MPCing and The Doctor Job

Creative Secrets for Looking For Your Next Practice Opportunity.

As I mentioned before, I used to manage a 3rd party recruitment firm. While we weren’t physician recruiters, we specialized in high end accounting and finance placements and collected fees of between 15-40K per placement, so there are some similarities there. Now, I’m going to ramble a bit here about recruiting in the accounting/finance world to set it up, but stick with me, because I will end up with something very relevant to looking for a medical position.

To a recruiter, a truly great candidate is like gold. The question is, what makes a truly great candidate? In general, it’s someone who is fairly rare. Each recruiter and/or firm has a different rating system for candidates. We used a system called AIP, where we rated candidates 1-5 (1 being the highest) based 3 criteria. A is for appearance -- just how sharp does the candidate look? I is for intelligence – how does this person’s technical knowledge rate with the average candidates you see in this specialty? P is for personality – life of the party or dead fish? Lastly, and not represented by a letter in AIP, we gave a letter grade for the overall place-ability of the candidate. After an in depth interview, reference checks and, at times, some testing we rated each candidate if a candidate rated very high over all (usually at least an AIP of 222B) and there weren’t a lot of other candidates with similar skills/specialty and a high rating on the market, we would “MPC” them.

MPC stands for “Most Place-able Candidate.” We turned the term into a verb, when we would tell everyone we know in a given field about the profile (no names, of course) of this “rare” commodity. This is an active way to really market your best candidates and differentiate yourself from other recruiters in the eyes of the hiring authorities and the candidates.

MPC-ing is an activity that every 3rd party recruiter knows about, but surprisingly few practice and it’s fruitful in many ways. Obviously, first and foremost, your goal is to find the candidate a position, which, depending on the candidate and how in-demand his or her skill set is, really happens. For example, I worked in a city where manufacturing was king. So, when I would come across an outstanding Cost Accountant with a manufacturing background, I picked up my phone and called all of my closest connections who were CFOs/Controllers/Cost Acct Mgrs in manufacturing and told them all about this candidate. Next, I wrote up a concise summary of the candidates profile and emailed it to everyone else in the industry and sit back and wait. Now, with a cost accountant, I would be fairly likely get at least one response back wanting to set up an interview, and that interview would sometimes lead to an offer or employment for the candidate. However, Cost Accountants were extremely rare and even a truly outstanding candidate wouldn’t necessarily receive an offer via those efforts.

The vast majority of the responses I would receive were along the lines of “This is a great profile, but we are not currently recruiting for a cost accountant.” Other responses that were at least as likely as setting up an interview for the MPC candidate, but were also great news for a recruiter were: “We don’t need a Cost Accountant, but we are looking for a Payroll Manager (or whatever)” -- thus uncovering a possible new job lead for other candidates – or “We’re not recruiting for anything right now, but I’d like to see what other options might be out there for me.” – thus uncovering a possible new candidate and, if that candidate goes elsewhere a new job lead as well.

The bottom line with recruiting is there is a ton of activity involved with uncovering each job and each candidate, let alone putting them together to make a match. So, you use as many tools as you can and you’re constantly looking for both candidates to place and jobs to fill. MPCing is a wonderful tool to really put forth a marketing effort for a great candidate, but you’re also fishing for other jobs and candidates. If a recruiter’s only activity was MPCing candidates and that recruiter was only looking to place that candidate with that effort, said recruiter would go hungry. While it happens, you can’t live off of only MPC placements as a recruiter.

Which brings me to back to the topic of physician recruitment….

The Doctor Job is a web tool for physicians where, for a fee ($1.75 - $3.00 per address), you basically MPC yourself. They work on the premise that “physicians find jobs by being in the right place at the right time.” Essentially, their site assists you put together a Cover Letter/ CV package and send it out to their list (other physicians and hiring authorities) based on the location and type of position you’re looking for. You put out the bait and hope you’re lucky enough to be in that place at that time.

