the new hire. "If they say they want a board-certified doctor, you have to question them on it," she says. "What if they have their boards pending? Is there any circumstance in which they would accept non-board certified?"
· Know what to offer.
In the competitive market for physicians, you have to know not only what national compensation trends are but also what local trends are. For national data, you can go to the Medical Group Management Association in Englewood, CO. Local information will take more research. Cornett says you should also be aware that for some specialities, you will have to compete for candidates on a national level.
· Have an employment agreement ready.
This can be a simple letter outlining salary and benefits, says Cornett, or it can be a 30 page document. Typically, this includes information on the pay for the first year or two, what the bonus program is, when they will be eligible for partnership, what the benefits are, information on malpractice, any administrative conditions for licensure and maintaining privileges at local hospitals, and conditions for termination.
A lawyer should look at your agreement if you haven't done one before.
· Be sure there is consensus on the hire.
Cornett says that all of the key players - usually the physician partnership but sometimes also the top administrative staff - should be in favor of the search. A really good group will also seek input from other people in the practice, Cornett says, such as the nursing staff. "You just can't afford for everyone not to be on the same team."
· Know your practice's strengths and weaknesses.
"You have to take a good, hard, objective look at your hospital and the position, and identify what a candidate would see as strengths and weaknesses," he says. "Then, you play to the strengths and minimize or fix the weaknesses." For instance, if you have a lot of managed care contracts, you may not be able to pay the national average in that specialty. But you might make that up with a shorter partnership track. Or, you might offer a more lucrative bonus structure than otherwise.
Whatever you do, don't hide the weaknesses, says Greenwalt. She often had to struggle to find candidates for her rural practice. "But the goal isn't to find candidates; it's to find candidates who will say yes to the job and succeed in it," she says.
"To do that, you have to tell them that it is a rural location or that there is a lousy call schedule. You can emphasize the good things and make things like a rural setting more appealing, but you don't want to lie to them. If you do, they won't stay."
· Have a plan of action.
Cornett says this means having a clear time frame for starting and finishing a search. "Keep in mind that if you need someone to start in September, you have to make the offer in May or June. It takes three to four months to get things like the license settled." The plan should also include information on:
- where to find good candidates;
- how to screen them;
- how to reference them;
- how to bring them into the interview;
- following up on the interview;
- negotiating and closing;
- staying in touch until the start date.
"And someone has to be responsible at each step of the way," he says. "But no one person will have time to do this. Spread the responsibility around among three or four people who will form a recruiting committee."
It is particularly important that you find someone with good sales skills to be on the committee, Cornett advises. "You may have a great bunch of people, but sometimes docs want to beat the bad stuff to death. This isn't surgery. They don't need a surgery disclaimer."
You want the candidates to come in with their eyes open to the realities of your firm, but their is a way to be honest and still direct them toward saying yes, he adds. "Docs can overdiagnose. They spend their days looking for stuff that is out of whack. They bring that negative mindset to search processes and to candidates. They have to learn to accept the best that is out there. If you can find 75% of the stuff that's important to you, you better take it."
· Execute the plan.
· Be decisive.
"When you find someone that looks like the right person, get them," says Cornett. "Don't fool around and let time go by." If you have two other interviews set up, unless they are scheduled for the next couple of days, lock in the first candidate, he says.
"If you interview Dr. Jones today, and [your meeting with] Dr. Smith is three weeks away, Smith may look good on paper and sound good on the phone. But Smith is interviewing elsewhere in all likelihood. And Smith may come, and you may think, 'Yuk, he isn't as good as Jones in person.' Then, you go back to Jones, who has been sitting there three weeks; he feels like a loser, and you have lost both of them."
The biggest mistake you can make in a search, says Greenwalt, is not get enough information from the physicians in your practice about what they want. "Without adequate information, you may be able to find candidates but not the right candidates, and the idea is to hire someone, not interview them," she says.
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