Job market for medical specialties

WHAT’S YOUR COMPETITION LIKE? And how tight is the job market in your physician specialty? For job seekers of all kinds, it can be hard to know. A simple PracticeLink.com search for opportunities in your specialty will give you an indication of the demand for physicians like you, but without knowing who else is vying for those jobs, it’s hard to get an accurate picture of supply. 

How many other candidates in your specialty are actively looking for jobs at the same time? And how does that number correspond to the number of opportunities available? 

That’s where the PracticeLink Physician Recruitment Index comes in. The Index is a relative indication of the ease or difficulty of job searches in various specialties based on supply and demand information gathered by the PracticeLink system quarterly. The larger the “jobs per candidate” number for your specialty, the better your potential standing in the market. 

The change in rank reflects the specialty’s movement since last quarter. 

The Most-Challenging-to-Recruit Specialties are those specialties with the highest demand-to-supply ratio in the PracticeLink system. The specialties on this list likely won’t come as a surprise to candidates; they’re often narrow fields. 

The Most-In-Demand Specialties represent the specialties that have the most jobs overall posted on PracticeLink—specialties for which the demand for physicians is highest. For the Index, we then rank those in-demand specialties according to the supply. Those at the top represent specialties with the most jobs available and the fewest candidates per job. 

After reading these Indexes, ask yourself: Do these Indexes match my experience of searching for a job in my specialty? Do I need to widen or narrow my job-search parameters as a result?