History of PhysEmp, Part I
PhysEmp, one of the first physician job boards, is still thriving 30 years later
Physicians Employment (PhysEmp) was founded in 1994 by Bob Truog, who continues to helm the company today.
Since the 1990s, medical recruiting and hiring practices have evolved in concert with the advanced search technology that powers the industry. In this article we’ll explore what has happened, what it means, and the role played by PhysEmp.
Physicians Employment started as a print quarterly publication in 1990, offering job listings for physicians.
In early 1994, job postings began to move online. A hospital administrator or a recruiter looking to advertise positions for physicians really had only one destination, and that was Yahoo, the first and only search engine at the time. No specialized job boards existed yet. To help their advertising efforts, many recruiters and hospitals opted to have their website registered on the Yahoo Directory.
PhysEmp.com is born
The PhysEmp.com website was launched in November 1994. Within a week, the response was so huge that founder Truog knew that print classified ads would eventually be phased out, replaced by online systems.
In those early days, with PhysEmp.com listed on Yahoo, a search for “physician jobs” returned hundreds of pages of results. To the job searcher, it could be overwhelming. Doctors looking for open positions in a particular specialty had to spend long hours combing through all those pages.
Making things more difficult, most ads didn’t include the locations of the practice or hospital.
Soon, other search sites came online, including Alta Vista and Lycos, offering similar kinds of unwieldy experiences.
By the late-‘90s, when Google arrived on the scene, it offered search results that were superior to all other search engines. Job seekers could now home in on a specific specialty and see exactly where the job was. Overnight, Google transformed search by displaying, for example, 10 different relevant sites rather than, say, 10 pages as others’ did. These other search engines could not compete.
The dominance of keywords
Posters of jobs quickly came to understand that keywords were important to Google’s search algorithms. Since Google was precise in serving content relative to keyword choices, many websites responded by “stuffing” their web pages with keywords in order to rank higher and draw more traffic.
Businesses now filled their homepages with these terms, including “meta” keywords that could be embedded in the code and which did not display.
The more keywords one could jam into a page, the higher up in the organic results the page would appear. Even with Google’s plain, unadorned interface, job seekers began to flock to the site.
Eventually, Google’s policy changed to prohibit keyword stuffing. The company’s algorithms evolved—and more job sites began to appear as well.
By the late ‘90s, a search for “physician jobs” brought up many independent job boards, including PhysEmp.com. As the market heated up, job boards began to attract venture capital funding backing new companies in Silicon Valley, such as HospitalHub.com, DrKoop.com, and Auntminnie.com to name just a few.
However, many went out of business around 2001 when the dot-com bubble burst.
‘Observing’ the competition
In the fall of 2001, PhysEmp’s Truog sought to see what competing start-ups were doing. He attended a trade convention in San Diego. At the time, funding was pouring into the online healthcare marketplace.
“I was concerned about the competition,” Truog said. “And then I met them.”
He stepped into an impressive-looking trade show booth featuring stacks of glossy brochures announcing the company as the #1 destination for physicians seeking jobs online. Truog leaned over and asked a staffer how that could be possible given that their website was not even live yet.
“The guy looked at the brochure I was holding, and said, ‘Yeah the marketing people got a little ahead of us there’.” This company, like many that were well funded but lacked a plan for revenue generation, eventually went out of business.
Other sites had similar stories of pumping resources into marketing but having little or no battle plan for revenue production. “They didn’t understand the field.” Truog said. “We’d been in business more than 10 years by then. We understood it.”
PhysEmp soon began to implement new features that streamlined the process for both its clients and for physicians seeking jobs.
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