In this podcast episode, John discusses how to save your career if you wish to continue working in clinical medicine.

John shares five proven strategies for physicians to revitalize their medical careers while maintaining patient care, drawing from his experience as a Chief Medical Officer to help doctors reimagine their practice rather than abandon clinical work.

Drawing on real-world success stories, he offers practical solutions for physicians who enjoy patient care but struggle with administrative burdens and work-life balance.

Our Sponsor

We're proud to have the University of Tennessee Physician Executive MBA Program, offered by the Haslam College of Business, as the sponsor of this podcast.

The UT PEMBA is the longest-running, and most highly respected physician-only MBA in the country. It has over 700 graduates. And, the program only takes one year to complete. 

By joining the UT Physician Executive MBA, you will develop the business and management skills you need to find a career you love. To learn more, contact Dr. Kate Atchley’s office at (865) 974-6526 or go to nonclinicalphysicians.com/physicianmba.

For Podcast Listeners

• John hosts a short Weekly Q&A Session on any topic related to physician careers and leadership. Each discussion is posted for you to review and apply. Sometimes all it takes is one insight to take you to the next level of your career. Check out the Weekly Q&A and join us for only $5.00 a month.
• If you want access to dozens of lessons dedicated to nonclinical and unconventional clinical careers, you should join the Nonclinical Career Academy MemberClub. For a small monthly fee, you can access the Weekly Q&A Sessions AND as many lessons and courses as you wish. Click the link to check it out, and use the Coupon Code “FIRSTMONTHFIVE” to get your first month for only $5.00.
• The 2024 Nonclinical Summit is over. But you can access all the fantastic lectures from our nationally recognized speakers, including Dr. Dike Drummond, Dr. Nneka Unachukwu, Dr. Gretchen Green, and Dr. Mike Woo-Ming. Go to Nonclinical Summit and enter Coupon Code “30-OFF” for a $30 discount.

Taking Control of Your Practice to Save Your Career

Contract renegotiation offers a powerful tool for employed physicians to improve their work conditions. Key areas for negotiation include vacation coverage, and ensuring adequate support during colleagues' time off through locum tenens or community coverage. Working hours should account for documentation time, and supervisory responsibilities for NPs and PAs need clear boundaries.

When approaching renegotiation, physicians should review their contracts months in advance, engage legal counsel, and strategically time their negotiations, especially as healthcare systems face increasing challenges in physician retention.

Breaking Free from Traditional Constraints

You can explore various practice models to eliminate common stressors while maintaining clinical work. Options include direct primary care (DPC), cash-only practices, concierge medicine, or specialized focus areas. These models often eliminate insurance billing headaches and allow for better work-life balance.

Alternatively, you can consider micro-incorporation, forming an LLC to work as an independent contractor with hospitals, gaining tax advantages and greater flexibility while maintaining the appearance of traditional employment.

Summary

Each approach requires careful consideration and planning. However, there are solutions to the challenges in modern medical practice that preserve the physician-patient relationship.

Links for today's episode:

• Why an Infusion Lounge May Be the Best New Thing
• How to Save Healthcare, Satisfy Patients, and Fix Physician Burnout – 256
• Negotiate a Great Contract, Avoid Burnout, and Be Happy
• Now Every Doctor Can Win As a Micro-Corporation
• More On The Benefits of a Professional Corporation
• Avoid These Mistakes When Seeking a New Practice
• Make Your Clinical Practice Great or Move On
• Purchase Your All Action Pass Videos and Bonuses from the 2024 Summit (Use Coupon Code 30-OFF)
• The Nonclinical Career Academy

Podcast Editing & Production Services are provided by Oscar Hamilton

If you liked today’s episode, please tell your friends about it and SHARE it on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Right click here and “Save As” to download this podcast episode to your computer.

Today's PNC Podcast Transcript

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Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 384

First Consider 5 Proven Strategies To Save Your Career

- Recent Trends Offer Options for Physicians - 384

John: Okay, today I want to describe several ways that you can fight to save your clinical career. Normally, I talk about nonclinical and unconventional careers to consider when you're fed up or burned out from your practice, but I've learned that sometimes it's not practice per se, but the long hours, dwindling salaries, and unsympathetic bosses that lead physicians to leave practice. You may still enjoy seeing patients and working in a clinical practice if you could get rid of all the other nonsense.

I'm coming to believe that reimagining your practice might be a valid, maybe even a better way to save your medical career and get back on track than just abandoning it and doing something nonclinical, albeit still in the field of medicine or in the field of healthcare.

I've had several guests over the last year or two who have confirmed that belief, and I want to spend a few minutes today to provide a little bit of food for thought on a short list of strategies to get you back on track in your career, bring some happiness and satisfaction without leaving medicine. So let's get to that discussion.

All right, we're talking about considering five proven strategies, and these strategies are designed to save your career. Let me work from this premise that you're in this position and you actually still like seeing patients for the most part. You enjoy practicing medicine, and that's not the problem, but it's all the other stuff that gets in the way.

Things are happening, most of the time it's because you're employed, you feel you don't have a lot of control, and you know what's going on is not really aligned with your lifestyle desires or your values, that kind of thing. And you'd really like to be able to spend time with your patients, make a decent living, and maybe even not be sued and other factors that I'm going to talk about here in the next few minutes.

But while you're thinking about these strategies, remember several things, that most of these will require hiring an attorney, most of them or some of them will require moving at least to a new practice. You might not have to move from your city if you're in a big city where you can actually still commute, but some of these things I'm going to mention do require you leaving your current practice. And sometimes it might not only involve moving to a new practice, but it might involve starting a new practice. So those are big things if you have to sell a house and so forth, they can be a barrier.

But these are all situations where you can continue to practice. And in many of these situations, your practice is extremely rewarding. So I have five strategies for you to consider today, and I'll go through all five right now, and then we'll go through them one by one.

The simple one is to aggressively renegotiate your contract. The second is to hire an agent. Now that might seem kind of unusual. We don't think of using agents for physicians to negotiate their contract. This one usually applies for your first job, but it can apply to your second or third as well. If you can somehow eliminate the billing from insurance companies, that can sometimes eliminate a big chunk of problems in a practice.

Let's say you're in a private practice now, either alone or with others. If you can figure out a way to avoid the need to do billing, hiring staff, tracking it down, working with the big insurers, which is extremely frustrating, that might solve the problem. Possibly you can just narrow your focus, narrow your practice.

I'll give you some of my ideas on that. And then the other is maybe switching from an employee to an independent contractor, even in a similar situation, or what some people call micro-incorporation, that might solve the problem and bring you closer to the practice of your dreams.

Well then, let's talk about aggressively renegotiating a contract. Now this is for those who are already employed. And I have a fair amount of experience with this because I was a CMO for my hospital and I either negotiated or renegotiated over a hundred contracts. I even oversaw the hiring and then also the recruiting of new physicians from their own practice. In other words, we would buy their practice and we would add them to our group.

But if you're already employed, you have a contract, there are usually certain factors that cause the burnout, that cause the dissatisfaction. One could be the vacation coverage. And it's not that you don't have enough vacation. You may have two, three, four, even up to six weeks or so. The problem is that sometimes you don't take your vacation because you're so busy and you feel like your patients will be let down.

Sometimes you don't take vacation because you don't have enough coverage. And related to that is you don't take vacation because you realize the more vacation that you take, the more that the other physicians who cover you are going to take. And when they're gone, your own time is extremely stressful because you're covering for all their patients while they're gone.

So if you're in a group with six, seven, eight specialists in a certain field, it's not always a big problem to have only one person gone at a time. But if you have three and one leaves for two weeks, then that means the other two are on call every other night or every other day for those two weeks. And so, it's kind of a misnomer, and I realized this even when I was negotiating these contracts, but sometimes we just had these difficulties with the small groups of specialists that it's really not every third or every fourth call rotation.

