Leveraging social media to help physicians find non-clinical jobs

Here's a practical example of using social media to help physicians find non-clinical jobs. Let's review the list of social media tools/websites that can be valuable resources:

• Blog: http://www.nonclinicaljobs.com/
• Ning: (Non-Clinical Healthcare Professionals) http://members.nonclinicaljobs.com/
• LinkedIn: Our LinkedIn Group
  
• Facebook: Our Facebook fan page
  
• Twitter: @DrJosephKim
  

Now, how did I leverage these resources to help a physician find a non-clinical job? In this example, it went like this:

• A female physician found this website by doing a search on Google for "non-clinical physician jobs." She wanted to balance the following: family life as a wife and mom; she wanted to leave clinical medicine and work from home; and she wanted to maintain some level of financial productivity by working part-time.
• This individual reached out to me to get some personal guidance to find some non-clinical opportunities.
  
• She became active on our social network (Non-Clinical Healthcare Professionals) and reached out to some physicians within the network to get some advice about different types of non-clinical opportunities.
• She also leveraged other social networking websites like LinkedIn and Facebook and reconnected with her college and medical school friends and colleagues. She had lost contact with many of these people because she had become so busy working as a full-time physician (sound familiar?).
  
• We soon discovered that one of her college friends was married to someone who works in a medical company and she reconnected with this individual through Facebook and Twitter. Through this individual, she was able to get an interview with a hiring manager and this led to a job opportunity.
  
• She's now working from home for this medical company and doing some other contract-based work for several other companies.
  

Now, this simplified example is an illustration of a major key point: the importance of social networking. She may still be looking for work had she not reconnected with this college friend.

The other point is this: once you get your foot into the door and establish yourself as someone who has solid non-clinical experience, it becomes much easier for you to find additional non-clinical jobs.