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Practicing anesthesiologist and the physician co-founder of Marit Health Rob Anderson discusses his article “Why can’t finding a doctor job be like Zillow.” Rob shares his personal journey through divorce and house hunting, revealing how apps provided the control and privacy missing from his professional life. He contrasts the ease of filtering dates or homes with the invasive reality of medical recruitment, where doctors are bombarded by spam texts and expensive headhunters. The conversation advocates for a digital transformation that empowers physicians to browse opportunities discreetly, filter by lifestyle needs, and reclaim autonomy over their careers. Learn why the future of medical hiring must prioritize choice and respect over aggressive sales tactics.

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Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi. Welcome to the show. Subscribe at KevinMD.com/podcast. Today we welcome Rob Anderson, anesthesiologist and co-founder of Marit Health. Today’s KevinMD article is “Why can’t finding a doctor job be like Zillow?” Rob, welcome to the show.

Rob Anderson: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Kevin Pho: All right, so let’s start by briefly sharing a story, then jump right into why you decided to write this KevinMD article.

Rob Anderson: Yeah, so I am a practicing anesthesiologist in Richmond, Virginia. I was in a leadership position with a large private equity-backed anesthesia company. Then I transitioned to a night float position to kind of change up my life quite a bit. I was going through some changes and opening up myself to different opportunities. I was stepping away from leadership, creating more space and time for family, and creating more space and time for business pursuits, which we will get into. I was definitely in this period of growth and really leaning in.

Part of that was related to a divorce. I think it is not uncommon for people in the medical space; everyone knows someone that has gone through this in their career. It is not an easy time. It does allow you to focus on other aspects of your life. It can be very transformative, and it was for me. Part of that healing process for me was leaning in towards my identical twin. I have an identical twin who was my support through that whole process. He was there for me to listen, but also to distract. Part of that distraction was actually talking about a business plan together.

As identical twins, we have very different paths. I think that is actually common for identical twins to diverge in paths where it can effectively end the competition. So I of course did the medical path and he took the business path and did business and then consulting and MBA. He ultimately worked at big tech companies like Yahoo and Flickr and Glassdoor. So he was foundational to this idea of building a Glassdoor for medicine.

We have talked about that for many people. For people in medicine, they may not have heard of Glassdoor, but Glassdoor was really pivotal in bringing workplace salary transparency. It was really foundational in pushing for salary ranges being mandated on job postings. So they changed the landscape in terms of that and bringing more transparency, which is something that obviously medicine needs a little bit more of. Glassdoor still exists, but was acquired by Indeed.com. Everyone has heard of Indeed.com. They are the de facto job board for everyone outside of medicine. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really work that well for medicine at this point in time. So this idea came about to build a salary transparency site for medicine and a modern job platform for medicine, which is something that has been sorely lacking and just kind of underrepresented in the tech space.

Kevin Pho: So what is the traditional way doctors look for jobs online? I do work with a variety of traditional physician job boards. Sometimes they always say what the starting salary is. How is what you are doing different from what is traditionally done in physician job boards?

Rob Anderson: Yeah, so as an anesthesiologist, I actually come from a specialty that has one of the only specialty-specific job boards out there. It is called GasWork. It is very similar to Craigslist. It has a similar platform. It is very basic. It is firmly entrenched in 1995 and not very modern. But at the same time, it is functional and widely adopted and used.

What we are trying to do is aggregate salary content. To use Marit and to see salary data, you actually have to submit your own salary. So this is similar to what Glassdoor did. It is kind of a give-to-get model so we can build a salary database that is highly powered and actionable. Now we have 25,000 clinicians on the site that have given salaries. So we have a deep dataset with our data as well as supported by MGMA data for specialty-specific verified clinicians. This data alongside jobs does help push employers to put salary data alongside their site. Right now, I think there are 17 or 18 states that mandate some kind of salary range that doesn’t necessarily translate to very specific salary ranges. What we want to do is nudge everyone towards that because in actuality, when you have jobs on one tab and you have salaries on another, it is very easy to toggle back and see what the market is paying in that specialty or that region.