Because let's say that you have four people working in that. Well, all four of those physicians could conceivably take off three weeks each year, which means during let's say the nine weeks when other people are taking call, you're no longer on every fourth night. Now you're on every third. So your contract is essentially in violation. What they're doing is in violation of your agreement. Really what you should be doing is plan those out well in advance and get locum tenants to come in and fill.

And it's even worse if there's only three of you or two of you, because then when one person's gone, if there are two, then it's extremely stressful. And yet they say, well, we'll work around it, but no, that can be devastating. So vacation coverage is a big deal. And that's something that should be really clarified that if you're really on every fourth, then that means when people are taking off, you should get locums in there to cover or pay somebody in the community to cover.

The hours and salary of course are big deals too, but it's mainly the hours that you're expected to work. And I think we need to start pushing back on the employer and say, okay, I'm including the hours of my documentation. So you shouldn't be seeing patients for eight, nine hours a day. And that's quote your normal office hours when you're going to be spending an hour or two at night doing your charts, there needs to be time taken during the day while you're seeing patients to do your charts. And if that doesn't work out, then you need to come up with another plan.

And the other one that came up a lot when I was doing this was working with physicians and getting enough supervisory time for the NPs and PAs that we had, because we were hiring a lot of them. And it really got to the point where we were struggling to get them coverage and sponsoring or collaborating physicians. And so they could be the designated coverage or sponsor for, let's say some PAs, it could be 5, 10, 12, 14 PAs that could be calling at any time that they're seeing patients. And this is like a minor thing in a contract theoretically, but it's really a big deal.

And so, what you need to do is look at all those things in your workplace that are making you unhappy and take the opportunity to plan for it and aggressively renegotiate your contract so that it actually provides you what you need safely and at a low risk of being sued. Some of these things lead to fatigue and leads to mistakes and all that kind of thing. So that's one option.

Now, this has always been out there, obviously. I think as hospitals and systems are having more difficulty keeping physicians, you can get a little more leverage now that maybe you had five or 10 years ago. So that's the first thing. You can definitely start by renegotiating aggressively. Obviously, you're going to need to have a good attorney and you're going to want to strategize with the months and months before it's time to renegotiate. And you're going to look at your contract and make sure that you give them enough notice that they don't just say, oh, it just rolled over for another three years because you didn't dispute it. That's enough of that one.

The next one is hiring an agent. And this is mainly for your first job and then subsequent jobs. But I interviewed a guest by the name of Ethan Encana. He was trained as an attorney and that was in February of 24. And he has a full time company job and associates who are hired by physicians as an agent to do the negotiation upfront for their jobs. And they're really serving more like they would for an athlete, a professional athlete. They're going to look after you. They're going to approach the organizations that have these jobs posted. And they're going to negotiate even before they get to the negotiation of the actual contract, the arrangement. And the arrangement is that they are going to pay the fee for this agent. And this agent is going to keep all of your best interests in mind and negotiate very aggressively to get you a contract that has all the things in it that you want and need.

And it's again, usually those same issues that include vacation, the hours and salary, the pay for supervising other medical providers, the restrictive covenant. It's tough to get rid of that restrictive covenant, but there's more and more examples where they are getting rid of that. So if for some reason you would want to go private at some point, then you can do that.

But you can actually hire an agent. And again, I had never even heard of this until earlier this year in 2024. And so, I'll put links in the show notes to any of these things that I mentioned in terms of previous guests and resources to follow up on these options.

Hiring an agent is an option. Maybe they can get you a better deal that is to your satisfaction and has a great life work-life balance and so forth. And particularly if you're willing to look not maybe rurally for sure, because they're really having trouble, but even in the suburbs and stay away from the big cities, you're going to find a lot more opportunities because they are struggling to find physicians, but you're going to have to keep them honest in terms of what their contract requires them to do.

The next one, number three is eliminate billing. Particularly if you're already in your own practice. It seems like it's that whole issue of billing and hiring more staff to do the billing and then have to go after payments that are declined, costs a lot of money, you spend a lot of time, you might have to be doing a lot of paperwork and signing off on paperwork to challenge these billing decisions. Really, there are different ways of doing that. But we know, of course, that DPC, direct primary care is a great one.

I've had, I think, two or three guests on. And let's see there. Also, I talked to someone who is doing an infusion lounge, which is cash only. Direct primary care most of the time is cash only based on a membership fee. Concierge is very similar, kind of high end, more expensive.

A lot of the DPCs, the monthly cost is reasonable and patients really are not opposed to paying that because they have such high deductibles and copays that they do better doing DPC. A med spa is another example. Or you could really narrowly focus your practice and do cash only. You could do functional medicine, I think even lifestyle medicine are ways that you can eliminate third party billing. It's not that the patient can't access their billing, they can do that. You just have to give them records that they can then submit their own reimbursement. Of course, a lot of people have health savings account and similar accounts.

So, if you're in your own practice and that's one of the things that's really making your life miserable, then you want to move to a model that doesn't require you to do a lot of billing. Well, at least not billing of the insurance companies because that's where you really get killed. Normally, if you're doing DPC or even free for service, you're going to get paid by your patients because they'll be afraid that they can't keep you as a primary care doctor. Now, if you're doing urgent care, you could do cash only urgent care. Of course, you do need to be paid at time of service for that.

So, let's move along here. Another thing you can do is narrow your focus. We'll look at this and start in a pretty general practice and that's what we get overwhelmed with. Sometimes, if you can focus on just one sub area or two sub areas of a practice, then you have the ability to systematize things. You can master the billing. So, even if you're doing billing, usually if you're only using, let's say, a handful of codes, you know how to document and how to get paid for that.

I'll give you an example. I have a friend, he's sort of pre-retirement. He's a pediatrician. Obviously, he did a lot of different things, was working in the hospital for a long time, eventually stopped doing hospital work once we got some pediatric hospitalists in town. And then he decided that he wanted to simplify his life a bit and so he started doing only care for attention deficit disorders.

Now, he's still charging fee for service and he's not using a DPC model per se, but you could. You can do either one. But the patients that he has, they are so happy to have someone who's really focusing on this area that they'll pay the money rather than go to a general pediatrician who's doing so many other things and isn't necessarily able to sit down and spend the time and doesn't have the staff in the office like this friend of mine who since we're all on the same page, we're all working on the same problems with these patients. Everyone's very knowledgeable and they get a lot of personal care and they're happy to pay for it.

And so, you can do things like that. I can imagine a neurologist focusing on Parkinson's disease or something with some other neurodegenerative disease and have just a lot of patients with that particular condition or certain cancers or certain cardiac disease. And so, think about ways you could focus down, simplify your practice. Again, you'd have to be in practice to do this. In some cases, you might be able to do it in a large group, but you may end up on your own or with a small group to be able to do this. But at least you're still practicing and your patients will really appreciate you.

The last one, number five here is what I'm going to call microincorporation. I spoke with Todd Stillman back in October of this year, 24, and he was recommending, and there's a reason why this makes so much sense too, besides the fact that it's just another option to get more independence. But you're thinking what I just described in terms DPCs and concierge and med spas and narrowly focused practices, you have to build a practice. It's expensive. You have to market it. You have to have space. You have to pay rent. You have to hire staff. You have to have someone to help you with the billing if you're doing the billing. But you can avoid all of that. And to get a lot of the benefits of being in your own practice by forming an LLC, but then using that LLC to become a pseudo-employee of a hospital system or a large group.

And basically you're a 1099, you're an independent contractor, and you negotiate a contract with the hospital. And the hospital contract is not an employee contract. And so they are alleviated of some responsibilities. They don't have to treat you as an employee. They don't have to give you any benefits. So you have to make sure on the other side of the equation that you make up for that.

