5 Email Strategies for Physician Recruitment Sourcing

Always purchase lists from a trustworthy source. If you’re on the fence, run your list through a tool like NeverBounce — a bulk email verification and list cleaning service. Sending recruitment emails to a bad list will lead to poor delivery rates and potentially get you banned from your service provider.

Another way you can ensure you target the right audience is by properly managing your candidate data. Make sure to keep track of your contact points and all responses. Also, responsibly manage your unsubscribe requests. This is not only a good data practice, but it’s a legal obligation.

Tip 1: Don’t include pictures. Some email tools block them and, if they’re large, they can stop candidates from seeing your message. Instead, replace images with solid content. Physician recruitment emails should be personalized letters to candidates versus ads.

Tip 2: Keep your content fresh; change it monthly. Try to create a conversation with candidates instead of selling them on your opportunities. Give enough information so they know the details, but not so much that they have no reason to contact you. Also, make sure to personalize your emails leading with the candidate’s name. This is easy to do and makes a big difference!

Tip 3: Craft a solid subject line. According to HubSpot, 47% of email users open emails solely based on the subject line, so make yours count. Be honest and descriptive. Also, include your location, the opportunity and your hospital or clinic’s name. This will differentiate you from search firms and attract candidates that are the best fit. Imagine the candidate you want to reach and write a subject line that will inspire them to open your email.

Based on our own email research and implementation, this equates to one message per month. This cadence helps you find the perfect balance between not being “a pest” that forces a user to unsubscribe and being present in their inbox when they’re ready to make a decision.

In addition to the optimal cadence, what day and time you send your physician recruitment emails can make or break your success. Unfortunately, there’s no one-size-fits-all tactic… different specialties may require different times and different days. So, use data to build out your strategy and test your results.

Case in point, we start sending to next year’s residents in May or June and continue until the May or June prior to them leaving their residency. Patience is important! You don’t know when a resident is going to be ready to start their job search, so don’t get discouraged. Just keep sending them quality content and when that physician is ready to make their decision, you’ll be there for them.

If you don’t have the capacity to get emails out, there are businesses that can help. Finding providers that can assist you with resident and practicing physician lists is huge — you need to be able to trust your data to be efficient. Also, managing your candidates/data needs to be easy and straightforward, or else you won’t keep up. This is where a good physician recruitment CRM and/or database manager can help you focus on the work that matters.

For example, at Barlow/McCarthy, we can manage your entire physician recruitment emailing process and only forward the leads that relate directly to your team. Each email is sent from your team and follow-up is from your team as well, so it’s a seamless connection. We also have a DIY version of our product where you can send emails from your own dashboard, get help with templates and access our resident database. Learn more here.