While it’s all speculation on my part, I assume their list is probably pretty good, as they’ve been in business for a few years and for that type of business, the list is the lifeblood. While you’re paying for a little more service than just purchasing a list through The Doctor Job, the price for their service starts at $1750-$3000 per 1000 addresses, which is an outlandish amount to pay for a medical list, especially one that you can only use once. On a side note: there are other lists you can find out there that you can find with a simple Google search that you can purchase yourself and use as much as you like, but the prices vary greatly and so does the accuracy.

The Doctor Job claims to “find more jobs for physicians than any other source in the world,” but looking at the results from their testimonial page, which I assume are among the most positive results they get (otherwise they wouldn’t be sold as testimonials), the results, in terms of responses per out going messages are not any better (some not even as good) as I received as a recruiter when MPCing a candidate, which the hiring authorities knew came with a heavy price tag.

Other claims they make are this:
“Using a recruiter could cost you as much as $20,000 in lower salary and reduced benefits! Even though they dominate job boards, physician recruiters are only useful in a few situations. The fees they charge can be as high as $25,000-$50,000 or more! This means that
(1) 90% of physician employers will never use a recruiter, and
(2) Since the fees are so high, many employers who use physician recruiters pay a below-market salary to physicians (to cover the costs of the recruiter's fees).”

Well, I suppose using a recruiter “could” cost you, but this assumes that you, as a candidate, have no say in the matter. Whether you’re represented by a recruiter or not, if a medical organization wants to hire you and makes an offer, it’s your right, if not duty, to negotiate the best salary you can. If you accept an offer that is less than market value for that position, that is your choice, not the fault of a recruiter or anyone else for that matter. If you stand your ground, you’re going to get the pay and benefits that you should, based on your specialty, location, experience, etc. Further, if you ARE using a recruiter, they can often help in this endeavor. Recruiters, the good ones at least, tend to be skilled negotiators. It’s just part of their world.

As for the 90% of physician employers that will never use a recruiter… I’d like to know where they are getting their numbers. Here at Physician Recruiter publication and TheRecruiter.com, we talk to thousands of medical hiring authorities each month and one of the questions we routinely ask is “Are you using a recruiter to hire for this position?” and our results are not even in the same ballpark. Further, while it was accounting and finance rather than medical, as a recruiter I found that most companies that didn’t fall into the “mom & pop” category would gladly pay my fee to hire the right candidate for an executive level position, because those are key hires. The positions they often won't pay fees for are the more clerical functions. Last I checked, physicians make executive level incomes and are more important to more people than a Controller or Sr Financial Analyst, etc, so I don’t see how there’s any real difference. If the candidate is worth a fee, the hiring authorities will pay it.

One important difference between the MPC process that I described and what The Doctor Job is the all important rating system. While we’d all like to think we’re a “Most Place-able” 111A type candidate, we just can’t be. As a recruiter, if I MPCed 333C candidates all day, I’d place very few and eventually my contacts would stop taking my calls and would send my emails to trash prior to opening them. For this concept to really work a high percentage of the time, you have to be truly outstanding as a candidate, if you’re not, your CV will get tossed into the pile with the other also-rans. Even if you are a good candidate, the premise also relies on follow –up. With The Doctor Job, that all falls on you.

As to their main claim….. If The Doctor Job truly “find more jobs for physicians than any other source in the world,” then it seems it’s likely a function of the number of physicians using The Doctor Job being larger than the number of physicians using any other single possible option out there. And I'd still question that.

I believe in the MPC and I can understand where The Doctor Job is coming from. It's a smart idea and can see some benefit in what they do (it must work fairly well or they wouldn't remain in business), but I’d be pretty wary of putting all of my eggs in the basket of an organization who claims you’ll find your next position if you’re in the right place at the right time. Whether you use The Doctor Job or choose to get a list from elsewhere and you have the time to MPC yourself and follow-up, by all means do it. But if you’re actively looking for a position, I suggest you use other avenues (job boards, recruiters) as well, otherwise, you might be waiting to catch lightening in a bottle while less worthwhile candidates are accepting the offers that you should be getting.

- WJ 8/13/07