But the thing is when you incorporate as an LLC or whatever other PLLC, each state's a little different. You work as an independent contractor, but you look as though you're employed by the hospital and you're not opening. As a matter of fact, you're working in one of their clinics and one of their offices. When I was talking to Todd Stillman, he was funny because he actually had owned an office. Now he was leasing that office to the hospital, which was then allowing him to work in that space. And so he was actually making money by leasing the space to the hospital and other physicians have done this.

And then granted, you've got to cover some things like your own health insurance, but you can find good policies and you have more options as an LLC or PLC to actually diversify your income. You can, through that LLC, do other things. You can have much higher limits on a 401(k) and other tax advantaged investments and so forth. And there's a lot of other tax write-offs that can be used legitimately.

If the first three or four options that I talked about involve starting your own practice, it seems too onerous and you don't want to borrow $100,000 or $500,000 to do that, then this micro-incorporation is another way to really achieve the type of practice that you want to achieve, but mostly onus of the investment on the hospital and still kind of maintaining that arm's length relationship, which enables you to do these other things that make up for it, which includes investing in other ventures and maybe even have other side jobs.

And by the way, nobody else needs to know that this is how it is. You can be doing this and to everyone else in the hospital, in the community, it will look as though you're an employee of the hospital, but you've created your own mini-corporation to get the advantages of the flexibility and so forth that you desire. And yet everyone else and you're still participate with committees at the hospital and stuff to meet all the requirements as a physician, but it does add a lot of flexibility. And I think there's two episodes. I'll put links to everything here in the show notes.

There are five ideas for trying to improve your lifestyle, improve your satisfaction without leaving clinical medicine. Some of the prep will involve really start by reviewing your contract right now, even if it's not due for a year, look in there, see what you're restricted. What can you do? What can't you do? How much notice is required? Early on in the process, as you're reaching that deadline, you need to let them know early and say, look, I'm not leaving. I have no plans to leave this organization, but I want you to know that I have some things I'm not happy with and I'm going to be renegotiating this contract. So if that requires me to give you six months notice that I'm leaving, then I'm going to then you give that notice in writing.

But even in that letter, you can say, I'm planning to stay, but I'm giving you notice as required by my contract that I might not stay if some of the concerns I have about my contract are not addressed. And it doesn't have to be anything onerous, doesn't have to be very confrontational. You go in professionally, you talk with your attorney and you go in and say, here's what I want.

From a negotiation standpoint, I would always ask for the moon. And if you have three or four issues, you start with putting it out there and say, I don't want a restrictive covenant. And then you can come back and negotiate maybe something that's much less restrictive than it was in the past. I don't want to work in this office, or I don't want to supervise 10 NPs and PAs. It's too much work unless I get a lot more compensation and cut back my hours in other areas. These are things you can do. You definitely want to talk to either an agent, as I said, or an attorney, and then discuss your options and negotiation strategy before starting that process.

That's basically it for me today. You know, if you find yourself on the way to burnout, consider taking some of these steps now and go to the show notes for links to the interviews mentioned so that you can learn more about each strategy. And to find those, you can go to nonclinicalphysicians.com/save-your-career.

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Many of the links that I refer you to and in the show notes are affiliate links. That means that I receive a payment from the seller if you purchase the affiliate item using my link. Doing so has no effect on the price you are charged. I only promote products and services that I believe are of high quality and will be useful to you, and that I have personally used or am very familiar with.

The opinions expressed here are mine and my guest’s. While the information provided on the podcast is true and accurate to the best of my knowledge, there is no express or implied guarantee that using the methods discussed here will lead to success in your career, life, or business.

The information presented on this blog and related podcast is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only. I do not provide medical, legal, tax, or emotional advice. If you take action on the information provided on the blog or podcast, it is at your own risk. Always consult an attorney, accountant, career counselor, or other professional before making any major decisions about your career. 

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The post First Consider 5 Proven Strategies To Save Your Career appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

In this podcast episode, John interviews pediatrician Dr. Zhen Chan whose startup offers a new way to find a job by eliminating third-party recruiters and putting physicians at the center of recruitment.

Through his platform Grapevyne, doctors can earn substantial referral bonuses while helping colleagues find positions with unprecedented transparency and detail. With his unique combination of medical training and business school education, Dr. Chan is reshaping how physicians connect with career opportunities.

Our Sponsor

We're proud to have the University of Tennessee Physician Executive MBA Program, offered by the Haslam College of Business, as the sponsor of this podcast.

The UT PEMBA is the longest-running, and most highly respected physician-only MBA in the country. It has over 700 graduates. And, the program only takes one year to complete. 

By joining the UT Physician Executive MBA, you will develop the business and management skills you need to find a career you love. To learn more, contact Dr. Kate Atchley’s office at (865) 974-6526 or go to nonclinicalphysicians.com/physicianmba.

For Podcast Listeners

• John hosts a short Weekly Q&A Session on any topic related to physician careers and leadership. Each discussion is posted for you to review and apply. Sometimes all it takes is one insight to take you to the next level of your career. Check out the Weekly Q&A and join us for only $5.00 a month.
• If you want access to dozens of lessons dedicated to nonclinical and unconventional clinical careers, you should join the Nonclinical Career Academy MemberClub. For a small monthly fee, you can access the Weekly Q&A Sessions AND as many lessons and courses as you wish. Click the link to check it out, and use the Coupon Code “FIRSTMONTHFIVE” to get your first month for only $5.00.
• The 2024 Nonclinical Summit is over. But you can access all the fantastic lectures from our nationally recognized speakers, including Dr. Dike Drummond, Dr. Nneka Unachukwu, Dr. Gretchen Green, and Dr. Mike Woo-Ming. Go to Nonclinical Summit and enter Coupon Code “30-OFF” for a $30 discount.

Reimagining Medical Recruitment Through Physician Networks

Dr. Zhen Chan noticed something broken in physician recruitment – endless vague job listings, intrusive third-party recruiters, and a lack of transparency. His solution? Grapevyne is a physician-only platform that puts doctors in control of the hiring process.

The platform incentivizes physicians to refer qualified colleagues while providing detailed job listings that answer doctors' questions about potential positions. In just a few months since launch, the platform has attracted over 315 physician members and eight healthcare organization partnerships, with 40+ new positions currently being onboarded.

Building a New Way to Find a Job While Staying Clinical

Despite the demands of launching a startup, Dr. Chan maintains his clinical practice as a per diem pediatrician while running Grapevyne full-time. He partnered with HealthWorx Studio for initial funding and assembled an expert team spanning technology, recruitment, and healthcare operations.

The platform aims to expand beyond job matching to become a comprehensive career resource for physicians, offering guidance on contract negotiation, healthcare payment systems, and professional development.

Summary

Grapevyne is the next revolution in physician recruitment through a peer-driven platform that eliminates traditional recruiters. The platform offers substantial referral bonuses and detailed job listings. It has already attracted over 315 physician members and eight healthcare clients. Physicians interested in joining can visit grapevyne.health or contact Dr. Chan directly at zhen@grapevyne.health.

Links for today's episode:

• Grapevyne.health
• Dr. Zhen Chan's LinkedIn Page
• Zhen Chan's Email Address: zhen@grapevyne.health
• Healthworx Studio – building the future of healthcare by working with founders driven by purpose, passion, and impact. 
• How to Practice Hospital Medicine and Found a Startup
• Introducing a Fearless Medical Entrepreneur
• How to Nurture a Career in Cutting-Edge Healthcare Technology – 156
• How to Fulfill an Academic Need and Spawn a Business with Dr. Jason Ryan – 081
• Purchase Your All Action Pass Videos and Bonuses from the 2024 Summit (Use Coupon Code 30-OFF)
• The Nonclinical Career Academy

Podcast Editing & Production Services are provided by Oscar Hamilton

If you liked today’s episode, please tell your friends about it and SHARE it on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Right click here and “Save As” to download this podcast episode to your computer.

