Doctor recruitment is a growth decision

A unit head once told me, with some pride, that she had signed a senior joint replacement surgeon from a competitor across town. The medical director was pleased. Finance had approved the guarantee. Nobody had asked what happened to the patients who searched for him.

Three months in, his OPD was half empty. His profile on the group site had gone live a fortnight after joining. His listings on maps and the aggregators still showed his old hospital. His reviews — years of them — sat on a profile the competitor controlled, and the competitor had, sensibly, kept his page up with a note that other surgeons were available. The referral base that had followed him for a decade was calling a number that rang at the wrong building. The guarantee ran anyway.

Doctor recruitment in an Indian hospital group is treated as a clinical and financial decision. It is also a growth decision, and growth is usually not in the room. This is about what a consultant’s digital presence is actually worth to a unit’s P&L, how to assess it before the offer goes out, and what to do in the first sixty days so that the guarantee is earning rather than burning.

What a consultant’s presence is worth

Strip the romance out of it. A consultant brings three streams of demand to a unit. Patients who already know the name and will follow it. Referrals from other doctors, diagnostic centres and GPs who send to the person, not the building. And new patients the hospital’s own engine generates, who will be booked with whoever has capacity and credibility in that specialty.

The first two streams are the consultant’s. The third is yours. The guarantee — the fixed sum the group pays for the first year or two while the practice builds — is priced on an assumption about how much of the first two the consultant carries across. That assumption is almost never tested against evidence. It is tested against the consultant’s own account of his practice and the medical director’s impression of his reputation.

Both are useful. Neither is data. The data is public and takes an afternoon to gather.

Assessing the search footprint

Before the offer is finalised, someone in growth should do what a patient does. Search the consultant’s name. Search the name with the city. Search the specialty with the city and see whether the name appears anywhere in the first page, on any platform, without the hospital brand attached.

What you are looking for is whether the consultant has a footprint that exists independently of the current employer. Some senior doctors do: a personal site, a well-populated profile on the major aggregators, video content, a presence in regional-language media, a name that autocompletes. Others have a footprint that is entirely their current hospital’s — every result is a page the competitor owns, and when the consultant leaves, that footprint stays behind.

This distinction matters more than seniority. A consultant with fifteen years of reputation and no independent footprint is, from a demand point of view, starting close to zero at your unit. The reputation exists in the heads of referring doctors and former patients, and those people will find him only if you rebuild the footprint fast. A younger consultant with a strong independent presence may carry more transferable demand than the senior name everyone is excited about.

Look also at the search demand for the name itself. Monthly searches for a consultant’s name in a city is a number you can get from the standard tools. If it is meaningful, you have something to capture. If it is negligible, the practice was built on referrals and walk-ins, and you will be building the digital side from scratch.

Assessing the reviews

Reviews are the asset most groups forget to think about until the day after joining. A consultant with several hundred reviews on the aggregators and maps profiles is carrying a demand asset that took years to accumulate. The question is whether it moves.

On most platforms, the doctor-level profile belongs to the doctor and the reviews follow the profile when the practising location changes — if someone actually updates it. The hospital-level reviews that mention the doctor do not move at all; they stay on the competitor’s listing. So a consultant who says he has “hundreds of five-star reviews” may be describing reviews that are attached to a building he is about to leave.

Read them. Not for the rating, which is almost always high, but for what patients describe. A profile where patients talk about the doctor by name, describe the consultation, and mention travelling from other towns is describing a portable practice. A profile where reviews are about the hospital’s facilities and the doctor is incidental is describing a practice that belongs to the building. This is a better predictor of what follows the consultant than the interview.

Look at responsiveness too. A doctor who has never responded to a review, or whose profile has clearly been managed by the hospital’s marketing team, will need your team to run the profile for him. Budget for that.

Assessing the referral base

This is the stream the consultant will talk about most confidently and the one you can verify least. But you can do better than nothing.

Ask for the referral pattern in specifics: which diagnostic centres, which GP clusters, which corporate accounts, which towns. A consultant who can name them has a real base. A consultant who says “all over the region” may have one, but you cannot plan around it. Then look at those sources from the outside. Are they within the catchment of your unit, or of the competitor’s? A referral base built around a hospital in one part of a large metro does not automatically transfer across the city. Distance, and the TPA empanelment of the receiving hospital, both matter to the referrer.

Cross-check the empanelment question early. If the consultant’s referral base is heavily corporate and your unit is not empanelled with the relevant TPAs and corporates, the referrals will not come regardless of how much the referrer likes him. This is a growth conversation that should happen before the offer, not after the first quarter of disappointing numbers.

What this changes about the guarantee

None of this should stop a recruitment. It should change the shape of the guarantee and the plan attached to it.

