Most of you are familiar with the headhunters of the financial world. Bankers and finance people are notorious for migrating from one firm to another. Typically, it is the headhunters that cold call and go after the best and brightest of any firm. It is a lucrative business based on the concept of a placement fee or a commission.
Medicine has its own version of headhunters called placement agents. Typically, these staffing companies target newly minted young MDs and try to place them into an existing practice. For those types of physicians who are in high demand, such as specialists, the placement fees can be astronomical. After all, typically, a physician usually only moves once or twice in his entire career. Some do not ever move from their first job. This is in stark contrast to those in the corporate world who may move every few years for upward mobility. The main difference is that a physician is a small business owner and spends years building up his reputation and practice. Like any small business owner, moving locations is expensive and definitely dings your business for a while.
Thus, placing a specialty physician into a practice can earn the placement agent a fee in the tens of thousands of dollars, if not more. It is a big business that inundates resident and new physicians with mail, email, phone calls, and a lot of schmoozing. If you make the mistake of getting your name on one of these lists, you will never get out from under the deluge of marketing materials.
Unlike the regular corporate world, staff placement agents typically have no medical background. They know a lot about the field from their work, but if you ask them about the scope of any physician’s practice, you will soon leave them with a confused look on their faces. They want to move a very lucrative and highly valuable product – the physician who has gone to school for decades.
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