A medical recruiter’s day would have looked very different twenty or thirty years ago.
At the office, you’d probably be calling leads from paper lists, or stacks of contact cards with handwritten notes, and leafing through piles of paper stuffed in file folders. You’d be tied to a desk phone, watching the clock to make sure you weren’t making unessential long-distance calls during peak rate periods.
You’d fill out paperwork by hand because typewriters were expensive and bulky, and you’d have to start over or use a lot of white-out if you made too many mistakes on the complicated forms. If you needed the number to a medical facility, you’d look it up in a bulky phone book–maybe even call information.
If someone needed to reach you after hours, they’d probably call your pager. When you received a caller’s phone number–no message, just a phone number–you’d be obliged to search for a pay phone if you didn’t happen to be at home. At some point you’d probably be digging through your large, stuffed-to-the-brim documents planner for the material you needed.
Such was the life of a recruiter in the not-so-good ol’ days.
Pace, productivity, and power
Like it always has been, communication is at the core of every facet of the recruiter/staffing specialist’s position. The difference now is, rapid advances in technology have given today’s recruiters many methods through which they can find and share information, resulting in vastly improved efficiency and much greater access to data.
Computers are the catalyst behind most of the improvements in the world of medical recruiting. Database technology makes it possible to track and share information efficiently (our database contains thousands upon thousands of easily-accessible files). Personal computers and handheld devices mean documents are virtual, data can be enter via keyboard, and files can be stores and retrieved electronically.
No more cluttered desktops and mounds of paper to drag home each night.
Welcome to the future
Stemming from computer technology, the internet has made it possible for recruiters to find candidates through a multitude of sources: the RTG website and various medical job posting sites, and social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
Don’t get us wrong–recruiters still spend a lot of time on the phone. But no one carries around bulky pagers these days, and caller ID helps prioritize your time, making concerns about pagers and long-distance rates a thing of the past. Email also helps communication, and even technology like Skype or FaceTime can be useful.
The good news is, all of this technological support points to one thing: your success. It’s a great time to be a recruiter.
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photo credit: Creativity+ Timothy K Hamilton via photopin cc
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