Today's PNC Podcast Transcript

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Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 383

This Physician Entrepreneur Offers a New Way to Find a Job

- Interview with Dr. Zhen Chan

John: Well, I like talking with physician entrepreneurs, as some of you listeners know, and today is going to be very interesting. He's a relatively young physician pediatrician who's also running a company full-time. So with that, let's just get into our conversation with Dr. Zhen Chan. Hi, Zhen.

Dr. Zhen Chan: Hi, John. How are you doing?

John: Really good. I came across, I don't know how we met, actually; I think we were introduced basically.

Dr. Zhen Chan: Yeah.

John: When I looked at your website and your LinkedIn profile, I mean, it's really interesting. You're involved with this company. But before we get into that, let's have you go ahead, like we do every podcast interview, and just tell us about your medical training, your background experience, and then kind of lead up to what you're doing now.

Dr. Zhen Chan: Sure, that sounds good. So I'm a pediatrician by training. Didn't do any fellowship, but I graduated residency summer of 2023, which I can't believe it's been that long already. Yeah, I did that up in New York Presbyterian with Weill Cornell in Brighton, Manhattan. And then the rest of my education was all back in Miami where I grew up— Miami, Florida. So, I was at the University of Miami for undergrad and medical school, and I took a year off between third and fourth year for business school as well. It was focused on health management and policy, and it really kind of expanded my knowledge of healthcare beyond just the clinical piece. So that was the seed of some of this extracurricular interest, so to speak. And then during residency, I did a lot of quality improvement work, was able to have the opportunity to lead a couple projects as well, which was super fun. And I think because of how fulfilled I was from doing that, and also some of the advocacy work too, I was like, "Oh, maybe I gotta do some more career exploration and like soul searching." I wanted to apply for Peds Hema Fellowship. Second year, I toyed with the idea of doing PICU. And then I was like, wait a minute, I really enjoy these like back end healthcare solutions. I really think that working on them allows you to really scale your impact. And so let me do some exploring. I networked people all over the field— public, private sector, you name it. And worked in venture capital actually for about a year as like a part-time associate. And that started as a fellowship position just to get to learn and get a lay of the land. And then I really, really enjoyed meeting founders. I really enjoyed people working in early stage startups because of how mission-driven they were and really trying to solve problems that are out there. And that's when I said, "Oh, I really want to build something on my own." And here I am.

John: All right. Well then, tell us what is it that you decided to build and what problem were you solving by building that.

Dr. Zhen Chan: Yeah. So the company's called Grapevyne— Grapevine spelled with a "Y". And the name comes from this, kind of comes from the song. I heard it through the Grapevine, or the saying, "I heard it through the grapevine." Because what we're doing is we're driving physician recruitment and the job matching process through physicians. So, no need for third-party recruiters. We're also, because we're physician-founded and we're building a team around understanding what doctors truly value, we're creating job posts that are fundamentally different from the other job boards that you see out there. So no more of these like vague, undescriptive listings that you're looking at this and you're honestly, you don't know salary, you don't know location, you have no idea what this job even entails. And more importantly, you don't know what it's going to be like day to day, which is very important to understand. And so, as someone who went through a job search myself, I know exactly what we need. I want to, if there's certain specialties, I'll go out and interview those specialists to say, "Hey, in your specialty, what are the things that you really want to see on a job post?" And we'll put that all there. So that's one fundamentally different piece. The other piece is that how we drive the process and that is through referrals. So, once an employer contracts with us and puts a post on our job board, we activate the network and we tell members— who are all physicians right now— to say, "Hey, look at these posts." If you're interested yourself, you can apply. But if you know someone who could be interested and you think they're a good match based on this very detailed listing, comprehensive listing, you can refer that over to them and you will actually get a significant cash payout for a successful referral, meaning like right now, the structure is if someone submits an application because of your referral and it's a qualified application, that you can get $25 on most of our posts right now. If they complete the interview process, you'll get another incremental payout. And then if they actually get hired and truly start the position because of your referral, you'll get the most significant payout. Right now on our job board, every post has a payout of $2,000. That could be different in the future, but that's what all the posts have now. So, we're driving the process through physicians. We're a company led by a doctor— not that I can speak for everybody, I do want to say that. Then we're bringing money back into the process too. So ownership, cash, everything— we're putting back into the physician community.

John: Okay. That's pretty unique and interesting. It seems like there's always processes that can be improved— made less costly, less onerous, less time consuming and so forth. So, let me just kind of think about the different stakeholders here.

Dr. Zhen Chan: Yeah.

John: So, I mean, it sounds like a physician can, if they know of a job opening, and let's say their organization, they can make a referral or put a post or something. Or do they come from directly from the hospitals and the medical groups that are looking for physicians?

Dr. Zhen Chan: Yeah, that's an important distinction. So it's not that everyone can just post whatever opening they have. We do contract with the employer. And then we look at the post that they want to give us. And we will work through because they probably already have some standard materials and bulletins that they're sharing with the traditional recruiters out there and the traditional job boards that are out there. But we will take that bulletin, inject kind of our own flavor into that. If it's an ENT job, we'll try to find an ENT member of our community and we'll try to find an ENT maybe in our personal networks and then say, "Hey, if you were to look at a job, what would actually entice you? What do you need to know? What are the questions that you probably would have had to go through a lot of intermediaries to find out before you actually get a comprehensive understanding of the job?" Let's get all those details and let's just smack them onto the job post. And then for the employers, the reason why it's a better format is- we're creating posts that are more engaging. So, doctors can see these and will say, "Wow, I actually really like what's on here. I know everything I need to know. I'm willing- I wanna apply." As opposed to somebody coming in and saying, "Hey, I have this fantastic job that's perfect for you. It's in a great location. Do you wanna hear about it?" And you're like, "I'm not gonna respond to this email. Like I get a million of those. Like what's gonna make this one any different?"

John: Yeah, I can think about some of the complaints I've heard about the usual process. Like... For some it is they find something online— a job— but they really don't know. Like they might even be blinded in the sense that they don't even really know exactly where it is because the host isn't actually revealing that until they get your name and phone number. And then they apply, they send in the resume and they don't hear anything forever. Sometimes, you know, just they don't qualify, but. So yeah, I mean, there's a lot to improve in that process. So, and the revenues for this that really is supported by the companies, the hospitals and the groups that are looking for physicians.

Dr. Zhen Chan: That's correct. That's correct. We are on that kind of contingency fee structure, but we're able to charge a much more affordable flat fee structure. And right now, since we're early, we're not charging any subscription fees, any listing fees— nothing like that. So there's no downside risk to working with us and we're not expecting any exclusivity. We really just want to solve a problem in this space and be able to reduce the administrative expense that goes out into things that frankly, we are seeing as unnecessary.

John: Interesting. I'm just kind of thinking through the process too. Like if I were, let's say working at that organization already, let's say there's 500 physicians there. I mean, would it make sense for the HR department, whoever's putting these out to actually promote let their people know, I suppose. Sometimes I like to do things, you know, like in a vacuum or quietly. But I mean, they could just let all their interns know that they've got an opening for another internist. They're probably doing it because these internists have asked for it. And so, hey, by the way, if you're gonna help us get the word out, feel free. That would, I would assume, would be something that could work.

Dr. Zhen Chan: Yeah, many groups have internal employee referral programs. What I like to say is this is an employee referral program scaled to the entire network of physicians that are out there and anyone can look at jobs and refer each other. It's not going to be siloed to your facility.

John: Okay. Awesome. Well, let me ask how are things going so far. What's the feedback? I think you are relatively new.

Dr. Zhen Chan: We are. We are. So we launched our first job post in end of September, got another— if I remember correctly— seven onboarded at the end of October, and then we had another 16 mid-November and we're currently onboarding another 40 from a larger health system. We're up to eight clients just in these short few months and in terms of member size, that's probably been the most exciting thing to see— how many physicians really enjoy the idea of this platform and want to support its growth. We've gained now over 315 members, just I would say over October, November, and these first couple of weeks of December, we've gained about three-quarters of that. So it's been tremendous growth.

