Recruiting, Retaining Physicians Requires Finesse

In the meantime, hospitals are also considering how adept physician prospects are at using technologies such as electronic medical records and social media, Stone says. They also question their motives in hiring. Hospitals and physician groups are asking themselves these questions: Do we want the physician who's good with a robot? And do we really want a specialist just because the nearby hospital brought one on board?

"We see a lot of competition among hospitals and physician groups to offer the best quality and best variety of services," Stone adds. "I can't tell you how many times across the country a hospital recruited a urologist after another hospital recruited a urologist, or went to buy a robot after another hospital got one, while the patient population may not support two urologists or robots."

"It's a competitive dynamic that drives the recruitment effort, resulting in lengthy and expensive searches," Stone says. "Difficult searches vary from specialty to specialty. Certain searches are always difficult because of overall shortages."

At the same time, employers hurt only themselves by limiting how they carry out hiring searches, Stone says. "I think, unfortunately, employers put up walls and road blocks based on parameters they define at the outset of the search," he adds. Those parameters could be age or training, or other factors.