A consultant with a strong independent footprint, portable reviews and a referral base inside your catchment can justify a shorter guarantee and a faster ramp, because the demand is real and the job is to capture it. A consultant with a reputation that lives inside the competitor’s brand needs a longer ramp, a demand-building budget alongside the guarantee, and a P&L that is honest about the fact that the group is buying capability, not a practice.

I would want the growth assessment to be a page in the recruitment file, next to the credentials check and the financial approval. What is the transferable demand, what is the rebuild cost, and what is the plan for the first sixty days. If a unit head is signing a guarantee that assumes a full OPD in ninety days and the growth page says the footprint is zero, someone should notice before the signature.

The first sixty days

The gap between a consultant’s joining date and the day his digital presence is correct everywhere is pure waste. Every week of it is guarantee money spent on an empty clinic. In most groups the gap is measured in months, because the profile goes into the same content queue as everything else.

The sequence I would run, with the clock starting before joining:

• Two weeks before joining: the group profile is drafted, photographed and approved, ready to publish on the joining date. Not the day after. The specialty and condition pages he will be featured on are identified and the edits are queued.
• Joining day: the profile goes live. Every listing the group controls is updated — maps, the major aggregators, the directory sites, the group app. The contact centre knowledge base has his name, OPD days, conditions treated and the booking rules.
• First week: the consultant’s own profiles on the aggregators are claimed or transferred, with the practising location changed. If the competitor still shows him as practising there, a correction is requested. Old reviews are checked for whether they have followed.
• First month: the referral base gets a direct communication — not a mass mailer, but a personal note from the consultant with the new location, the new number, and the empanelment list. The unit’s referral desk, if it has one, follows up by phone with the top sources.
• First two months: content that establishes the consultant at the new location — a video, a regional-language piece, a condition explainer — and a modest paid programme on his name and his specialty in the city, so that the patients who are searching find him at the right building.

Then measure. Searches for his name at your domain. Enquiries that mention him. Bookings against his OPD. The referral sources that have actually sent someone. Put it against the guarantee assumption every month. If the practice is behind, you will know in sixty days rather than at the annual review, and you will know why.

The exit side of the same conversation

The mirror of all this is what happens when a consultant leaves. The group that is careless about onboarding is usually careless here too, and it costs the same way.

The consultant’s page should stay up, updated to say he has moved and naming who is now seeing his patients. The listings should be corrected within days, not left to confuse patients into calling the wrong building. The reviews that mention him on the hospital’s own profiles stay with you, and a patient who reads them and finds another good surgeon in the same department has not been lost. The contact centre should have a script for “I want to see Dr So-and-so” that offers the alternative without pretending he is still there.

I have seen groups let a departed consultant’s page run for a year because nobody owned the decision to change it. The patients who arrived, were told he had left, and walked out, went straight to the competitor’s reviews and said so.

The conversation growth should be in

The recruitment committee in most hospital groups is the unit head, the medical director, HR and finance. Growth is briefed afterwards, if at all. The brief usually arrives as “we’ve hired Dr So-and-so, please do a profile.”

The argument for a seat at the table is not that growth should have a veto. It is that growth holds the only evidence about transferable demand that is not the consultant’s own account, and that growth will be asked, six months later, why the guarantee is not being earned. If you are going to be accountable for the ramp, you need to be in the room when the ramp is assumed.

This is a harder conversation with medical directors than it sounds, because it can be heard as marketing second-guessing clinical judgement. It is not. The clinical assessment stands. The growth assessment is about whether the practice will fill, and how fast, and what it will cost to make that happen. A medical director who has watched a good surgeon sit idle for two quarters because his listings were wrong tends to become an ally quickly.

The way I have made this land is to bring the analysis unasked, for one recruitment, and show what it would have changed. Not a framework. One page, one consultant, one number about searches for his name that nobody in the room had seen. Do that twice and you are invited the third time.

If you’re starting this next quarter

• Ask for the recruitment pipeline — every consultant in negotiation — and run the search, review and referral assessment on each, without being asked.
• Build the sixty-day onboarding sequence as a standard, owned by one person in growth, with a checklist the unit head can see.
• Fix the departure process at the same time. It is the same checklist run backwards.
• Put a growth page in the recruitment file and ask the CFO to expect it alongside the guarantee approval.
• Report consultant ramp monthly for every guaranteed hire — searches, enquiries, bookings, referrals — against the assumption the guarantee was priced on.
• Pick one recruitment in the next quarter and use it to show the medical director what the analysis changes.

The guarantee is the largest speculative bet most units make in a year. It deserves at least as much demand evidence as a campaign a tenth of its size.

You are not hiring a doctor. You are buying a practice, and the practice is only as real as the demand that follows it through the door.

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