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Careerealism: It’s Not Your Imagination: No Jobs Anywhere Thomas L. Belanger, MD FAAEM
the employer. This also meant that I counted job listings for EDs, urgent care centers, medical spas, sports events, speaking engagements, and other similar listings (even though they may not all be considered equal by prospective applicants). I read every post from June 6, 2018, the group’s inception, to Dec. 14, 2020. It was a horribly depressing read, as you will see.
Table 3. Total EM Docs Jobs Posts by Type
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hen I last applied for jobs before my family’s move to Texas at the end of 2014, all an emergency physician had to do was wait for the free steak dinner. I often joked to my family that you could be offered a job before a recruiter even knew your name.
Table 1. Job Listings over Time
Flash forward to the present, and suddenly it seems as if there are no jobs anywhere. Two often-cited factors are the use of advanced practice providers as cheaper labor and private equity encouraging an overproduction of residents. The COVID-19 pandemic may have exacerbated the problem. The reasons for this shift are important, but there is some debate over whether a problematic shift exists. The question then is: How has the market for emergency physicians changed?
Classifying Posts I used an unconventional data source for these data: the EM Docs Jobs Facebook group. This group started in mid-2018, and has about 7200 members who use it to post job listings and requests for employment. This appealed to me as a data source because it is an organic, honest dataset; the page contains information on both sides of the employment market, employers and employees; and there is a time-stamped electronic log of posts. I read each post and classified it as a job listing or a request for employment; other types were not included. Some posts were difficult to classify; as a general rule, I classified it as a request if it seemed the poster was trying to recruit employers. A post was classified as a job listing if somebody posted contact info for a paid job, even if the poster was not
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COMMON SENSE MAY/JUNE 2021
Table 2. Employment Requests over Time
Results Examining the posts over the life of the group, both job listings and requests show a numerical increase over time, likely due to increasing membership in the Facebook group and some seasonality. (Tables 1 and 2.) Transposing the two histograms paints a much clearer picture, however. (Table 3.)
