How to Hire a Physician for Temporary or Permanent Roles [2026]

Hiring a physician is a strategic investment in a community and the healthcare facility that serves it. Done right, and you’ll not only find and place a physician who’s an excellent fit for your team, you’ll retain them with a solid support system and control costs. But to make all of the plans necessary to recruit and retain a new physician, it’s important to understand what drives costs and how to build a hiring process that’s both agile and thorough. 

Today we’re going to explore how to optimize your hiring process in 2026. From budget planning to ensuring long-term retention, many facilities are looking for ways to minimize risk while controlling spend in today’s market. We’ll explore strategic cost management, how to deploy targeted marketing for high visibility, and strategic ways to engage with prospective candidates during the interview process to gauge their expectations and best fit. 

How to Hire a Physician

• How Much Does It Cost to Hire a Physician?
• How to Post Jobs for Physicians
• Interviewing Physicians for Temporary and Permanent Roles

How Much Does It Cost to Hire a Physician?

Estimated costs by the New England Journal of Medicine are around $250 thousand dollars. This number includes the costs to market the position, interview one physician (including an on-site with travel expenses), and provide a relocation stipend and sign-on bonus. 

But the cost of hiring the right physician pales in comparison. First, there’s the estimated cost of replacing one due to turnover, which can range between $1.8 to $2.8 million dollars. Then there’s the lost time and productivity during candidate searches. In the end, it’s a combination of skyrocketing costs and morale taking a nosedive that make it so important to find the right physician fit. 

Top Salaries for Permanent Roles

To understand how locum tenens helps to control costs, it’s critical to take a look at the top-range salaries for physicians in permanent positions rather than national averages. For instance, US Bureau of Labor Statistics data for Obstetrics and Gynecology estimates the average salary is around $277,320. But in high demand areas salaries for permanent OB-GYNs can reach as high as $1 million dollars. The same is true for Cardiologists, whose salaries just hit an all-time high in 2025 and have only continued to grow. Although the national average is around $423,250, higher demand subspecialties in high volume areas range between $700,000 to $1 million dollars. 

Locum Tenens Costs

Locums roles provide great value to healthcare facilities by maximizing resources to defray short term costs. Because locums come with fewer expenses for retirement, benefits, and onboarding, they’re able to reap the benefits of higher pay while ensuring continuity of care is maintained. 

This is where a cost benefit analysis for your facility comes into play. Whether you’re looking to fill a staffing shortage short-term or add a physician due to increased demand, the cost of a locum specialist is determined by the overall staffing costs at your facility. That means you’ll need the estimated daily rate for a permanent physician vs. the average daily locum rate. To calculate this you should factor in the mean salary for a full time physician plus their benefits package and malpractice insurance and divide that by the total number of work days. 

Comparing the cost of a locum specialist in your region to a permanent physician should also incorporate elements like time costs. Strategic locum partners are incentivized to find the right candidate quickly and efficiently, because your success is their survival. 

How to Post Jobs for Physicians

1. Craft a job description

Physicians are sharing information on social media about what to look for in job postings. It’s important to be very aware of what providers view as best practices and balance this with your available data. The goal here is to craft a job description such that there are no surprises during the interview process. 

These are the top pieces of information you’ll want to include to reflect industry best practices:

• Salary or rate of pay is now highly preferred in job postings and marketing materials.
• Whether the role is Inpatient or Outpatient. 
• The estimated number of patients per day.
• Team composition and support: the number of Nurses, NPs, PAs, and techs. 
• Type of procedures and/or Trauma Level.
• Organizational licensure needs: whether you are looking for single-state-only licensure or IMLC.
• Fellowship requirements.
• Clarity on expectations around mentoring or supervision. Some roles do require the physician to mentor, and the posting should be very clear about that.

2. Share to your networks and on your website

The job market has always been about word of mouth. But now more than ever, candidates are trying to navigate scams and seeking more direct routes through trusted sources to find their next role. You can leverage that in your candidate search by being the primary trusted source, sharing in your own networks. We recommend sharing both on professional sites and more directly with trusted network partners who may have a candidate in mind. When in doubt, a direct message can be a great vehicle to finding a top quality provider who comes recommended from an organization or peer you trust. 

3. Post on external job boards

External job boards are critical in today’s hiring environment. But facilities need to be strategic to ensure the posting is seen by the right audiences to control costs. Hiring professionals know that job board placements can be costly. If you’re already using one but not getting the qualified candidates you’re looking for, you may want to change up your strategy to ensure the posting gets in front of the right audiences. 

One of the pros of this strategy is that you can target specialist community job boards that highly qualified physicians are more likely to use than LinkedIn. But a second key benefit is that AI regularly scrapes public job boards, meaning that the physician role may be more visible to qualified candidates because of AI search. Both a general and a targeted approach have their pros and cons.

4. Use social media to strategically engage your networks

One of the best ways to gain additional visibility on your job posting is to put it up on social media. A surprising amount of physicians are lurkers on some of the top platforms: they may not engage directly with posts but they see posts, screenshot them, and send them to friends privately. Because there’s so much risk in today’s job market, lurker activity is not captured by standard key productivity indicators on social media such as likes or shares. But it may become visible in other ways, such as increased traffic to job posting links. Posts can also be sent directly to physicians that clinical leaders or hiring staff know and are looking to engage.

Interviewing Physicians for Temporary and Permanent Roles

What to ask permanent hires

Tell us about your career path.

Asking a permanent hire this is about how they see your organization as integral to their career story. It’s not just about whether they’ve read your organization’s mission statement: how they talk about the past can tell you how they’re envisioning their future at your facility.

Asking a specialized question for technical proficiency.

Specialized knowledge from an informed interviewee speaks to their professionalism, proficiency, and clinical skill. But this is also an opportunity to talk with them about their work in practice environments similar to your facility.

How do you protect yourself and your team from burnout?

This question has two main goals: to assess their self-awareness for burnout prevention, and to see them demonstrate the collaborative care necessary to work on a small team. You’re also opening up an avenue to showcase facility culture and discuss mental health and wellness resources available to the physician. (Both of those things are green flags!) 

What to ask temporary hires

What are you seeking in your current career goals?

Here, you’re looking to gauge physicians’ expectations by inviting them to answer with as much detail as they can provide. Best fit comes from knowing all of the factors at play in their decision to apply. But it should also tell you about their future goals. Are they open to staying further if there’s an ongoing need? Are they pursuing continuing education or subspecializing? These insights can be invaluable.

What is your motivation for seeking to work with us?

This question is about research. Locum tenens physicians are smart, savvy providers who do their homework. You’re looking for answers that show you a strong fit with your organization’s mission and values, work culture, and overarching goals.

What is your level of experience with our EHR?

This is one way to ask a question that helps you parse the physician’s readiness to hit the ground running. But it also gives the locum provider the opportunity to ask you questions that will tell you about their experience. Asking practical questions about logistics is actually essential to making that first week in their new role a successful one.

Find more questions to draw on for both general and specialized needs at our blog post on physician interviews.

Let Us Connect You with Our Qualified Physician Pool

It’s time to take the friction out of locums hiring. Your next candidate search should run like clockwork: from the initial posting to credentialing and hiring. We specialize in making hiring fast, smooth, and easier than ever. 

Welcome to your “found our people” era. Come see about us.