Kevin Pho: So in your KevinMD article, you compare what you are doing to Zillow, which is the real estate platform. For those who aren’t familiar with Zillow, tell us a little bit about that and how you are using some of those aspects into the job board that you are talking about today.

Rob Anderson: I would guess a lot of people are familiar with Zillow in terms of house hunting. In fact, Zillow is a house hunting site similar to Realtor.com. They have housing listings, they have all the data that matters. You can search, you can scroll, you can save, you can share, and you can reach out to a realtor. You can communicate and you can book a house showing all on one site.

We, as our jobs platform, are really focused on making it a similar experience in terms of having all the data that matters. So we enrich with AI, and we enrich a job listing. We have facility data, location data, and community data that goes deep in terms of schools, housing, and even political leanings. We are really trying to be the one-stop shop where you can see everything just as you would be able to see on Zillow.

I think the important part for us is we want to make this private. We want clinicians to be able to search privately on their own time without giving up their information. We really focus as a clinician. This is really my driving force. We want it to be private. We want to protect your information because if you apply to one job, sometimes your data gets out there, and your phone and email get out there. That creates an avalanche of other inbounds and spam texts and spam calls. Now stuff shows up in your mailbox. So we want to try to change the landscape there and allow you to do this in a self-service motion.

Kevin Pho: So traditionally, physicians, like you said, would have to give up a lot of private information like a cell phone number and sign up for a site in order to get more information about a specific job listing. But what you are doing is having a lot of the information just out there already without having a physician necessarily give up his private information.

Rob Anderson: So we keep all of the information private until someone actually expresses interest or applies to a job. Obviously, there are some information transactions that have to happen to start that conversation, but it is all private. We are never going to sell clinicians’ information. We are going to keep it private because I personally, being in anesthesia and being in a relatively high-demand field, get it every day. I mean, I get text messages and calls in the middle of seeing patients in the middle of my day. It is very difficult to deal with. It is frustrating. It feels like we are being hunted. We want to change the landscape there and allow clinicians to do the hunting and the searching on their own terms and shift the power dynamic a little bit.

Kevin Pho: So for physicians looking for a job, it goes far beyond salary. You mentioned a few things like schools, cost of living, and what the community is like. Specifically, what should physicians look for when clicking on an online job listing beyond salary?

Rob Anderson: Obviously the workload is key, and we are working hard to capture some of this data. We have a team largely from Glassdoor. We are very fortunate to be blessed with a highly skilled team. We are leaning heavily into AI. So we are moving forward and growing quickly. We are going to be incorporating some quality of life indices into our job postings where you can kind of measure that.

So quality of life is important. If you are taking excessive call without pay and have very little vacation, all of these things matter in terms of staying in the game. We have all experienced burnout to some degree. We need to manage our time and manage our lives and careers and our lives outside of work to stay in the game. Or else you are just going to flame out and burn out. So we want to focus on these other aspects, not just salary. Salary is a big component of it. But we want to focus on these other aspects as well that make the practice of medicine a little bit more rewarding and fulfilling and long term.

Kevin Pho: Have you run into any friction from the legacy job listing sites or even employers who may be hesitant to be transparent with information that typically hasn’t been transparent?

Rob Anderson: What has been interesting, and honestly from being in leadership with my own anesthesia corporation, is that they have been very supportive. It has been interesting. I thought there would be that friction. I really did. I thought there would be a lot of pushback, but what we have come to realize is that they want to get to this salary conversation as early as possible. So they want to be dealing with the same numbers as well. This information asymmetry that exists does serve them to some extent, but they do want to get to this conversation early so they can negotiate fairly and have mutual understanding and move to the hiring phase. So we have seen very little pushback in fact. We have seen a lot of interest just because a modern platform like this where you can have all the information about your job just doesn’t exist right now. So there is more excitement than concern.

