In Medicine, Purple Squirrels Are Common

If you've spent any time in physician recruitment, you've heard the term. A purple squirrel — the mythical candidate who checks every box, meets every requirement, and is willing to work in a location or specialty that most physicians have never considered. The implication is that such a person doesn't exist. That recruiting them is a matter of luck, not strategy.

We'd like to challenge that idea.

Let's acknowledge something first: recruiting physicians — especially for rural, niche, or underserved positions — is genuinely difficult work. The market is competitive. Physicians are discerning. The timeline from first contact to signed contract can stretch across many months. Anyone who tells you this is easy hasn't done it. You're doing hard work in a demanding field, and the stakes are real.

But here's the thing about purple squirrels: in medicine, they aren't rare. They're probably already on your payroll.

The purple squirrels are already there

Rural hospitals, wound care programs, correctional medicine facilities, critical access hospitals in underserved markets — these aren't empty. They have physicians and advanced practitioners working in them right now. Providers who chose those jobs, who built lives around them, who stayed when they could have left. Your "impossible to fill" position already has an incumbent, or a predecessor, or a whole team of colleagues who made exactly the decision you're asking your next candidate to make.

That reframing matters. A true candidate shortage is real in many specialties — but layered on top of it, for these positions, is almost always a marketing problem. And that part is solvable.

Why generic ads fail hard-to-fill jobs

The instinct when filling a difficult position is often to broaden the appeal. Soften the language. Downplay the rural location, minimize the payer mix challenges, don't lead with the specialty's stigma. Write a job description that could apply to almost anyone, post it widely, and hope for volume.

This approach generates phone calls. It can generate interviews. But it very rarely generates hires — because it doesn't speak to the people who would actually take and keep the job.

Think about it from a candidate's perspective. A physician considering a position in rural Montana or a wound care role in a small critical access hospital isn't looking for a generic opportunity. They're often looking for something specific: a lifestyle, a calling, an escape from a high-pressure system, or a community they've already decided they want to be part of. In a thin market, you can't afford to have the right candidate land on your posting and keep scrolling. If your ad looks like every other ad, that's exactly what happens.

Find out why your current providers stayed

This is the single most underused strategy in hard-to-fill physician recruitment: ask the people already doing the job.

Why did they take the position? Not the official reason — the real one. Was it the hunting and fishing? A spouse who grew up nearby? A slower pace after years in academic medicine? A sense that they could make a meaningful difference in a place that genuinely needed them? Were they tired of being a small cog in a massive health system and wanted to be the doctor everyone in town knows?

These reasons are the core of your recruiting message. And they're highly specific to your location and your role — which means they're differentiating in a way that no generic job description ever could be.

When you know what actually keeps your providers there, you can build job descriptions and recruitment materials that speak directly to the physicians most likely to respond — and most likely to stay. Weave in real quotes from your team. Name the lake. Mention the trail system. Describe the culture of the call group. Be honest about the challenges and honest about what makes it worth it.

In a competitive market, specificity is an advantage. You're not trying to generate the most applications. You're trying to make sure the right candidate — the one who actually exists and would genuinely thrive there — doesn't scroll past without recognizing themselves in what you've written.

Your current providers are your best recruiters

There's a final piece of this that most health systems leave on the table: the physicians already working in these jobs are often highly motivated to help recruit. If a rural hospitalist is carrying extra call burden because of an open position, they have a direct personal stake in that hire. If a wound care team is stretched thin, they want a great colleague as much as you do. And providers who are deeply embedded in a community bring credibility that no recruiter or HR department can replicate — they can speak to the job honestly, including the hard parts, and candidates trust that honesty.

That said, not every physician will want to participate, and not every schedule allows for it. Before reaching out directly, check with your department administrator or office manager about which providers have been enthusiastic in the past, or who might be particularly invested in seeing the position filled. A warm introduction through the right channel goes a long way.

For those willing to help, the ask is straightforward: a brief, informal phone call with a prospective candidate. When you conduct your initial screening call, that's a natural moment to mention it — let the candidate know that a typical next step, if they're interested, is a short conversation with one of your practicing physicians. You can set expectations right there: these are busy clinicians, so you keep the calls focused and to whatever length works for everyone. Most candidates appreciate the transparency, and most participating physicians appreciate being asked rather than voluntold.

Consider closing every outreach for a hard-to-fill position with something like this:

That closing does several things at once. It signals transparency. It lowers the stakes of an initial inquiry. And it positions your current providers as genuine ambassadors — which they are, if you let them be.

The bottom line

Purple squirrels aren't mythical in medicine. They're the physicians working in wound care clinics in rural communities, the internists who chose a critical access hospital over an academic center, the hospitalists who traded call-heavy systems for a job where they know every patient by name. They exist — not in unlimited supply, but in greater numbers than most hard-to-fill postings ever reach.

In a tight market, you can't control how many candidates are out there. But you can control whether your posting speaks to them when they find it. Learning what made your current providers say yes — and building recruitment materials honest and specific enough to say the same thing to the right person — is how you improve your odds in a market that isn't getting easier.

Generic ads cast wide nets. Specific, authentic storytelling finds your purple squirrel.

**Editor's note** If you're on the hunt for your own purple squirrel, consider starting your search with the sourcing tools on HospitalRecruiting. Also, purple squirrels are real.