I was brought in as the Director of Physician Recruiting, and found that MHA Group, Merritt Hawkins and Associates, or AMN Healthcare (all the same firm), was listed all over the Internet. Everyone in the industry is pretty leery of all the search firms, but I thought I would give them a try. We needed three new physicians, two of which were Internists and one which was an OB/GYN.

To me these are fairly easy searches being that they aren't higher end specialties...i.e. surgeons. Well the Marketer kept constant communication with me, and even flew up from Dallas to see me before beginning the search. After signing the contract though everything changed.

A physician recruiter came up the week after signing the contract to "learn about our opportunity." He seemed very bright, was charming, and we were excited to move forward. At the end of his presentation he told us we needed to do a mail campaign, and had a contract already printed out which totaled 20k across all searches. This made me a bit nervous as this was never discussed in the original contract or with the other rep, but we moved forward as the physician recruiter explained that it would target the candidates we were looking for in a faster timeframe.

Well a month later we received the first invoice. It had the 20k for the mail pieces, and an ungodly amount of "billable hours" for time various people spent on the search (a total of 5 people). I called the marketer (original rep) and wanted to know why the search was already so expensive when we just got started, and that all of these people were already working it before the mail pieces even hit. He basically pushed me back to the physician recruiter.

Well the next week my own doctors and those in my general area received copies of the mail pieces. The search was supposed to have been kept confidential to those on my staff, and I was told the mail pieces would be sent elsewhere. This caused great upset with our staff, and I could have easily spent my time calling doctors in the general area. What a waste!

For the next 4 weeks the only contact I had with the physician recruiter was random CV's being sent over on candidates that we had already stated we wouldn't be interested in. None of the qualifications matched what I stated we were looking for. Again a waste of my time and our money! And then to top it off I received another invoice for "billable hours" which was again very high. Moreover, it showed that the recruiter worked for 4 hours on my search on a day he had previously told me he'd be out of town.

So I called Tony Schnapp, the Vice President of Physician Recruiting. He said that his employee worked on the road and that was the reason for the charged time. I then called my representative and without telling him about my conversation with Mr. Schnapp asked him how his trip was. He told me it was a trip to Florida for a wedding.

Feeling doubtful that he'd spent 4 hours working as Mr. Schnapp had stated I immediately canceled the search. I will never work with this company again. The lack of communication was upset, I feel like we've been lied to, and the CV's that we did receive were worthless. We spent over 35k and have nothing to show for it.