Best Practice: How to Write a Great Ad for a Physician Job Board
Writing an effective ad is an essential skill for recruiters and hospital administrators looking to attract top physician-candidates. There are lots of physician job boards out there of varying levels of quality, and ads are everywhere. How can you write the best possible physician job ad? And, what kind of writing can make your ad unattractive to candidates?
Remember: any confusion experienced by a busy doctor reading an ad could earn you a click to another website.
Your goal is to provide not only as much information as possible, but the right information—in other words, exactly what the candidate wants to see, written not too long or too short.
What to include in a physician job description?
Doctors perusing ads want to see:
- Salary
- Benefits
- Location
- Certifications required (e.g., Board-certified, eligible, etc.)
- Lifestyle info including about parks, schools, metro areas, transportation, airports, bus stations, etc.
- Technology used on the job
- Covid requirements
The best ads use bulleted lists and run around 200-450 words.
Two examples of great ads
Ad Example 1 reads short and to the point. Note the details offered in the first set of bulleted points all relate specifically to the job itself. The second set of bullets relays lifestyle factors such as community, schools, cost of living, and other info important to a doc and his/her family.
Ad Example 2 is a slightly longer, with more details. The first set of bullets, titled “Clinical Role,” hones in on the position. The second and third sets of bullets are helpful touches, relating to the organization and its values.
Optional info you can include in your ad that can be helpful but isn’t required:
- Specific hours the physician will be required to work, and info on shifts and on-call work
- Relocation assistance and sign-on bonus
- More detail on quality of life issues, with specifics such as distance from attractions and info on schools
- Cost of living
- Telework options
- Caseload information
- Comments about staff
- Visa requirements, if applicable
It’s a nice touch to use upbeat language in the lifestyle points:
- Easy travel options from any major airport in NY, NJ, or MA – enjoy shows, entertainment, sporting events, restaurants, etc., right at your fingertips
Leave out your contact info or external links, so as to get accurate metrics
Note that PhysEmp prohibits the use of external links to outside sites in ads. That’s so that your ad will yield accurate metrics.
For instance, if you include a link to an outside site (such as your own) and a physician applies there and is hired, that physician essentially disappears from the PhysEmp system, which can throw off our metrics—metrics we’ve worked hard to provide so as to help you understand ad performance. It’s important that you allow the process to continue through to completion within the PhysEmp system to get the full benefit of your reporting.
When it comes to adding your own contact information in an ad, we allow it but strongly discourage it. As mentioned above, when a physician contacts you outside of our system, it becomes impossible for us to track the conversion. Please use the contact information provided instead of the application prompts that are currently in place.
It’s not uncommon for busy physicians on the hunt for a job to not even recall where they saw the job in the first place! On PhysEmp.com? A job aggregator site such as ZipRecruiter? By using the PhysEmp system throughout the entire process we then can continue to produce accurate reporting for you.
How do clients send us open positions to post as ads?
If you’re a member of a large company – say, a hospital or a recruitment firm – you’ll probably be sending us an XML feed or a spreadsheet containing your open positions. After we receive it, a customer service rep will review it and upload it to our database, making sure all fields are populated and correct.
A lone recruiter or a smaller firm or hospital often will either post jobs themselves manually or send them to our customer service rep who will post them for the client.
Ad-writing no-no’s
You can lower your chances of advertising success by doing the following. Believe it or not, the reader of an ad may equate the quality of the writing with the quality of the institution. Stranger things have happened. So, it behooves you to write a sharp, smart ad.
Avoid the following in your ad:
- Misspelled words or poor grammar – it’s not the end of the world, since mostly you’re writing bullet points, but it can reflect badly on you and the institution
- Excessive wordiness – can slow down the reading
- Lots of capitalizations – can come off as “shouting”
- Excessive use of bold-face type – works well to break up tracts of text, but not so much if overused.
- Omitting mention of the city – will lower your chances of success
When does the ad go live?
After you enter or send us all the info about the position(s), you’ll then preview and save it. Ads automatically go live at that point.
Once the ad is live, it will be available for viewing by job seekers as well as the person who posted the job, if they want to check and see what it looks like on the live site.
Ready to start connecting with physicians? Contact PhysEmp today for a free demo.
