As an emergency physician, your only reliable source for on-line job searching is via sites devoted exclusively to emergency medicine. There are plenty of them. Some have been around a long time, and some are new and upcoming. Some are hosted by contract groups and independent recruitment firms, while others are open to all job listings.

Some are hosted by professional associations while others are job boards on specialty information sites. Some are the online versions of print classified ads. The most important thing is to chase the web listings in a way that produces strong results and little hassle. Let’s talk about where you can find real opportunity while retaining confidentiality and safety.

Still king of the mountain (maybe not for long) is EDPhysician.com. This is still the premier site for finding EM opportunity based on sheer numbers alone with more than 1,500 jobs around the country. There are separate sections for Administrative jobs, Locum jobs, Urgent Care jobs, Pediatric Emergency jobs and even PA/NP jobs. There is also a section that provides the contact information for every state medical board.

The style is free form, though the owner, Dr. Ralph Single, is restricting individual listing size to 300 words. Click on a state and jobs come up in random order. Leave the site and come back in, click on the same state and the order changes.

It’s easy to navigate, the actual employers are easily identified and you can email a specific listing to yourself or a friend. You will notice that the listings have reference numbers. Those are more for the site than the employer so, if you contact an employer, don’t use the reference number as an identifying item.

With this as with many sites, you can contact the employer/recruiter directly from the site. The email goes to the employer and is identified as a response from a specific job listing, provides your email address, a phone number (if you provide it) and the opportunity to pen a quick note from you to the employer.

It is state driven and each state has a “top of the box” option for employers, which allows for the same listing to show up on top every time.

EM Career Central at www.emcareercentral.com, the career center by ACEP and EMRA is remaining steady. Listings there total about 500 emergency physician jobs around the country.

The biggest problem with this site is the cost to employers/recruiters for listing – easily the most expensive of all the sites which cuts down on usage by potential employers. The format is fairly simple, though I have often encountered technical issues on the cover page and had problems applying filters for the search. Other emergency department job listings, including those for mid-level providers, nurses and then the locum community are mixed in with the physician listings as well, requiring more targeted scanning.