First of all, be sure to include your current contact information (phone, email, address) at the top of your resume.  That sounds simple, but it’s surprising how many job-seekers “recycle” older resumes after they’ve moved or changed cell phone numbers.

Be sure your resume highlights your career accomplishments, health-related skills and educational background.  Make it easy for the recruiter to check your credentials by including specific information on any state licenses or professional certifications.  Many candidates wonder whether or not to include personal or professional references on a resume.  Generally, the best approach is to say “references available on request,” unless you’ve earned the support of a Nobel Prize winner, dean of a medical school or CEO of a regional hospital system.

On the other hand, it’s usually a mistake to include a photo on your resume, and leave off any descriptive information (height, weight, eye color, etc.).  Those things don’t matter to a recruiter.  Other things to leave off your resume include your age, marital status and sexual orientation.  If you belong to a religious denomination, social organizations or political party, it’s best to omit that as well.  To reduce the risk of identity theft, never put your social security number on a resume.  There’s no way to tell who’ll have access to your resume after you send it off.

Always remember that the goal of your resume is to help you make it to the next round of the screening process.  Highlighting your professional accomplishments and experience while omitting any unnecessary personal information is the best way to capture the recruiter’s attention and be invited to interview for the position.  Good luck!

When you introduce your colleagues to All Medical Personnel, you can now make up to $500 per introduction.  With the new program, “The Buck Starts with a Great Referral,” you simply complete a referral form available on our new microsite, – www.locumreferrals.com.  All Medical Personnel will pay you $500 for each introduction to a physician and $250 for each introduction to physician assistants and nurse practitioners who work 20 or more days with our firm or take a permanent position with one of our clients.

Once you make a referral, we will contact the candidate and discuss open locum tenens positions and career opportunities.  When the candidate completes at least 20 days (160 hours) worked with All Medical (within one year of the date of introduction), you will be eligible for your bonus.  We will keep you informed of the candidate’s eligibility status. We reserve the right to cancel the referral program at any time.

For physicians, physician assistants and nurse practitioners, locum tenens assignments offer variety, providing opportunities to practice skills in a new clinical setting and serve a different patient population.  Many locum tenens physicians also enjoy a change of pace in their lifestyle, such as spending a month or two in a vacation-oriented community.

Other advantages include flexibility in scheduling. That might mean working a new shift, taking a temporary assignment for several weeks or moving to a new location for several months or longer.  A locum tenens assignment can also help professionals find a healthy balance between work and family responsibilities.

If you know a professional interested in locum tenens opportunities, contact All Medical Personnel today, and remember, “The Buck Starts with a Great Referral!”

In the past two years, corporate giants like Intel, HP and Michelin have invested millions of dollars into setting up employee clinics on their main campuses.  Other regional and local employers are also expanding their on-site healthcare programs in order to stake out a competitive advantage.  In many cases, these employers find it easier to partner with well-established hospitals or healthcare systems that can provide “brand-name” care to their employees.

However, some large companies are taking a different approach, expanding their human resource divisions and hiring physicians, nurses, nutritionists, and other professionals directly. In many cases, these employers turn to staffing firms like All Medical Personnel for assistance in planning their programs and for providing temporary staffing to get them underway.

When developing corporate healthcare programs, it’s important to survey employees and their families to determine what services are most likely to be utilized.  For instance, a recent study by the Center for Studying Health System Change in Washington, D.C., found that users of corporate clinic services most commonly sought vaccinations and other minor, routine services instead of care for chronic conditions.  When asked the primary purpose of their clinic visits, 63.7 percent of survey respondents in 2010 cited vaccinations.

Employers should also take a careful look at their insurance premiums and other financial outlays to build programs that offer the “biggest bang for the buck.”  For instance, corporate clinics and wellness programs could provide employees with incentives to address obesity, one of the nation’s most serious and costly health problems.  In any case, corporate healthcare is likely to grow in importance in the next decade, opening the doors to new partnerships, alliances and career opportunities.

Today, there are three key challenges for employers who use their in-house human resource (HR) departments to fill open positions.  The first issue is time.  It can take weeks or months to sift through hundreds of online resumes to identify potential candidates – especially if the HR professional must also juggle other, more pressing tasks.  Second, those candidates must be carefully screened to be sure they have the appropriate educational background, adequate experience and right certifications and credentials.  Finally, the HR professional must also be able to attract and engage the candidate by articulating the reasons for joining the practice, hospital, company or system.

