Working to your advantage with a search firm - Career RX
Categories: Medical CareerKEY CONCEPTS
* Search Firm Consultants
* Evaluating Search Firms
* Career Counseling
* Career Stewardship
* Making Connections
* Developing Relationships with Search Firms
Executive search consultants have become an inevitable aspect of life for health care executives and those who aspire to their ranks–and that includes physician executives. And they can work to your advantage–here’s how.
When the health care industry began to mature in the late 1960s, the “old boy” network was no longer enough to find and hire excellent executives who were needed for the new, more complex, era. Board members with business backgrounds had experience with search firms in their own industries. They understood the value of having the broadest possible (objectively chosen) candidate slates and began engaging search consultants to identify the best senior health care executives. The successes of those earliest searches–those great executive “stars” who took on some of the most visible arid complicated jobs in the country-ensured that other organizations would follow suit and use search firms as well. A new service industry for health care arrived on the scene.
At first, these firms were employed to assist boards with CEO searches. Less-senior roles were still filled the old-fashioned way, by health care executives contacting their colleagues for leads. Over time, as the stakes increased, the professional methods of search firms became the norm for populating health care’s executive suite.
Enter (in the early ’80s) physician executives-the new breed” as they were once described–the direct descendants of the medical director/chief of staff positions, but with greater executive responsibility and less direct clinical involvement, If it’s difficult to find talented executives for any industry, its even tougher to identify physicians who can manage people and budgets within an administrative structure. Once the need was established, health care institutions increasingly came to rely on executive search firms as a source of qualified physician executive candidates.