John: Interesting. So those what do you find? Are they all actively looking, or are they thinking, "Wait a second, doesn't cost me to join? I might need something six months down the road. Why not just join now and find out?" And then when they see the right position, they say, "Maybe I should jump on that."

Dr. Zhen Chan: Yeah. combination. So we have a combination of members who came because they were looking for some things right now. And, you know, frankly, we're because of how new we are, we may not have the right opportunity for that specific person actively looking. But most physicians are passive job seekers, meaning and that I think there's a paper that was put out that it's around 80% of physicians are passive job seekers with a survey from it wasn't a paper sorry, a misnomer. It was a survey of about 1,500 hundred doctors and so what passive means is "I'm not actively looking but if something nice rolls my way, maybe I'll pay attention to it" and so, I'm not gonna be on job boards; I'm probably gonna ignore those text and calls from outside recruiters but if someone I know sends me something that's interesting I'll take a look and that's how our process works so we have a lot of those individuals to and my hope is that as we bring on more employers have more jobs going to be more opportunities for everybody to see. And if they want to apply for themselves, they can. If they feel like there's someone else that's in their network, that's a good fit, they can refer that out. And I see it as a potential to make significant cash too, when you're making a lot of referrals. And I don't think doctors are going to be out there spamming and trying to scam each other for a quick buck in this way. You can lose a lot of trust in that process. And that's exactly why there's so much lost trust in traditional recruitment.

John: Yeah, I guess it'll be interesting how things pan out, but I would assume that most physicians have a lot of integrity and they're not going to be even making a referral to something that they think is at an organization they're not really fond of or something like that. So, that's awesome. Well, let's pause on this for a minute. Tell us how to go to Grapevyne and do that, and then I want to come back to something else.

Dr. Zhen Chan: Sure. So you can find us at our website, grapevyne.health. That's Grapevyne spell with a "Y", dot health. Our websites allows you to take a look at what we're all about, and then you sign up for our platform. Really the onboarding process, I would say it takes about maybe three minutes-ish to just give some basic info. We use a cell phone number for the sign-on, so we can have that one-step verification with you. We're really keen on not having anybody that's not a physician, be excluded from the platform. So it's a physician-only platform. We have an NPI right now that you use, which the NPI is out there, but that's how we verify. Once you're on, you'll see a dashboard with featured jobs. There's another page with all of our jobs, and we're working on a couple extra features to make sure that what you see is most relevant to you, and that there's a way for you to search, and filter, and everything like that.

John: Awesome. That's good. No, it sounds— I went on there and I only went so far before I thought, "Well, I'm not really looking for a job," but yeah, it was well-designed. And that brings me back to this other question I wanted to ask you. It has to do with running this business, practicing at the same time, that piece of it. And we also like to hear about the business building itself. And, you know, who did you pick out - how did you get this thing built and all that? So we kind of want to know a little bit about the business and what it takes to run this thing while you're still practicing.

Dr. Zhen Chan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'll talk about the practicing piece. I do still practice part-time. I am on a per diem contract, here in D.C., and this is a really good balance for me, based on my interest. Is it going to be the balance for the rest of my entire career? I don't know. But I do enjoy what I'm doing right now and the full time, running a startup aspect of things. It's- I would say hours-wise, it's as intense as I think I had residency. Like, yeah, it's as many hours as it was in residency. Now, do I get to do my work remotely? Do I have my puppy sleeping next to me and I can have my lunch and everything like that? Of course! I'm not going to compare it to the physical exhaustion I was experiencing in residency, but it's a full-time 24/7 type job. I'm working on the weekends, all that kind of thing. And The business side, building out a team is super important. So one of the first things I personally had to recognize was where are my gaps— where are things that I'm not an expert in? I won't be able to be the best person to do this part. And that was dealing with the lawyers, like the legal side, the day-to-day operations. I've never built a business from the bottom up before as a first-time founder, so I wanted to go out and find someone, and I found an amazing co-founder. His name is Drew Mayer, has been a repeat founder of early-stage companies, has been working in the healthcare startup space for a long time and worked with physicians. His father was a physician. So, when we were talking to him and I was developing that relationship, just felt like we were really aligned on the physicians take back medicine kind of push and that sentiment. And then as we move forward, we brought on an engineer. I can't do product development; I can't code. So went out and looked for someone there, brought on an individual who he worked on Indeed job board. And so, you know, had experience and expertise there. And then finally, you know, as much as we are trying to replace the third party recruiters, I have to be sensible and say, "Well, if there's established recruiters out there who are good and who really do care about physicians. Is there someone out there that can give me that expertise and has been in the industry for a long time?" And we did bring someone on just like that who's been working in health systems, in the exec positions and can really, and just bring her expertise and experience in ways that I personally like. So, finding what I don't have and being able to find the others to come in and help team up kind of building this "Avengers-like group" is the way I see it. And building this business— I have to give credit where credit's due, the concept of Grapevyne came from a venture studio. And so that venture studio is based here in D.C. It's called HealthWorx Studio, spelled with an "X". Yeah, we both have like words that are spelled differently. And so HealthWorx Studio, and they are always incubating and coming up with new ideas. And when they think they have enough research to say there's something here, they go out and look for founders to really come in and build out the concept. Like it's like you start with one puzzle piece and then you want someone to come in and build the whole puzzle. So they come out and look for founders that align with the vision or can give their own vision, build out the business strategy, build out the team, and then take it out of the studio. So that's the model that we're working under right now.

John: So are they the ones that provide the capital to support some of this? Or do you do a separate, you know, fundraising? How does that work?

Dr. Zhen Chan: Yeah, so from the conceptualization up to today, it's all been funded by the studio. And we are going out and looking for outside investors. We really want to find well aligned investors, specifically in the physician community— those that are going to be, I think ideally our end users too, right? Because then they can give us feedback, they can be the users of the product, whether if it's for their own practices to help them hire more. physicians or it's going to be physicians who are like, "wow, this is something I can really use." Those are the types of well-aligned investors that we are looking for, but we're starting those conversations now for angels, VCs, etc.

John: Okay. So with the studio, would it be people have used "incubator" as a term, you know, with other is that a similar type of idea that kind of get ideas, get people together?

Dr. Zhen Chan: Yeah. The way I like to explain it using what I understand is typically in venture capital, and you usually associate venture capital with earlier-stage companies or growth-stage companies, there's traditional venture capital firms, which is all about, you know, we're going to financially analyze you, we're going to do our diligence on your product, make sure that you have the right team, all that, and say, "All right, we're willing to give you capital for whatever returns expectations." That's traditional VC. And then you have the accelerators and incubators out there that outside founders will come up with an idea and then apply in, in exchange for equity. They apply in to obtain the expertise, to obtain the support resources, et cetera. Then you have now what's, there's more and more of them coming out, venture studios, which act like this reverse incubator or this reverse accelerator. They come up with the idea, start funding it. When they feel there's something there, they'll go out and bring in founders to take it out of the studio. That's my understanding. There may be listeners who will say, "I don't know if Zhen's right about that."

John: Well, it seems to be your experience, you know? So things do evolve over time, but it's a good explanation. It helps me understand really what's going on a little bit better.

Dr. Zhen Chan: Yeah.

John: Okay. Well, we're going to get to the end pretty soon here. So I want you to go back and kind of re, just restate, like, what do you think, like the big advantages to Grapevyne over, the current way of trying to find a job.