Kevin Pho: You mentioned one of the ways that physicians would engage your platform is they have to divulge their own salary first, and then that is how you build up that database. How do you validate the numbers that they give you?

Rob Anderson: Yeah, so we have a pretty intense auto-moderation algorithm that works behind the scenes using AI. So we are tracking. There are ways to verify users in terms of IP addresses and all this stuff. This is all carryovers from Glassdoor and the learnings from Glassdoor. So we have the expertise to do that.

Then we capture so many data points. We capture 60-plus data points, and then we can work. Some data points totally disqualify a salary submission. For example, let’s say you are self-employed, but you get 403(b) contributions. It just doesn’t make sense. Those would be flagged or eliminated and rejected. Some go through pending and in that pending queue, we actually reach out to the providers just for a little bit more explanation and go from there. So, we do rely on the community. This is self-reported. Employers have always said: “Well, this is self-reported data. We may not trust it.” But we also have MGMA data on our site that we have licensed. So we are really just providing as much data as possible. Our data is mapping pretty well with MGMA.

Kevin Pho: What do you see as the future when it comes to physician recruitment? Of course you mentioned AI several times during this interview. Tell us about what is coming down the pipeline in the physician recruitment space.

Rob Anderson: I think what is coming is matching based on your preferences. That is what we are moving towards. It is very similar to a dating site. Post my divorce, I was actually exploring dating sites, and that was mentioned in my article as well. They are doing matching. So as our user, you would list your preferences. You list your schedule, your vacation, your minimum salary, and all these things. Then we can behind the scenes do matching based on your preferences and your geographic region and only send you listings that are actually relevant.

I think what gets frustrating about some of the job alerts and emails right now that I get is that they don’t post anything that I would actually be interested in. So we want to filter through the noise and only give you something that is relevant for your life. We have seen a lot of engagement in those job alerts that get pushed out to our users because they are relevant. Me personally, living in Virginia, I would never look at a job in Las Vegas, per se. I don’t want to see that because it is just noise. I just want to see something in my specific region, maybe within 60 miles of my house, and then maybe some other region that I might want to live in in the future. So with our site, you can really pare it down to specific regions and multiple cities and go from there.

Kevin Pho: That type of matching to that granular level isn’t happening today. When a physician talks to a recruiter and gives specific needs and requirements and a recruiter looks for jobs to fit that physician, some rudimentary matching isn’t already happening.

Rob Anderson: I don’t think it is. I mean, the recruiters are dealing with limited information, so they are constantly out there trying to buy information about really trying to buy emails and phone numbers. We have seen this a lot. People want that data from us. We have said absolutely a hard no. We are not selling that data. We are here to protect clinicians. But it is out there. It is being bought and sold and traded, and that is what is creating these spam texts and these spam phone calls and these emails. Recruiters are really just trying to push out more information and just try to hope and pray. We really want to be more fine-tuned and a little bit more focused on what the clinician wants.

Kevin Pho: We are with Dr. Rob Anderson, anesthesiologist and co-founder of Marit Health. Today’s KevinMD article is “Why can’t finding a doctor job be like Zillow?” Rob, let’s end with take-home messages that you want to leave with the KevinMD audience.

Rob Anderson: So the take-home message is that actually the modern job platform is here. We have actually just built it. We have a team that is growing fast and moving fast on this. When I wrote the piece, we didn’t have a modern job platform. There were some basic ones that are all legacy and rather old and antiquated. But the modern platform is here that is leveraging AI to its fullest potential and protecting clinicians’ data. That is the first priority. We want to protect their data. We want to provide them with salary data so they can negotiate from a position of strength and information and manage their career to its fullest.

Kevin Pho: Rob, thank you so much for sharing your perspective and insight. Thanks again for coming on the show.

Rob Anderson: All right. Thanks for having me.