Healthcare organizations across the country face similar challenges — financial, regulatory, technological, and, of course, workforce. However, as leadership sets the strategy for the organization, they tend to focus primarily on the financial, such as how to increase revenue. The answer is often growth: launching a new service line, opening a clinic, expanding into a new market, etc. If the opportunity is there, the organization aims to deliver.
As Senior Vice President of Recruitment for Jackson Physician Search, I love working with clients to help them execute these plans, but in doing so, I have identified a common blind spot. The leaders who set the strategy — and the timelines — rarely consider the critical questions of who, how, and when they can hire providers to deliver care to these new markets. Leadership assumes human resources will manage it, and perhaps they could, if not for the steady stream of physician retirements and resignations they are already trying to backfill. The typical organization’s reactive approach to physician recruitment doesn’t leave room for proactive, large-scale physician hiring.
You might think this is the point where I detail how my team can expand capacity as a physician recruitment partner, but I want to speak to the deeper issue at hand and say something you might not expect: the answer isn’t simply more recruitment. The missing piece in this scenario is physician workforce planning. After all, it is the physicians and other providers who turn a strategic plan into care delivered and revenue earned.
The Reactive Default
A growing physician shortage has made recruitment a universal challenge in healthcare, and most organizations approach it the same way — reactively. An unexpected departure, a retirement, or an extended leave of absence triggers a physician recruitment scramble. Few systems have the intentionality, bandwidth, or dedicated team to plan ahead of such events. As a result, the entire department is under pressure to fill vacancies as quickly as possible. Add to that a strategic plan that involves opening a new clinic or launching a service line, and in-house physician recruitment departments are left scrambling to keep up rather than proactively planning for the future.
Where Workforce Planning Begins
Before organizations can plan for future growth, they must attempt to project turnover and retirements among their current physician workforce. I’ve written in detail about what it takes to move from a reactive to a strategic approach to recruitment. At a high level, this means tracking physician demographics, average tenure, and historical turnover patterns to identify potential needs before physicians give notice. With respect to retirement, for example, our past research found a significant gap between the notice period that administrators prefer (1-3 years) and what physicians consider acceptable (6 months). By tracking which physicians are approaching retirement age, organizations can initiate those conversations earlier and more effectively plan for those transitions.
Conversations should also be happening to gauge physician satisfaction. Organizations that focus on communication and building physician relationships are more likely to spot red flags indicating that a physician is considering a departure well before it occurs.
An ongoing analysis of physician demographics and turnover patterns is critical for succession planning, but for truly proactive recruitment, it must be accompanied by an understanding of strategic initiatives that involve physician hiring. Recruitment leaders must be involved in strategic planning to provide data on specialty-specific recruitment timelines, size of candidate pools, and market compensation. The strategic plan must factor in these details when setting timelines and targets.
What Proactive Physician Recruitment Looks Like
The organizations that get proactive recruitment right share a habit: they keep the pipeline open even when there’s no immediate vacancy.
I work with a small community hospital that has kept an active primary care requisition open for more than a decade. Over that period, they doubled the size of their medical group across multiple specialties and opened an adjacent campus with primary care, specialties, urgent care, lab, and imaging. And when a physician leaves unexpectedly, they are able to respond without panic hiring, because the pipeline is already there.
Proactive planning also impacts how retirements are managed. A phased retirement built over two years, rather than an abrupt exit, buys time for succession planning. It’s often what the physician wants anyway, a gradual wind-down, and it lets them train a successor and better manage patient transitions.
The foundation underneath all of it is data. Monitor age demographics and turnover by department to forecast retirement waves before they hit. Layer internal data with published industry statistics on specialty-level age demographics. Some specialties skew older and carry higher near-term turnover risk. Layer that market intelligence with community data — identify service gaps and aging specialty populations in your catchment area. From that foundation, you can build real three- and five-year medical staff plans rather than reacting to one vacancy at a time.
The Answer is Partnership
None of this works if the people closest to the market aren’t involved in conversations about growth. Recruiters and physician relations staff are the boots on the ground, and they’re the ones most often left out of strategic planning. Closing that gap requires both sides to change how they work.
For leaders: Bring physician recruitment into strategic planning before the plan is finalized, not after. They know the realistic timelines, the market compensation, and the specialty-specific hurdles that determine whether a plan is executable. A recruiter doesn’t need to sit in every meeting, but the discovery conversation should happen before the strategy is set.
When you’re modeling a new service line, ask for the workforce roadmap alongside the financial one. Treat time-to-recruit as a hard planning input, the same way you’d treat a construction timeline or capital availability. Ask your recruiting leaders a sharper question than “what’s our time-to-fill?” Ask about the supply risk and what they will need to overcome it.
For in-house recruiters: Earn the seat at that table by showing up with strategic intelligence, not status updates. Translate what you know about your pipeline into the language leaders use: execution risk, revenue exposure, competitive positioning. Bring data-backed projections — which roles are hardest to fill, which specialties are tightening, where retirements and volume growth are about to collide. If your internal numbers aren’t enough, a search partner like Jackson Physician Search can provide the regional and national market data most organizations don’t have on hand.
The Critical Question
Before your next strategic plan is finalized, put one question on the table:
Does our growth plan have a proactive physician workforce strategy behind it?
How organizations answer that question dictates whether their plans will succeed or fail. Leaders who treat recruiting as a downstream function will keep getting blindsided. Recruiters who wait to be handed requisitions will keep absorbing the blame for timelines they had no say in. The organizations that get this right build the workforce conversation into the strategy conversation — and find their growth plans are far more durable for it.
Whether your organization is hiring for growth or backfilling unexpected departures, the team at Jackson Physician Search has the experience and expertise to accelerate your efforts. Reach out to learn more about the benefits of a partnership.
More From Tara Osseck:
Address Physician Vacancies to Ease Financial and Workforce Challenges
From Reactive to Strategic: Transforming Your Approach to Physician Recruitment
About Tara Osseck
With over 15 years of experience in the healthcare industry, Senior Vice President of Recruiting Tara Osseck specializes in matching healthcare organizations with physicians who are a strong cultural and professional fit. Her healthcare career began as a physician liaison. It quickly expanded to include physician recruitment, strategic planning, and business development, working for various hospitals throughout Memphis, Tennessee, and St. Louis, Missouri. Based in St. Louis, Osseck leads the firm’s Midwest Division, placing providers across the Midwest and Upper Midwest. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Truman State University and a master’s degree in healthcare administration and management from the University of Memphis.