Since all these steps must be taken before the first interview occurs, it’s not uncommon for a vacant position to remain open for an extended period, while other employees pick up the slack.  The HR professional must dedicate considerable time to the identification, screening, and pre-interview process, rather than focus on other organizational priorities.  Finally, there’s always the risk that a new candidate won’t be a good match for the employer, regardless of how good those credentials looked on paper.

For all these reasons, healthcare employers rely on staffing firms like All Medical Personnel to find, screen and present appropriate candidates for open positions.  Today, effective recruiting requires specialized expertise and a distinct set of skills that may not be readily available in a small HR department.  Experienced recruiting firms know where to find suitable candidates and narrow the list to a small and manageable group.  Perhaps equally important, they understand how to appeal to the candidate by conveying both tangible benefits of working for the employer, and the intangibles like mission, values and culture.  For healthcare organizations seeking to fill open positions quickly and efficiently, hiring an outside recruiting firm can be a key step to filling vacant positions quickly and efficiently.

The study, led by University of Minnesota researcher Jean Abraham, who worked with the Center for Studying Health System Change, calculated the economic incentives for employers offering coverage to active workers before and after health reform implementation in 2014.   The analysis used data from the 2008-2010 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey.

“The findings indicate that the economic incentives to offer coverage will remain strong under health reform for many businesses, especially larger, higher-wage firms,” Abraham said. “But they will weaken for small and low-wage employers – the very establishments that already were most likely to drop coverage because of rising costs.”

For the nation’s healthcare providers, the study points to the importance of regular verification of current insurance coverage, particularly for patients working for smaller businesses that might decide to drop this benefit. If so, there could well be a significant time lag before the patient purchases coverage from another source.

The institute’s study found that pre-reform, all businesses had an economic incentive to offer health insurance because the U.S. government gave preferential tax treatment for both employer and employee premium contributions.  Post-reform, employer premium contributions remain tax exempt.  In addition, two new policies take effect in 2014: a penalty on larger employers that do not offer affordable health insurance, and premium tax credits for lower-income people to purchase insurance in new state exchanges if they lack access to affordable employer coverage.

In the pre-reform period, the economic incentives of employers to offer health insurance were all positive and increased with firm size.  After reform implementation in 2014, the largest firms with 500 or more workers will continue to have a strong economic incentive, with an average incentive of $2,503 per employee, according to the analysis.  However, the smallest firms with fewer than 50 workers will face lower economic incentives – an average of $990  – in the post-reform period, in large part because these smaller employers will be exempt from the penalty.

Most healthcare professionals and executives in their 50s and 60s grew up with the telephone – a key technology for dating and other social interactions – and spent many hours in lengthy face-to-face meetings.  Those personal interactions helped to hone their verbal skills, and many Baby Boomers still feel most comfortable when they are talking to others.

But it’s a different world for the Millennials, now in their 20s and early 30s, who largely communicate by texting, Facebook chats and emails to their older family members.  A younger healthcare employee may send dozens of texts from her mobile phone for every voice call.  That can result in a dramatic decline in conversational skills.  Even in an office meeting, many people find it easier to text each other than to raise their hands and discuss an issue out loud.

However, those often-neglected verbal skills move to the forefront in job screening and interview situations.  Therefore, both job candidates and recruiters should take a moment to assess how well they can handle the following types of situations:

• Setting a friendly and open conversational tone at the start of an interview
• Presenting the key points you want to emphasize
• Asking questions and listening carefully for the answers
• Clarifying statements when necessary
• Closing the interview on a positive note and discussing the next steps

If you’re not sure of your verbal skills in an interview setting, the best solution is to practice with someone else in advance.  Find a family member, friend, neighbor or associate who is willing to listen, and start honing those verbal skills that will last you a lifetime.

To answer those questions, All Medical Personnel’s staffing professionals will be on the scene at the Florida Medical Group Management Association (FMGMA)’s annual conference, May 13-15, 2013, at the Caribe Royale in Orlando.  The event will bring together hundreds of administrators and other professionals who belong to MGMA, a well-established organization whose mission is to improve the effectiveness of medical group practices in Florida and the skills of the individuals who manage or lead them.

