Typical interview questions hospitals ask doctors who are seeking employment

Doctors are at one point or another in their careers, whether we ever think about it much, job-seekers just like the rest of us have been.

Yes, their professional training is enormous, and their skills extraordinary, but when it comes to getting a job in a hospital, or in any medical facility for that matter, the job seeking and application process they follow is not all that different from what the rest of us have experienced in our own lives and careers over the years.

And after doing a little reading on the web about doctors and their job search-and-application process, I was struck by just how similar it is to the usual search for a typical professional position: letters of application, submission of resumes, phone calls, and, yes, face-to-face interviews.

I'm not sure why I might have thought it would be all that different for doctors. Or maybe it was because we sometimes tend to think of doctors as possessing a somewhat exalted status, maybe free from the mundane challenges of job hunting that most others regularly face. They somehow have just stepped into the jobs we see them in.

But job hunting is job hunting, I guess, and the work of doing so is still going to be there, regardless of the occupation or its status. And one supposes that doctors too, following an interview, often feel the same kind of stress wondering if they got the job or not, just like the rest of us would.

In any case, here are a couple of rather interesting articles that detail the process, both from a general perspective (an overview of how the typical doctor job interview might go), and specifics, including a list of typical job interview questions that hospital interviewing staff might put to candidates for a doctor position.

General:

https://work.chron.com/interview-doctor-job-19891.html

Specifics (again, note how many questions would apply when seeking hire in most any professional position):

https://www.locumleaders.com/news/career-tips/medical-job-interview-tips-for-physicians-and-clinicians/

So it looks like docs in fact aren't all that different from the rest of us when it comes to applying for and getting a job.

Not a doctor and never played one on TV - but my guess is that the physician unemployment rate is minuscule. A person that well trained in such a highly regarded profession probably doesn't have a hard time finding work. The job hunt is probably quite different from a guy applying for a clerk's job at Costco. I imagine there are lots of employment headhunter referrals too. The physician is probably interviewing the employer as much, if not more, than vice-versa in the employment dance. The AMA does a good job at keeping the physician population down, creating more demand than supply. There's no shortage of sick people in America putting doctors in the catbird seat. And I don't expect that to change anytime soon.