The Job Post Is the Least Interesting Thing About the Job

Physicians narrow a job search down to two or three names using documents that were never built to tell one job from another.

A posting is an advertisement that has been through legal review

I spent 20 years writing physician job postings and placing physicians into the jobs they described. A posting starts as marketing language, passes through a compliance read that removes anything the organization could be held to later, and arrives on the page enthusiastic and almost entirely unfalsifiable.

Everything in a posting is technically true and almost none of it is checkable. Nobody set out to produce a document that commits to nothing, but that is what the process turns out every time.

Why it matters: A physician who treats the posting as the job description arrives at the first interview with no questions, and the employer sets the agenda from there.

4 phrases and what each one replaces

Certain phrases turn up in physician postings often enough to be worth reading closely. None of them is a lie, and each one stands where a piece of information the employer already holds would otherwise sit.

• "Competitive compensation." No number exists behind the phrase. It persists because it works, and because physicians are reluctant to raise money first. A posting that will not print a range is asking you to spend several interviews before finding out whether the job is in the right neighborhood, which is why it pays to know where real compensation benchmarks come from.
• "Collegial." In my experience this word turns up most often where there has recently been a problem. Groups that are simply pleasant to work in rarely think to advertise it, so a posting that opens on culture is worth asking about directly.
• "Growing practice." The phrase covers two opposite situations. It can mean the service line is expanding and the organization is investing in it, which is good news. It can also mean the group lost two physicians and the volume stayed behind.
• "Flexible schedule." This is the softest phrase of the four, because flexibility that is not written into the contract is a description of the current medical director's personality, and medical directors change.

Telling an expanding group from a shrinking one takes three questions: how many physicians are in the group now, how many were in it two years ago, and what is happening with the other seats that are currently open. None of the three is answered by a posting.

The omissions carry more information than the text

What a posting leaves out is more diagnostic than what it prints, and the largest omission is almost always the reason the seat is open. A role created by growth and a role somebody fled are different jobs, and the advertisement will not tell you which one is on offer. That silence is where the questions they are quietly hoping you are too polite to ask begin.

A posting that describes call in the passive voice, or calls it "shared," is describing a number the employer would rather not print.

A posting that gives the compensation model as "productivity-based" and stops there has left out the model, the threshold, and the conversion factor that does more than anything else to set a physician's income (/career-hub/one-number-decides-your-paycheck-and-most-doctors-can-t-name-it).

Who wrote the posting shows in the posting

Postings written by a physician read differently from postings written by a recruiting department. A physician gets specific about the case mix, the equipment, the referral patterns and what the day actually contains.

When a posting spends four paragraphs on the region's hiking trails and one sentence on the practice, it was written by somebody who has never done the work. That distance matters, because the person walking you through the process is not the person who will live the schedule with you, and the purpose of the first call is to reach the people who actually do the work.

A badly written ad is not a bad job

Physicians who learn to read postings this way often overcorrect and start treating every vague phrase as a warning. Vagueness is the ordinary output of the process, and on its own it says nothing about the work.

A good job with a forgettable advertisement is extremely common, because writing the advertisement is nobody's actual job. It gets drafted between other work, inherited from the last time the seat was open, and pasted into a template built for a different specialty.

Reading a posting this closely produces a list of things to ask, which is the entire point of the exercise. It is not a screening tool.

One physician's four questions

I sat in on a call where a physician told the recruiter, politely, that he had read the posting and had four questions it did not answer: why the seat was open, what the call frequency had actually been over the past 12 months, what the conversion factor was, and how many physicians had left the group in three years.

The recruiter answered three of them. The fourth she had to go and find out, and when the answer came back it ended the conversation, which saved him about six weeks.

He had turned the gaps in the advertisement into an agenda, and the recruiter's answers told him more than the posting ever could.

The bottom line

The posting got him onto the call, which is the most a posting can do.

Everything that determines whether a physician should take a job sits behind the advertisement, with people who will answer a direct question and who have no reason to raise any of it unprompted.

Read the advertisement once for what it contains, then set it aside and write the list of what it did not say. The job description you need comes from the people already doing the work.

Questions physicians ask about job postings

Why don't physician job postings list a salary range?

Naming a number costs the employer flexibility, and the posting exists to keep every option open. The omission also works, because enough physicians apply without a range that there is no pressure to publish one. Treat its absence as ordinary rather than as a warning, and ask for the range on the first call instead of the fourth.

Is a vague job posting a red flag?

Usually not. Vagueness is the default output of a document written quickly and reviewed by legal, and some of the best jobs I ever filled had forgettable advertisements. It becomes a signal only when the same vagueness survives a direct question, which is a much more meaningful thing to notice.

What should I ask when a posting says "productivity-based"?

Ask which model, what the conversion factor is, and where the threshold sits before productivity pay begins. Then ask what the physicians currently in that seat produced over the past year, because the model only pays out on the volume the seat actually sees. Those four answers say more about your income than any figure printed in the advertisement.

Should I still apply if the posting doesn't say why the seat is open?

Yes, because almost none of them do. Make it the first question on the first call, and pay attention to whether the answer is specific or general. A concrete account of a retirement or an expansion means one kind of job, and a careful non-answer means the work of finding out has only started.

Who actually writes these postings?

Most often someone in recruiting or HR, sometimes with a physician's input and sometimes not, and the text usually gets reused from the last time the seat was open. That is why the tone so rarely matches the work. A posting that reads as though the writer has stood in that department is a good sign, and asking who wrote it is a reasonable question on the first call.