Dr. Zhen Chan: Yeah. So for us, recognizing that traditional recruitment, it's not efficient, it's not effective, and it's costly. And there's not really great guarantees for finding the right candidate. So our process, because it's referral-based through the physician community itself, and we're crafting job posts fundamentally different than the bulletins and posts that you see out there, we believe we're gonna be better, where our posts are gonna be better in engaging. And your jobs are going to be more visible by a larger swath of physicians that are out there. And on the physician side, the source of truth or the, not the source of truth, but the person who's going to be reaching out to you and giving you anything is always going to be someone you are already connected with— a trusted existing connection. So, driving trust, driving transparency, and ultimately for us as boots-on-the-ground clinicians, if I can improve job matching, if I can say doctors will be put into jobs that they are better fit for because the sourcing is inherently better, we can reduce burnout, we can reduce churn and turnover, doctors will stay in these jobs for longer and especially in fields like primary care or especially in practices that are in rural and underserved settings. Physicians are likely to take those jobs, stay in those jobs, and you have better access and better continuity. That's a hypothesis. I hope that plays out that way. But those are all the, I would say, the value props for what I, to me are the three different stakeholders, the employers, the physicians, and the patients, to be honest. And we're also, you know, for physicians, the job board for me, that's one piece of the puzzle. I want to also build out a career center, provide all of those resources that frankly in residency and medical school, we just didn't get that education. We didn't get that training on how to negotiate contracts. What are the different payment systems that are out there? Everybody talks about value-based care and a fee for service and all these kinds of things, the trends. How do I provide education on all of that we missed that I think is very important practicing medicine in the modern day. Because also, if I can provide more of that education in a way that it's digestible and people will actually view it and take it and absorb it, then I think we will also be able to practice medicine better, take back that ownership again— it's aligned with that sentiment— and not be burnt out as much as an entire industry of workers.

John: Now that sounds like a good plan. I think we were talking earlier before we started recording that looking to the future, I think a lot of physicians are looking to do maybe a nonclinical and a clinical.

Dr. Zhen Chan: Yeah.

John: And there would be no reason why that couldn't be something that just normally kind of evolves on this site.

Dr. Zhen Chan: Yeah, absolutely. We are open to posting nonclinical positions on our site. Physicians are looking for them, you know, extra avenues, not just in the form of side-gigs but thinking the similar vein to me— where there are things in healthcare that I also wanna work on. What are the jobs that are out there that can allow me to do that? I think more physicians need to be in those positions. And then you have physicians that are burnt out and are looking for an alternative while still making a difference. Those are out there. So we wanna be a supportive platform for every doctor, no matter what they are looking for in their professional careers.

John: That makes me think of another issue, which maybe you've already reached out to, but what about locums, which is a different kind of clinical job, but it is a clinical job and just need to find them.

Dr. Zhen Chan: Yeah, there are a lot of agencies that are out there in the locum space. And we just felt from a business strategy standpoint, let's not go into them. Would we ever go into them? I don't have an answer for that right now. But for me. There's also an element where Locums is an expensive band-aid to provide access to care. Now, don't get me wrong; it's a great gig for a lot of physicians that are looking for them. And I would never stop someone who is looking for them to, I would never stop them from doing so. But for us, we wanna drive more of those full-time positions right now. And I think that's the right strategy. But again, I think in business, it's not like medicine where we try to be as— well, we do try to be as surefire as possible— but a lot of these strategy decisions, I think, some may say that it's the right call; some may say it's not, and right now we're making the call to not do locums just yet.

John: Got it. Got it. Okay, what if someone wants to reach out to you personally for a question or something?

Dr. Zhen Chan: Yeah, so my email address is Zhen, Z-H-E-N@grapevyne.health. Again, reminder Grapevyne with a "Y". And so you can reach me by my email, and then I'm on like every social media platform. Too many, I think. It's been great. I love engaging with the community on social media. So, I'm on LinkedIn. I'm on TikTok, Instagram, and there's a Grapevyne account and my own personal account. And maybe we'll just link it in the show notes. It'd be it'd be a doozy to list.

John: OK, I'll put a few in and I'll definitely put grapevyne.health. I kind of used the dot com at first when I was looking for you. But no, Grapevyne with a y dot health. I'll put that in the show notes. And I think pretty much people can get information, everything they need to know. Physicians, if they're really thinking they're gonna access this kind of service, your service, then just go to grapevyne.health and do it. Check it out.

Dr. Zhen Chan: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John: All right, well, this is pretty exciting. I'm glad you could be here and answer my questions. I think it's inspirational to people— physicians who are thinking, "Well, maybe I could do something entrepreneurial. I could do a startup," or maybe not something as this, is a pretty big deal. This is a big thing. You're devoting full-time to it. So it's not like starting a little side gig on the weekends or something. So, I'm really glad you could join us and I'll be watching the growth of this thing. And it should be pretty interesting. And it sounds like that a lot of planning and a lot of investment of time and effort in this. So, you're to be congratulated.

Dr. Zhen Chan: Yeah, well, I really appreciate the support. I really appreciate you inviting me on. And I have to plug this podcast because I forgot to mention that when I was in my exploration journey, I love learning by podcasts. And this was one of the first ones, if not the first one, I hopped on to listen to a whole slew of episodes to learn just what else is out there for physicians to do. And yeah. So, so anybody who anybody who's listening I hope you share this with more physicians out there.

John: Well, I appreciate those comments. All right, Zhen, we're gonna let you go then. And with that, I'll say goodbye. And hopefully I'll catch up with you again, maybe a year from now.

Sounds great. Have a good one.

John: All right. Bye bye.

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The post This Physician Entrepreneur Offers a New Way to Find a Job appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

In today's episode, John briefly describes how advanced features in LinkedIn can help you find your first nonclinical job.

We delve into the advanced functionalities of LinkedIn, exploring how it enables users to expand their professional connections, customize profile visibility, and access job opportunities.

Our Sponsor

We're proud to have the University of Tennessee Physician Executive MBA Program, offered by the Haslam College of Business, as the sponsor of this podcast.

The UT PEMBA is the longest-running, and most highly respected physician-only MBA in the country. It has over 700 graduates. And, the program only takes one year to complete. 

By joining the UT Physician Executive MBA, you will develop the business and management skills you need to find a career that you love. To find out more, contact Dr. Kate Atchley’s office at (865) 974-6526 or go to nonclinicalphysicians.com/physicianmba.

Power of LinkedIn: Find Your First Nonclinical Job

LinkedIn is not your ordinary social media site; it serves as an online profile or resumé where users can showcase their experiences, education, and interests to the public. While many physicians have a basic profile, there are numerous untapped features that can enhance networking and job search capabilities.

John explored leveraging these features to uncover non-traditional or nonclinical job opportunities. Additionally, John will provide you with a powerful tool specifically designed to assist physicians in harnessing the full potential of LinkedIn for their nonclinical job search.

Unleashing the Power of LinkedIn: Four Key Topics

Let's delve into the four key topics that will transform your LinkedIn experience and help you find your first nonclinical job:

1. Connecting:
   In this topic, John mentions Degrees of Connections which categorizes connections into primary, secondary, and tertiary degrees and utilizes LinkedIn Search. This includes the mentors, coaches, and sponsors who play a significant role in professional growth, utilize the “alumni hack” strategy, and take advantage of premium LinkedIn features.
2. Networking:
   The goal is to establish relationships where they can provide referrals or information related to job opportunities or career paths. John will introduce you to how to provide value and recognize the importance of reciprocity with mentors and coaches.
3. Job Searching:
   John provided 2 steps under this topic namely, Connecting with the Hiring Teams and Leveraging LinkedIn Features.
4. Engaging with Recruiters:
   Gain insights into establishing meaningful connections with recruiters and maximizing your chances of getting noticed.

Summary

LinkedIn is known for its user-friendly interface that prompts users to complete their profiles and provides reminders to fill in any missing basic sections. LinkedIn provides reminders and encouragement to ensure that you don't overlook any basic sections while creating your profile.

