Weekly Whine: Recruiters

For those of you who are still early in your training, I will give you this warning: Do not encourage the physician recruiters. If you sign yourself up for one physician recruiting site, it's sort of like signing up for one porn site (I assume, *cough cough*). Sign up for one site and you will immediately find yourself immediately innundated with emails, except they'll send you jobs instead of porn. Presumably.

You can't stop it. Telling them that you already have a permanent position doesn't even remotely work. You can never escape!

It might not have been so bad when I was still job hunting if they sent any even remotely viable jobs in my direction. Even though I told them that I don't do fluoroscopic pain injections, I get tons of ads for jobs that call for interventional training and a fellowship in Pain Management. I tell them that I want to restrict myself to the midwest and the next day they call with a great opportunity in Maine. And one site has chosen to only send me primary care jobs (I am not an internist).

In nearly three years of dealing with physician recruiters, they have not presented me with even one job opportunity I might have considered.

Oh, and they call. During the day, when I'm with patients. And I see the number and feel obligated to take it because it's a number I don't recognize and WHAT IF THERE'S BEEN A HORRIBLE ACCIDENT??? Then I hear them say, "Is this Dr. Fizzy?" And I know. It's them.

It's too late for me, I suppose. But for those of you who have not had the recruiters descend on you, I have some important words of wisdom: Do not give them your real email address! Create an email address just for job hunting so you can abandon it when you've found a job. And don't bother to sign up for any recruiting sites. They'll find you anyway during your last year of residency (god knows how), but signing up for a site is like putting a drop of blood into a pool of sharks with laser beams attached to their frickin heads.