As a member of MGMA, All Medical Personnel contributes to advancing that mission by providing a wide range of staffing programs, including temporary or long-term locum tenens placements for physicians and other healthcare professionals.  For administrators, locum tenens staffing can meet increases in seasonal demand for services or fill gaps in coverage due to vacations, extended illness, or other causes.

For physicians and other professionals, locum tenens assignments offer variety, providing opportunities to practice skills in a new clinical setting and serve a different patient population.  Many locum tenens physicians also enjoy a change of pace in their lifestyle, such as spending a month or two in a coastal, vacation-oriented community.  Other advantages include flexibility in scheduling.  That might mean working a new shift, taking a temporary assignment for several weeks or moving to a new location for several months or longer.  A locum tenens assignment can also help professionals find a healthy balance between work and family responsibilities.

To find out more about summer staffing options, visit All Medical Personnel’s booth at MGMA2013. For more information on the conference, go to: http://flmgma.com.

Unfortunately, those “light-hearted fibs” can come back to haunt a candidate during the job search or even later in life. A healthcare organization that’s been burned by a candidate with a false resume will never, ever hire that person.  An executive recruiter who sets up an interview for a hospital CEO position only to find out the candidate is fresh out of college will not be pleased – to say the least.  At best, these types of “humorous” pranks are a waste of everyone’s time.  At worst they can tarnish the candidate’s reputation for honesty and integrity and cripple long-term career chances.

So, if you were thinking about celebrating April Fool’s Day with an awesome prank, hopefully you played a joke on your family and friends – someone who was able to appreciate your unique sense of humor.  But to avoid negative repercussions, don’t play pranks during your job search or with your bosses once you’ve landed a position.  The lesson for today is simple: Keep your pranks out of the workplace, and you won’t have to spend the rest of your life worrying about the consequences.

For providers, the HHS rule is expected to increase demand for healthcare services from the more than 30 million Americans who are currently uninsured for one reason or another.  Now, the HHS is mandating that most health plans include the following key provisions by 2014:

• Guaranteed availability. Nearly all health insurance companies offering coverage to individuals and employers will be required to sell health insurance policies to all consumers. No one can be denied health insurance because of current or prior illness.
• Fair health insurance premiums. Health insurance companies offering coverage to individuals and small employers will only be allowed to vary premiums based on age, tobacco use, family size, and geography.  Basing premiums on other factors will be illegal.  The factors that are no longer permitted in 2014 include health status, past insurance claims, gender, occupation, how long an individual has held a policy, or size of the small employer.
• Guaranteed renewability. Health insurers can no longer refuse to renew coverage because an individual or an employee has become sick.  Consumers have the option to renew coverage.
• Single risk pool. Health insurers will no longer be able to charge higher premiums to higher cost enrollees by moving them into separate risk pools.  Insurers are required to maintain a single statewide risk pool for the individual market and single statewide risk pool for the small group market.
• Catastrophic plans. Consumers will have access to a catastrophic plan in the individual market.  Catastrophic plans generally have lower premiums, protect against high out-of-pocket costs, and cover recommended preventive services without cost sharing.

With these rules slated to go into effect in 2014, hospitals, physician groups and other providers should begin planning how to address the likely increase in patient volume in the new state and national healthcare climate.

Many states even offer a Locum Tenens License. Instead of waiting the typical 2-12 months to obtain a permanent license in that state, they offer a speedier option whereby you can obtain a temporary or locums permit in 2-8 weeks. The fees are less and the wait times are shorter. It’s a win-win. The third piece of that is that the client receives the coverage they need much more quickly. Win-win-win!

States such as Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Wyoming and others will grant temporary licenses. New Hampshire, Maine, Indiana, Texas and others even have an expedited protocol on top of that to get Locums Physicians in quickly. All Medical’s experienced administrative staff can provide paperwork assistance to help make the licensing process as quick and painless as possible.

Not a Physician? Nurse Practitioners are also in demand. Many facilities are now using certified Advanced Practice Nurses to fill in as well. And with the Nurse Licensure Compact (NLC), it makes obtaining an APRN license in a compact state for a practitioner who already has a multistate nursing license a much quicker process. The compact states are Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia and Wisconsin. 24 states and counting!

If you are interested in Locums opportunities in the coming months, please give us a call. Our team of seasoned recruiters would love to speak with you and start your Customized Locums Search today. Or if you’re more of a ‘stay-cation’ kind of person, we can find you something local instead. We have a lot of non-travel work available too.