Read time: 2.5 minutes
Everyday on LinkedIn, I’ll receive at least 1 (if not 6) cold-messages from recruiters.
“Are you available for a great job in a vague location? Let’s chat if you’re interested”
“How’s your schedule for 2025 looking?”
“What are you looking for in a new role?”
“I’m working with *insert random rural hospital that always is desperate for help that you and everyone you know constantly avoids for various clear reasons*…”
If it isn’t clear from receiving a few hundred such direct messages on LinkedIn, text, and emails….doctors get turned off.
Especially clinicians who are new to the locum contract world or, even worse, are only trying to dip their proverbial toe in and so they’ve put their email out there only to be overwhelmed!
At first all of my attempts to find work came from outbound searches: gaswork.com or filling forms on every recruiter’s website I could get my hands on.
I was desperate and I needed as much contact as possible to find something that might stick.
But once you have your grounding and aren’t in a rush, you wish you could just filter through the noise.
Most of my assignments now come from personal inbound requests.
The 3 most recent positions that I’ve taken have all been by direct referral from either a recruiter I knew already or a former colleague who thought I would be perfect for the role at their institution (or former institution).
I have the luxury at this point of having worked this way for long enough to not have any rush to lock something down – I can afford to take my time; to be picky.
The last position before those 3 was a random cold-call from a recruiter that I had spoken to once (on her first-time cold-calling me) before, this time she called to offer an opportunity at a “random rural hospital that always is desperate…” see above.
The only reason it ended up in a job is because before I got off the phone I told her I really prefered specialty work in my field of Cardiac Anesthesia.
And of course, she has a lucrative position for just that specialty, but for some reason she wasn’t marketing it… It has turned out to be a good contract with great colleagues.
I’ve written before about the ridiculous used car salesman styles of many recruiters (I still have never pursued any position from a male recruiter for whatever reason).
If you’re looking for a better method than the shotgun approach, an approach that cuts out the noise – especially if you are in a position to take your time to find something optimal – I don’t know what that approach is.
Why can’t recruiters just cut out the bologna and be transparent?
Well sometimes they can and many times they can’t because of obligations to their client hospitals.
My Approach is All I Know
My approach used the shotgun approach combined with personal referrals from former colleagues.
I still get dozens of emails each week, and dozens of texts, and random phone calls.
At this point, I probably entertain 5% of all recruiter contacts and of those I’ll probably seriously pursue less than 5%.
It’s not a perfect science, but you have to create enough contact opportunities.
If you don’t, then you are just relying on blind hope that the next thing you find will be perfect.
Hope is not a good plan.
Put up with the frustrations inherent in this industry in order to get what you need out of it.
It will be worth it.
But it is definitely not the easy way to make a career out of anesthesia (or emergency medicine, or hospital medicine, etc.).
Whenever you’re ready, here are 2 ways I can help:
1) Let’s talk through what choosing your own path through medicine looks like. Over the phone, confidential, free:
https://calendly.com/tonyvullo/20min
2) Free Guides and Resources to Help You Reclaim Your Time and Autonomy:
