I just hate the saying “too big to fail….” A lot of these AMCs are using their economy of size to sell themselves. Is bigger always better? I don’t see the advantages in community health care. Usually the decision maker is too far away to be efficient. With the increase of size, you also get decrease in adaptability. Lastly, the mothership may be set in their ways, unable/unwilling to change for the local needs.
I’ve seen AMCs in action a few times. Many times the answer is “we cannot change for you, because then we’d have to change every anesthesiologists contract….” Or “that’s our per-diem rate for our W-2, cannot pay you more than our docs…” “we need to ask for the permission from X….”
What happened to we will give the control to the local group, when they recruit you. Out the window, that’s where….
JM, I gave your idea some thought. I think it’s a great idea, but like some of other posters said, who’s your audience? How are you going to make money? From the agency, the hospital/PP (employers), or the employees? How are you going to charge? When I look for a job now, pay itself is certainly important. But I also want to know supervision ratio, % of doing my own cases. Call burden and structure, or opportunities of taking “easy” or “hard” calls…. Most of these information aren’t readily available to the locum company. Their goal is just to “present” you to the “site director”. (I have problems with their terminology.) to find out these you almost need an anesthesiologist to do the intake.
Moreover, if I find a “good” locum job, I may just stay for a while, I wouldn’t need your services/website for a while. The hope some of these sites/locations will be able to hire is some far fetched fantasy. Some of the perm jobs that are advertising, will never ever able to hire in this market.
IMGASMD-this is a great post.
I think your insight is spot on.
Finding an audience is key. I'm trying to apply a scientific method so-to-speak to answer the questions you raise; many of which are addressed in an excellent book I'm reading:"The lean startup", by Eric Ries.
Although implicit, rather than explicit in the copy on my landing page, is a business model directed first at the locums market. I think it might be easier to learn and test in a niche market. There are approximately 22 million healthcare workers in the US based on by market research, most of which as you might imagine are nurses. Revenue modeling and pricing are large topics and getting it "right," must be accomplished.
Because our goal is to create meaningful change, which may cause some disruption, user adoption to a new way of thinking is required, and as you might imagine, will not be a simple task. Because the goal is to empower healthcare employees through transparency, I plan to keep the super simple and pleasant browsing function on this software application free- always, for everyone. A "freemium" model will allow a host of upgraded features (see my response to jwk), an affordable subscription pricing for those members. Many people (including myself at the earliest stage of this) don't realize the risk and overhead involved in maintaining a full stack software platform.
While folks who want to simply browse their job options to satiate curiosity, confirm their current employment value, or even utilize that information as leverage to negotiate a higher wage at their current shop, might
not find value in a subscription model with more features, but folks who independently contract, have a travel career or change jobs frequently, may find value in doing so, using scrubhunt in a premium way.
Employers typically pay upwards of 30% of the overall hourly rate to staffing agencies for any immediate need healthcare employee. You can imagine what some of the implications in that arrangement might be: 30% less capital in what is likely a fixed allocation for staffing. Because it would be far cheaper to simply post a job add to a captive and available audience of healthcare workers, that employer could simply utilize a fraction of those funds to advertise a significantly higher rate, which improves visibility of their job post, potentially shortening time to hire, which could cause a competitive effect increasing other wage offerings by other employers, while still remaining a cheaper option. As you might know, wage transparency has been shown to promote "fair pay," which can mean an increase OR a decrease in wages; but in a market where supply does not meet demand, like ours, the effect will be an increase in wages as fair pay effect.
Once traction is established and independent employers see that this way of hiring is better, faster and cheaper, the primary revenue will come in the way of tiered or graduated pricing in pay per job post per month, but not before that. The primary goal isn't so much volume of users; its user traction-that is, how many healthcare professionals are able to connect with and result in conversion to hire per job post-that is the metric we are focused on, which dictates where and when we roll out in various locations.
I'm most interested in making profit to be reinvested into the platform and service model, to continue to build out features and establish a community based on transparency that better serve our needs as doctors, nurses, allied health professionals etc, and in doing so (product development), we can easily add features that account for the important variables specific to different specialties that you mentioned. But as it stands, those variables will be described in the job post details at the earliest stage. Our initial thinking is this: in a general sense, the most important preliminary issues in any job search is a
clearly defined role, financial renumeration per unit of time and location. Unless those three variables align, the rest of the story is a moot point. However, I want to emphasize that at this stage, we are seeking to
really understand what our customers want-so we can make that happen. We are of the belief that ultimate transparency will also drive the development of a trust-worthy community. People first. Maybe sounds naive and crazy, but, there are worse things to be called
Thanks again for your reply.
JM