The “LinkedIn for Physicians” course provides a comprehensive approach to setting up a LinkedIn profile, utilizing its features, connecting with others, finding companies and jobs, and setting up your profile in a way that doesn't interfere with your current job. The course is constantly updated and can be accessed through the website nonclinicalphysicians.com/linkedincourse. The course is very reasonably priced for the valuable information and guidance it provides in leveraging LinkedIn effectively and quickly!

NOTE: Look below for a transcript of today's episode. 

EXCLUSIVE: Get a daily dose of inspiration, information, news, training opportunities, and amusing stories by CLICKING HERE.

Links for Today's Episode:

• Dr. Heather Fork's Awesome LinkedIn Course
• How to Land An Awesome Job Using LinkedIn – 232
• What Are the Best Resources for Finding a Nonclinical Career? – 195
• NewScr!pt

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Podcast Editing & Production Services are provided by Oscar Hamilton

Today's PNC Podcast Transcript

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Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 303

Top Tips to Find Your First Nonclinical Job Using LinkedIn

John: All right. Now let's get into today's topic. I will start by giving you somewhat of a definition and answering the question "What is LinkedIn?" Technically LinkedIn is a social media site, but it's a fairly unique social media site. Anybody that's used it would know this. There aren't a lot of competitors for LinkedIn. I will mention another site that's very similar to it in doing some of the functions that LinkedIn delivers to us. I'll talk about that later.

But basically, I look at LinkedIn primarily as an online profile, an online resume, if you will, that allows us to go in, create a profile that's accessible to the public. Although to varying degrees, depending on who's trying to look at it, it allows you to post your experiences, your education, your volunteer activities. You can post a personal statement about what you do and what your interests are, and there's a lot to it.

You can post things on there on a regular basis. And so, that's what most people see it as. And I think most physicians have at least a basic profile, a basic page put together. And I've talked before about how to put that page together and what should be on it. And the reason I wanted to do this update today is because I wanted to focus on some of the other features of LinkedIn that enhance its ability to enable us to network and to find jobs.

That's the other piece of LinkedIn. The profile is an integral part of that, and you can set the features to allow you to let some people see the profile and other people not, you can send your profile to people. In that sense, it's definitely very useful for helping on your job search.

But there's some more advanced features, I guess I'd call them, that many of us have not used to a large extent. Many of us have just put our profile out there, let people be aware of what we're doing, what our interests are, maybe message other members and look at their profiles. But there's some features I want to talk about today.

Now some of this I've talked about in the past, like I said, some of the basics about LinkedIn. So I'll put links in today's episode show notes to take you to those posts so that if you want to go back and review them, you can.

The so-called advanced features, which are pretty integral to it, and many of you maybe have already started using, include the ability to connect with others on LinkedIn to grow your network, to search for jobs and to engage with recruiters. That's where a lot of the really useful and effective techniques fall when you're trying to pursue a non-traditional or a nonclinical job. Sure, you can put your profile out there, but can you use LinkedIn to actually find jobs, find companies, find recruiters at those companies and so forth.

And while I'm not going to get into the specifics of this, I want to just explain how you can use it, and particularly for those of you that haven't used it to do this in the past, and maybe give you some insights, encourage you to start using it for those purposes. And I'll provide some instruction for that. And then I will give you a resource that is probably, as in my opinion, the best resource for clinicians, particularly physicians who want to learn how to use LinkedIn. It's a really awesome tool to enhance your nonclinical job search. So, let's get to those four topics that I mentioned earlier.

The first one is connecting and networking. It's pretty common knowledge, and it's been stated in several places that up to 60% of new jobs are acquired through direct interactions with people. In other words, through networking, through word of mouth, if you want to call it that. And the features in LinkedIn are really an advanced form of online networking that you can easily take advantage of.

Now, in LinkedIn, we talked to the primary, secondary, and tertiary. I guess first degree secondary or third degree would be your terminology a lot of people used for LinkedIn. But I'll give you an example. I've nurtured my list to some extent over these last six years since I started my podcast. And according to my LinkedIn profile, I have 2,700 almost 2,800 followers. Most of those are actually first degree connections. There's a small number of people who follow me but aren't really connections because I haven't followed them back. But let's just say it's at least 2,500.

Now, if you were to look at my list of secondary connections, if you take all those 2,500, 2,600 and then add all of their connections to my list, that would bring my second degree connections up to 1.3 million. That's a pretty rapid expansion. And then if you were to go to my third degree connections on LinkedIn, that brings it up to 900 million. It's pretty exponential.

But the point is that one of the reasons it's so useful is because you have a direct relationship with those first degree connections on LinkedIn. You can message them, you can interact with them, you can send them long notes, you can publish things that they will see, and it allows you to then try and expand your network further by converting those second degree connections to first degree connections. I just wanted to show you that it's pretty darn powerful.

So, what you should do once you're all set up in LinkedIn and you're to the point where you know what kind of company you want to work for, or what kind of job you want to do, or what town you want to work in, is you should start working on this issue of connecting and networking.

Now who should you reach out to if you haven't already made this aggressive attempt to expand your network? Well, basically you want to reach out to current colleagues, might be all those people you went to medical school with and went to residency your co-residents if you've completed a residency or fellowship. But then you should also reach out to alumni at any of the schools that you went to or the residency. So, you can do that directly. There's also some features in LinkedIn that allow you to do that. I'll talk about that in a minute. You can look for people that have similar interests so you can look for those when you're reaching out. You can look for recruiters, you can look for specific jobs and so forth. And then reach out and try and connect with the people that come up when you're doing those searches.

I'm like I said in my profile right now. So let's say that I want to do a search and I'm going to search for, let's say, somebody that has an interest in utilization review. Now, when I type that in, I can look for utilization review in jobs. I can look for actual UR jobs. I can look for utilization review groups. I can look for utilization review physicians. If I just look for utilization review, I'm given the option of also narrowing it down instead of narrowing it down in the search function. I can click on people, companies, jobs, groups, posts, schools, courses, events, products.

And if I look utilization review in people, and I just limit that to my first degree connections, I will find, for example, that I have a pretty long list of people in utilization review who are my first degree connections. Let me see here. Because of the nature of my list, I'm seeing basically dozens and dozens of people that are meeting the criteria of being first degree connections that have something in their profile that indicates utilization review.

Now, if I click on that and add second degree connections, the first degree it looks like I have about basically 20 pages of listings. If I show the results for the first and second degree, then it looks like I have it looks like a hundred pages. So five times as many that come up. That's if I look under connections.

Now, if I go to my network instead of my profile, there are other things that will allow me to expand my network. First of all, there's invitations. People find me through their first and second degree connections. They send me a note, invite me to follow them or to accept their invitation to connect. So, you can add those people. I'm relatively selective in that, that's why I don't only have 10,000 followers because I just really don't connect with anyone that doesn't have a valid reason to be a connection.

But then LinkedIn, if you scroll down below that section, again, this is on the My Network tab, you'll also be given other options for who to connect with. There are popular people to follow across LinkedIn that may or may not be that beneficial. But I do recognize a lot of these names because there is an overlap in some of the things that I do and some of the things that I've searched for in the past.

Then I'm provided a list of people that I might know from the University of Illinois at Chicago where I did my undergrad. So, I could go through there. And one of the fun things to do is for me to look in there and see if any of those alumni are physicians, because like I said, I like to add physicians to my network, even if they're not currently doing a nonclinical job, they may have some connection to a nonclinical or non-traditional job. So you could do that.

If I go down further, I have a list of top emerging creators to follow. I don't find that particularly useful. There's audio events listed. There are groups I might be interested based on what I've posted, based on who I'm connected with. Most of that has to do with education and training because I talk so much about careers. And let's see, what else?

There's just a number and it almost continues to go on forever. There's popular pages, again, that all seem to be related to something I've searched in the past. Joint Commission, CDC, Mayo Clinic, NCQA, which relates to quality improvement, et cetera. So, you can definitely find others to connect with by doing this.

