What Makes Physicians Tick? And Do We Really Know Why They Choose the Gulf?

After many years in international healthcare recruitment, I am certain of one thing: There isn’t one answer to what makes a physician interested in a new job.

“Every physician has his/her own buttons”. The challenge for a recruiter is figuring out what they are. 

We spend a lot of time asking whether a physician is qualified for a position. Where did you train? Are you Board Certified? How many years of experience do you have? Are you eligible for licensing? And etc. … All important questions. But perhaps there is another question we should be asking much earlier:

What would make you leave the job you have now? Most likely, the answer isn’t always money. For one physician, compensation may be very important. Another may want fewer calls or a better work-life balance. Someone else may want more complex cases, access to new technology, research opportunities or a leadership role. Another physician may have reached a stage in life where the professional challenge of working overseas is attractive. Someone else may want their children to experience another part of the world. And sometimes the answer is quite simply: nothing. … The physician is happy where they are. That’s important information too that we Probably Don’t Ask Enough.

I was recently reading a report about the physicians workforce in the USA. Of course, there were all kind of questions about salary, location and etc. However, it was the “other questions” that interested me: Physicians were being asked about workload, autonomy, work-life balance, whether they would relocate for the right opportunity and whether they were considering changing the direction of their careers.

A question came to mind: How much do we really know about the physicians we recruit to the Gulf? In a way we know a lot about them, career wise: Their qualifications, experience, fellowships, publications, Board certification and licensing eligibility. But do we know enough about what makes them tick?

There has been research in the Gulf looking at physician recruitment and retention, and it tells us something those of us in recruitment have seen for years: the decision is rarely based on one factor: Family, children’s education, workload, professional development, lifestyle and the working environment can all matter. The problem is that they don’t necessarily matter equally to every physician. Sometimes the Real Decision-Maker Isn’t the Physician. International recruitment adds another complication. We aren’t simply asking someone to change hospitals. We are asking the physician to move halfway-across the world and bring a family with them.

The physician may love the job. The spouse may not want to move. The salary may be excellent, but the children are at an important stage in school. Or the clinical opportunity may be exactly what the physician wants, but the spouse has a career they don’t want to leave. In those situations, adding another allowance to the offer may accomplish absolutely nothing. We need to understand what matters for before trying to solve the wrong problem. 

Finding the Right Button Doesn’t Mean Pushing It, there is an important distinction here. Understanding what motivates a physician shouldn’t be about finding a weakness and using it to convince someone to accept a job. Quite the opposite. If a physician tells me that what really matters is having a high-volume interventional practice, and the position we are recruiting for doesn’t provide that, there isn’t much point trying to sell the opportunity. It’s most likely the wrong opportunity. But if the hospital happens to offer exactly the clinical environment that physician is looking for, that’s something we should be talking about. This is what I would call “Candidate–Opportunity Alignment”.

The question isn’t only: Is this physician right for the job? We should also ask: Is this job right for the physician? So, maybe, we need better questions. Perhaps the recruitment conversation should include a few questions that don’t appear on the CV.

• What would make you seriously consider a move?
• What would you want to be different in your next position?
• What matters to your family?
• What would make you reject an otherwise attractive offer?
• And if you moved, what would make you stay?

There is no right and wrong here and surely, the answers will be different for every physician… and … That’s the point.

Though, the recruiter may have own ideas about what motivates physicians to consider Saudi Arabia, the UAE or Qatar. But I would rather ask the physicians. 

Because  ….. before you can present the right opportunity to someone, you need to understand what makes them tick.