And the other similar online social media site that I'll mention now is Doximity. Now Doximity is nowhere sophisticated and complete as LinkedIn, but you can do a lot of searches on Doximity where you can reconnect with alumni from your medical school, from your undergrad, from your residency fellowship. You can reach out, you can connect and you can grow a network pretty well on Doximity, and then you can search through and find if other people are doing something you're interested in.

I think the functionality is not anywhere near as sophisticated as LinkedIn. So I would focus on LinkedIn initially, but when you've exhausted your search on LinkedIn and some of the other things we're going to talk about today, then you could go to Doximity.

Now, when you're trying to connect, let's say you're connecting with someone who's a second degree connection, you're limited on a number of characters, so you can do a message of about 300 characters. It's funny because technically LinkedIn says you really shouldn't connect with people that you don't already know. But at the same time, it enables you to look for people you have a very tenuous relationship with in terms of it may just be knowing someone that they know, but it does allow you to send those messages. You can get the premium level of LinkedIn.

And I've used that from time to time, and in fact, I think you can still do what I've done in the past, and then is use it for a month or two to make the connections you want because you're able to put a longer message and you're able to reach out to third degree connections if you need to using the premium version of LinkedIn last I checked. But then I usually drop off after a month or two and go back to the regular version because a lot of times I don't really do anything actively on LinkedIn for several months at a time.

Anyway, you send a short message to them, ask them to connect and includes something that would be an enticement, not a reward for connecting, but just what is the nature of the connection? Why are you reaching out to them? I get requests all the time to say, "Well, I do this. I'm in AI and I'd like to connect." And there's no real good reason.

But actually another good example of me using LinkedIn is for my podcast. I will do a very short message and I'll say, "Hey, I'm a physician. I'm a family physician. I have a podcast. I'd like to connect and tell you more about the podcast to see if you'd like to be a guest." Sometimes it has to be shorter than that. I don't know how many characters that was. And then they'll invariably accept and then I do a follow up message, and that one can be much longer.

I have found that there are certain people that prefer to interact on LinkedIn. I like to fairly quickly get them switched over to my email address. That's a personal preference depending on who you're connecting with. You may want to say, "Well, I'm going to connect with recruiters, but until I have a good reason to really follow up with them, I'm not going to give them my email list." That makes perfect sense.

But anyway, if you connect with someone and you think it's going to be a useful long-term connection, then yeah, you can make that decision of whether to send them over to your email rather than to continue to engage on LinkedIn because, for me, I sometimes go a week or so where I'm not looking at LinkedIn, even though I get probably 20, 30 notices a day that something was posted that might be of interest unless I have a reason I don't sometimes go back.

The other thing is, this is how we network. We get this larger group of connections, and then we can later on go back to them and if they have a particular skill, a particular niche that they're working in, or particular role, then we could try and engage them. And then at some point the purpose is to find out if they can refer you to more information about a job or a career or a group or something like that. The other thing to remember when you're doing networking is that you should try to have something of value that you can provide to them, if at all possible. It's always better to figure out how you can assist somebody else before asking them to assist you.

Now, as I'm talking mostly about physicians, we generally are very good about serving as mentors. We're generally very good about sharing information. Definitely everybody that I know in the nonclinical world that's a physician who's a coach or has expertise in a certain nonclinical area, they love sharing that and they'll be glad to respond to an email or a text if that's what you're using.

Just because we're taught to be preceptors, we're taught to teach medical students and other clinicians. But you should try to figure out a way that you can be of benefit to them. It could be something as simple as sharing an article or information about a course that you believe they may find useful or interesting.

But keep that in mind. Anytime we're talking about mentors and free coaches and I guess you could call them sponsors in some cases. We need to really keep in mind the idea of giving back to them as much as we can before expecting them to help us.

One of the reasons I'm doing this LinkedIn presentation today is because I was reminded by Dr. Heather Fork that there's some recent changes to LinkedIn. And I was listening to her course, which I bought a year or so ago. She was talking about an alumni hack where you can reach out to alumni at your medical school or residency and try to contact someone in that alumni list who's working at a company that you wish to work for.

And if you can get that connection to someone who's already there, we say the alumni, because your own class may only have a limited number of people that graduated from that class, especially if it was a small residency program or fellowship. But there's probably 10 times that many alumni.

And alumni typically are very willing to engage with other alumni. The hack is to find one of those alumni that are working at a company you want to work at, reach out to them, and if possible get some advice and even have that alumnus present your resume to the hiring manager or the director of HR or something like that. So, you can really leverage LinkedIn and some of the connections that you might have out there waiting to hear from you.

Now, the other features that you can use in LinkedIn include the job search and recruiters functions. If you look on your profile under jobs, you'll see a set of jobs that are recommended for you based on how you've set up your profile. Sometimes as you're looking for one of these new jobs, it's good to just start going through the job. First look at the title and see if it makes any sense. If it does seem to be a qualified type of job that you're looking for, just click on it and then scroll down on the right to the description.

And the first thing is look at the job requirements, because that's gone be the thing that will affect whether you're wasting your time or not. If it says you have to have a residency or specialty, or you have a certain license or maybe some of these jobs, they have multiple licenses in different states, or at least have one license. Some of the nonclinical jobs may not require any license, but if you want to cut the time wasted going through all the description of the job and locations and so forth, again, the first thing is look at the requirements of the job.

And in the process of doing that, see if there is someone on what they say "meet the hiring team." And then you can potentially get a name and then go to their profile and then ask to connect with them. You can learn a lot from recruiters. Now, there are several types of recruiters. There are those that are freelance or work for third parties, and there are those that work for particular companies. A large company will have its own set of recruiters. Sometimes they'll call them talent management team or the hiring team. And you can go and click on that name, which will bring you to their profile. And then you can see whether this person is a contingency type of recruiter, or someone who is a retained recruiter.

Contingency is they get paid once someone is found to fill that slot, no matter how long it takes and how much effort it takes. The retained is paid in amount over time, and as soon as the payments stop, they stop looking whether or not they have filled that slot. It's good to understand that, and again, to understand the distinction in between an internal and external recruiters.

But by doing this and leveraging the networking and recruitment features of LinkedIn, you can definitely make a lot more progress than you otherwise would. There's a lot of other tips and hacks that you can do which really brings me back to what I started to talk about a minute ago, and that is this course that Dr. Heather Fork put together. And really to me, there is no other course specifically built for physicians to do this.

This may sound just a 30 minute ad for the course, but one of the things I try to do is find resources for people. And I can only explain so much on a podcast. I actually have a video on my Nonclinical Career academy, which I'm probably going to make free at this time because really it's outdated. Whereas a course like Dr. Fork's, it's always constantly updated. In fact, she sent a notice out lately that there's several things on LinkedIn that were updated and changed the terminology and so forth. So, she updated her course.

But it's by far the best course to teach physicians how to create and leverage their LinkedIn profile. And the course is called LinkedIn for Physicians. So, that kind of says it all right there, and I really recommend it. I am an affiliate for it, I guess because I do a lot of affiliate marketing for other people's courses that I think are good. And so, if you want to check it out, you can go to nonclinicalphysicians.com/linkedincourse. And look at over, it'll tell you what the different sections are. But it really does a comprehensive overview of how to set up your initial profile, how to use all the bells and whistles, and then to leverage it, to connect and to engage and to find companies, to find jobs, to find recruiters, and how to set it up in a way that isn't going to necessarily interfere with your current job, for example.

There are ways to make sure that it's not shared with certain people, and I would definitely encourage that as a follow up to today's podcast if you feel like you haven't already created a really good LinkedIn profile, and if you think you might use the other features that it really takes a while to get used to them and to find them, unless you're using it a lot. And a course like this would definitely accelerate that process. And really the cost of the course is extremely reasonable for what you're getting.

All right, with that, I'm going to end today's presentation. I thank you for listening today.

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The post Top Tips to Find Your First Nonclinical Job Using LinkedIn – 303 appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.